Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude.

lamenting about movements that sweep over the tops of their founders.

loyally crusading for your version of God’s nonexistence.

But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world, the ripples left in our wake.

You will become like an adulterous spouse striving to force normal behavior. You may have to be an Actor for other Beneficiaries as well: your boss, your cabdriver, your waitress.

As an Actor, you get to see the backs of things.

Presumably, other Actors during the week will have similar assignments, so the Beneficiary will be guided toward a new idea or meeting.

Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth?

You could permanently blow the cover, but the Directors are confident that you won’t; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it.

With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command.

With time, people began to push death switches further. Instead of confessing their death in the emails, they pretended they were not dead at all.

The problem for those of us still living, however, is the increasing difficulty in determining who’s dead and who’s alive.

So an afterlife does not exist for us per se, but instead an afterlife occurs for that which exists between us.

Memories now live on their own; no one forgets them or grows tired of telling them. We are quite satisfied with this arrangement, because reminiscing about our glory days of existence is perhaps all that would have happened in an afterlife anyway.

So when you arrive here, you are split into your multiple selves at all possible ages. The you that existed as a single identity is now all ages at once.

They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none.

feeling that they were part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life even though they can’t quite put a finger on it.

In this way, death is not only for humans but for everything that existed.

And it turns out that anything which enjoys life enj...

It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who composed them. But the underlying principle is simple: the afterlife is made of spirits. After all, you do not bring your kidney and liver and heart to the afterlife with you—instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up.

everything interesting happens at the borders between domains of power.

all across the vast network of humanity, signals are passed at a blinding pace without any of us knowing we are messengers.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

The quark despondently resigned itself to the fact that it could keep the show going only if it saved energy. It realized it could accomplish this by drawing only those entities that were being observed by someone.

He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself.

He’s not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

He doesn’t have any more wonders to unleash, and He’s increasingly concerned that we would see the strings if He tried.

In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.

You begin to realize that the gift of immortality applies to things we created, as well. The afterlife is full of cell phones, mugs, porcelain knickknacks, business cards, candlesticks, dartboards.

"Afterlife" is a notion of continuity of something that is no longer continuous. So why restrict it to the human animal?

If these people were able to completely shake their traditions, the claims of their ancestors, the songs of their childhood—She reasons—they would have a decently clear shot at the right answer.

If you assumed that God is fond of those who hold loyally to their religions, you were right—but probably for the wrong reasons. She likes them only because they are intellectually nonadven-turous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.

The Rewarder whispers into one of your ears, Isn’t it wonderful to understand the code? The Punisher hisses into your other ear, Does understanding the mechanics of attraction suck all the life out of it?

At some point the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop, and begin to contract, and at that moment the arrow of time will reverse.

Marriages reride rocky roads and eventually end in erotic dating.

You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life story consistent with who you thought you were.

By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.