Notable Quotes from "The Story of God: Beyond Death" by Morgan Freeman

DEATH, GRIEF AND HOPE

Everybody grieves, but some people have a certainty that helps them cope with grief. They're certain they will see their loved ones again in Heaven. For some of us, it's not quite that simple. In fact, it's the greatest question we ask ourselves: What happens when we die?

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The hope for life beyond death seems to be an almost universal instinct.

AZTECS AND ETERNAL LIFE

The human sacrifice of the Aztecs and the elaborate tombs of Ancient Egypt are both driven by a common belief in the afterlife. The dead have the power to reach back and sustain the living. But today, billions of people believe this power can do more than sustain us in this world; it can grant us all eternal life.

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Brutal as it seems to us now, the Aztecs saw human sacrifice as vital. Without human blood, they believed the sun would lose power, crops would fail. Without the power drawn from the death of a few, all life would come to an end.

CHRISTIANS AND LIFE BEYOND DEATH

The Day of the Dead developed from the Catholic faith's All Souls and All Saints Days. But the heart of the celebration is much older. It dates back to the Aztec ideas of the afterlife, a tradition that is profoundly un-Christian.

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Most of my family are buried near my home -- gives me a sense of rootedness that I need, gives me occasion to remember, reflect on how their lives influenced me. This in itself is a poem of life after death. Our memories of them continue to guide us when their life on Earth has ended.

For Christians, a graveyard is not just a place of memory; it's a place of hope for life beyond death, hope that began in a moment of extreme anguish 2000 years ago.

HINDUS AND THE CYCLE OF LIFE AND DEATH

For Hindus, reincarnation means death is just a step on the way to another life, right here in this world.... Hindus believe in reincarnation and karma. Live a good life, and death gets you a new body with a chance for an even better life. Live badly, and you'll suffer the consequences in your next life -- which may not be as a human -- and the cycle repeats, living, dying, and being born again.... Hindus see themselves in cycles -- living, dying, rebirth. However, rebirth is not the goal. The goal is to transcend rebirth and to attain a state of eternal pure energy, moksha, the god state.

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We yearn to break bonds with mortality to become eternal.

SCIENCE AND THE SOUL

It is important to understand that when a person is drying and they've [sic] turned into a cadaver, it's only at that point that the cells inside the body start to undergo a process of death which can take hours, if not days of time. And so actually we have this window of time where we can bring people back to life, and the experiences that they have gives [sic] us an indication of what it's like for humanity when we go through death. Dr. Sam Parnia

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Today, we call the soul consciousness in science. So we can test this theory scientifically and see does consciousness continue or does it stop? The evidence we have at least is that when a person dies, that part that makes us who we are -- the psyche, the soul, the mind, the consciousness, whatever you want to call it -- me -- it doesn't become annihilated, it doesn't disappear into thin air. It continues at least in the early period of death. It continues when the brain is not expected to be functioning and when a person has gone through death. Dr. Sam Parnia

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It is amazing that science is now quantifying death, even defining the soul. The afterlife, something that has fascinated us since the dawn of religion, now seems tangible.

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Morgan Freeman: Martine and Bina Rothblatt have been married for more than three decades. They're so close, their kids call them by a collective name, Marbina. Martine, who has made millions in tech and pharmaceutical ventures, can't stand the thought of being without Bina. So, she created Bina48, an android filled with the memories, beliefs, and values of the real Bina. So why do you want to clone Bina? What's the purpose?

Martine Rothblatt: Our quest for doing this experiment was to see if there's a way to encourage technology to allow people who love live, including loving other people in life, to continue that love indefinitely into the future.

Bina: We're also doing this to store our memories and mind files, because for our great-great grandchildren, we have a means of them communicating with us, even if our bodies don't make it forever.

Morgan: This experiment is ultimately so that we humans can cheat death.

Martine: I think, Morgan, what we are doing with this experiment is part of a long, long line of people trying to stop death from cheating life. And first we got ourselves out of the jungle where we were at the mercy of animals. We developed vaccinations. So I think it's the job of the medical industry and the biotechnology industry to push the boundaries of death further and further into the future.

Morgan: There are philosophies that say that one of the things that separate us from the machine, what the Egyptians call ka, we call it soul.

Martine: It will take decades of additional development in what Bina and I call cyberconsciousness, using computers to re-create the mind, to see if a soul evolves from that. Whether or not there is in the eyes of God is a question that you and I will not be able to answer.

EGYPTIANS AND IMMORTALITY

It's human nature to fight against the finality of death. If we ourselves can't live on after our time on earth is over, we at least want to be remembered. It's a desire that's as old as the pyramids.

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For the ancient Egyptians, the afterlife of the Pharaoh was vital. It ensured the sun would rise each morning. Their enormous monuments didn't just ensure the pharaohs would survive beyond death; their afterlife provided essential power to sustain the living.

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Morgan Freeman: This is the Temple of Rameses. It was the mortuary temple. He's not buried here. This is where you would go to invoke him.

Dr. Salima Ikram: ...It's a memorial temple, and the Temple of Millions of Years so that he could live for millions of years.

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Morgan: Egyptians believed their pharaohs embodied the falcon god Horus. Each human king was a reincarnation of Horus' spirit, his divine ka.... Instead of having blood relation from monarch to monarch, there's something else that's going from monarch to monarch, and that something else is the ka.

Ikram: The ka, the divine ka, exactly. It is a continuation. It's the same divine ka going from body to body to body of ruler....

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Morgan: By saying the name, his life is for a moment renewed, his afterlife extended.

Ikram: The name is one of the most important things. So if you have your name written down and if people say it, so everytime you've said Ramses III, his ka has been given this burst of energy and he's living, and that's one of the reasons why, of course, you'd carve it deeply so it will not be erased. It will be remembered and you will live forever.

Morgan: So what do you think? You think maybe people feel the same way today? I mean Facebook?

Ikram: I think some people feel that if it's on the Internet, it's real and it lasts forever.

Morgan: I will live forever. I'm on Facebook....

Well, Ramses succeeded in his quest for immortality. His temple may have crumbled, but his name is still being spoken 3,000 years after his death. So, his spirit is still with us, still moving among the living.

OUR MEMORIES AFTER DEATH

In fact, we all live on in the memories of those we love, and those whose lives we've impacted in a positive manner, just as my brother who passed away so many years ago lives on in my memory, so I hope to live on in the memories of others.

BECOMING AS THE STARS

Whether you're a Christian following the example of Jesus, a Hindu hoping for liberation from the endless cycles of reincarnation, or you're simply trying to leave the world a better place than you found it, our desire to go beyond death has changed the world. Whatever we may find on the other side, no matter what our faith, we can all become eternal, like the stars.