A Final Lecture

This evening I received an online video from my Sister-in-law. It was a segment from a recent Oprah Winfrey show. Oprah introduced a guest, Randy Pausch. He is, she told her audience, a “popular Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.” She also told them that he, Father of three, had only months to live. She’d invited him to her show to reprise his “final lecture.” This lecture, previously given to his students, has been, Oprah noted, “downloaded from the Internet more than a million times.”

I listened to the lecture and then wrote the following letter …

Vannie,

Hello!

In case you're wondering who this is … it’s that Bro-in-law you haven’t heard from in so long it took a moment to remember who on earth was e-mailing you …

Thanks for forwarding this video … It really is quite moving!

Despite the value and inspiration of it I have to share a deep concern I have with it as well as with an increasingly pervasive view of life and reality that I consider to be alarming.

Again, I applaud this man’s courage and the enthusiasm that virtually oozes from his every expression and gesture.

The point that concerns me is clear in the words he finishes with. He says, “If you live right the karma will take care of itself. If you live right the dreams will come to you.”

Karma is an Eastern Mystical term for a force in the Universe which exerts its influence on all life pretty much beyond any thing or any one’s control. You’ve heard someone say, “Oh well that’s his Karma.” And the suggestion is that it’s his “fate,” and no one can help him through it but himself. Hinduism is built around the premise that we essentially evolve, spiritually, through one existence after another until we finally reach, through what is essentially complete disconnection with all conscious reality, a state of “eternal bliss” described as ultimate unity with a “cosmic consciousness.” All conscious reality, for such a view, interferes with that process. “Nirvana,” the assimilation into “cosmic consciousness,” is achieved only when one’s own consciousness is “transcended.” And that can be achieved only as I “transcend,” through mindless meditation, all the “bad Karma” delaying, through multiple lives, my blissful, though personally unconscious, destiny.

How do someone’s “dreams,” fit into such a way of thinking?

It strikes me as lacking intellectual integrity to talk about Karma and dreams at the same time. Karma … fate … fortune … whatever one wants to call it, is deterministic. It will happen and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. My dreams become a sort of cosmic teaser that I reach for only to be disappointed. If the man on the video were being truthful he would acknowledge that the very 3 people for whom he says he really made the speech will never get to hang out with their Dad. Nor will he get to hang out with them. But Karma allows no place for subjective dreaming. That must be abandoned as the illusion that it is to be replaced by the assurance that true “bliss” is to be found in an unconscious merger with a “cosmic consciousness.” A great deal of what we value most highly in life will never happen for the Professor’s loved ones if Karma and the dreams its proponents view as illusory are what life’s about.

This man is being completely disingenuous about what’s happening to him. Oprah, and her “power of attraction” fellows, have nothing to offer him. He will die and be buried and eventually become nothing more than a bit of dust. No dreams … no better fortune a few incarnations along the cosmic continuum. And, for his Kids? Just a nice sounding video of a fairly attractive Father who gives them nothing with which to meet the increasingly complex world they’re about to face but a shallow promise that, if they live right, their dreams will come to them.

Like they did for their Dad!?

What this video fails to do, Vannie, is adequately address the problem of death.

Only Jesus of Nazareth does that. And He does so by living right, and then, dieing a cruel torturous death. This He and Randy Pausch have in common. But here the similarities end. For Randy there is nothing more than the certain death he faces. Karma is like that. Jesus, quite to the contrary, dies to live forever, inviting, as He does so, anyone who wishes to follow Him, into that never ending existence.

Talk about dreams! He describes this existence He offers to those who follow as “more and better life than anyone ever dreamed of.” It is life beyond our dreams! He insists, in His instructions for living such “Life,” that some of those dream transcending experiences can be ours now. Some of them await our death. But, in that dieing – like Him – you will never lose your identity. You will never lose your ability to recognize those you love. Nor will you lose the freedom to commiserate with them in a forever destiny that is the epic chapter in a truly “Never Ending Story.” A story in which you, and everyone else who follows Jesus to His Cross and beyond, become the most excellent, ultimate expression of the persons an all powerful, tirelessly loving Creator dreamed you would be when He initially created you!

Vannie, I so wish the man in the video had told his Kids and the myriad other viewer/listeners this! It really is the “best of the story of LIFE”!

I hope that someone, who's downloaded Randy's lecture, will find it and discover that their “dreams” really only come true when they’re trusted to Jesus, the “Ultimate Dream Weaver,” to be refined until they are, “more and better than anyone could have ever imagined”!