Who Wants To Live Forever?
For the super rich, technocracy is the forerunner to immortality
Freddie.
A wraith hallowed by spotlight, noticeably thinning a year before his HIV diagnosis, descends the stairs to the stage.
It is not quite a swansong, more a foreshadow.
Death is coming and an ambivalent question floats through the air; a question that gives pause, is worthy of thought.
Noah got to be 930 after all, Methuselah, his grandfather surpassed him at 969 as the oldest character in quite a pantheon.
Adam and Eve were created to live forever but, as we all know, ‘the wages of sin are death’ so, unfortunately, they didn’t make it to the cloud where billionaires and rock stars may find themselves in a few short years.
I would guess that to many younger people, those raised on a steady diet of technology, immortality may be appealing, but hovering near 60 (the only cloud I will ever see), it seems the endgame of the dystopian nightmare we have just entered.
Besides, what the investors in this narcissistic dream (including the founders of Amazon and PayPal) cannot comprehend is that we are already immortal.
Just not as a body.
So why are our forebears reported as living so long?
I guess for one thing, there were few people, therefore little if any disease. Second, if they were to go forth and multiply to cover the globe, they would need time and plenty of it.
Living longer would also allow an accumulation of necessary knowledge. And there is a talk of a water vapor canopy surrounding the Earth shielding people from radiation and creating an optimal climate.
Finally, the antediluvian world may have been a vegetarian paradise, mankind switching to a carnivorous diet post flood.
But what is the sin that cursed us with death? Who is this serpent that entered upon the scene and upset the apple cart of immortality?
Is it not the ‘I’ thought itself, the first concept, which separated us from the rest of nature, indeed our own true nature, and sent us hurtling in the shuttle of the human body into time and space?
As the exponents of non-duality report, the concept ‘I’ rises from the heart and soon becomes the foundation of our separate experience.
But we can realize our immortality once more — like Christopher Lambert in the film Highlander who nursed his aging wife to Brian May’s tune — by sending that thought back to its source.
To do so, we have to turn volte face away from the neon glare of the world, which drags us inexorably and seductively to our doom, towards the light in the heart.
In other words, to come home the seeker has to die. It’s a form of suicide but entirely of a very persuasive illusion, one whose glamours entice us to return again and again for just one more taste of honey.
Like a child begging for more sugar or an addict saying the next fix will be his last, we hurtle in again thinking this time it will be different.
But at some point a door, perhaps a window, creaks open, and we glimpse a better way.
Yet I suspect those who now step from behind their dark curtain — perhaps only because we are tugging at it — telling us firmly they are in charge of our lives, may never get such a chance.
For they have made themselves gods and imagine living forever in a digital world, wishing to deny, even murder the soul in favour of a techo-supremacy.
Why? Perhaps devoid of a soul themselves they know the farthest they can travel is within a very limited circle. Big fish small pond kind of thing.
If the natural order is subverted, the divine thrown in the junkyard for spares, your playground is the physical realm only. Higher consciousness can’t happen, although you can try and fake it through some AI god.
But it will never be the unique and envied possibility of the human being who has the opportunity to realize he is in fact not human, instead consciousness itself.
That must be very scary to all those billionaire toddlers in a temper tantrum wanting to destroy what they are not and may never be.
It seems there’s a lot of would be gods out there — I hear the Living Forever market is already touted to be in the trillions. Divorced from their divinity, where else is there to go?
The only way forward is to build a bigger, longer lasting ego (body and world). The dimension of the sacred has been sacrificed on the altar of progress along with tribal cultures the world over.
Genocide is both method and madness. We are witnessing it again now, this time on a global scale with the rest of us being added to the list of peoples surplus to requirements in a final mopping up operation.
We are simply cannon fodder, totally dispensable, our gifts unrecognized and discarded, like a million wise elders shuffled into care homes, obscurity and death.
Yet death is not the opposite of life but birth, life contains both; death is simply an aspect of life to be celebrated and honoured, another portal to the beyond.
Many individuals and families now have no choice but to learn a painful and often final lesson as death is now being forced upon so many.
To the current crop of genocidal maniacs/immortals, I would say this:
By all means try and find portals in this dimension if you must, but it’s a fool’s errand, condemning its proponents to the wheel of birth and death forever and a day.
Ok, perhaps not forever. Although that is the dream which, according to futurologist Dr Ian Pearson may be achievable for anyone under 40 (Phew!).
Playing Frankenstein will do it, he reckons, as technology outpaces emotional maturity and with it common sense, the year 2050 is a good ball park figure for the super rich.
Want to upload your consciousness into the cloud, hire an android and be anywhere in the world, experience anything you want as in the film Total Recall? We are nearly there.
He postulates a future of endless experiences while I see the goal as desire-lessness and the end of wanting any experience at all.
Perhaps I have a perverse reverse psychology and am a contrarian by both habit and training. Even a Luddite. But I know enough of the spiritual now to have seen what we are really looking for is not in this world.
Only by dropping the ‘I’, not expanding it do you get to be what you really are and bask in eternal bliss beyond both pleasure and pain.
Maybe I will be on my own. I certainly won’t be — as Pearson suggests — dropping in on the National Health Service for spare parts, a new Android body.
For what he didn’t bank on is that although some humans may live forever, it looks likely the NHS won’t.
COPYRIGHT Simon Heathcote
