Who knew they cared that much about immortality. I remember among Catholics it was the sin of presumption to say with St John, “that you may know that you have eternal life,” the point of the objection being this is not something one should know. Sin of presumption. That suggests that you may without impunity know that you will die, although a young man would scarcely accept that even as a theory. What this leads to is that immortality is an idea like many others, but if you ask where it is most common and what are the kinds, among the Greeks, gaining speed with the Romans and free floating down the years, it comes to us with nuance.
To live long be useless is the counsel. Or get eaten. The invitation to usefulness, perfection, immortality is an invitation to consumption. The Mystic quest is tainted with the furtherment of personal ambitions and political purposes. Science and art are marketed as business. If you are a migrant you may be kidnapped, but if you are rich you might be too. Hunchbacks are not conscripted for war, the straight and strong are, therefore hunchbacks live. The straight tree is the first cut; the well of sweet water is the first exhausted (Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 33). But if a man can empty himself of himself during his time in the world who can harm him (II, 31)? We sure see a lot of that! The close-furred fox and the elegantly-spotted leopard...it is their skins which occasion their calamity (II, 29). Chuang Tzu was asked whether he would rather drag up the useless tree that was spared or the unsinging goose that was not (Legge, II, 27). 'There is a man over there with a long body and short legs, round shoulders and drooping ears. He looks as though he were sorrowing over mankind. I know not who he can be.' 'It is Confucius!' 'Bid him come hither.' #26
Immortal but at what price, as if we thought it free. We have Swift to thank, it’s not immortality we want, but youth, which means the same headless flinging enthusiasm unfettered with experience we already know. Who are these old men who wander in as proctors in the golden age? Well they are not fun guys, wild and crazy. They attained immorality but without having any fun with it. But that’s the point, immortality is serious business because it is unnatural and has to be worked at to sustain. Worth killing for. You need to go in for your checkups, updates like Internet Explorer whose program is never complete. Just a few more nanobots say the engineers of life. Truly it sounds more like the end than the beginning of life to be immortal. If you don’t have any follies what is the point of life at all, that is unless you go back to St. John or somebody who says life is for praise. Let everything that has breath praise Him.
In time however our immortals, as avarice is the necessary consequence of their old age, become proprietors of the whole nation, gross civil power, which, for want of their ability to manage, end in public ruin. Chinese Taoism placed their Island of the Immortals eastward from China, while Swift places the struldbrugs near Japan.The immortal seeks power like a sports event. Both Taoism and Christianity represent its poles, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom. Among the Christians Boehme and Beissel and Swedenborg, but Alan Watts says among the Taoists: [Hsien Taoism is] "a quest for immortality and supernormal powers through the gymnosophic and "yogic" practices which seem to have arisen among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal--one who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exrcises for preserving the semen comparable to those of Tantric Yoga" (The Watercourse Way, xxv).
As opposed to this H. G. Creel says that the Huai Nan Tzu Contemplative Taoism (which became Zen), "insists repeatedly that death and life are just the same, and neither should be sought or feared. It ridicules breath control and gymnastics, which are designed to perpetuate the body but in fact confuse the mind" (xxvi). Watts says, "the indefinite enlargement of our powers and techniques seems in the end to be the pursuit of a mirage."
It is important not to miss the wit of this response which is more gentle than its condemnation by Lieh Tzŭ, who called it "not merely foolish and futile, but even immoral" (Creel, 22). Facetiously assuming the mirage, these "immortals" live in the desert of their own making. They deny themselves. Watts teases "one who is immortal and who has control of everything that happens to him strikes me as self-condemned to eternal boredom, since he lives in a world without mystery or surprise."
But people are highly vested in immortality. Russell Kirkland calls Creel's nicely reasoned What is Taoism? a "diatribe". The diatribe is the critic's.
Beyond aspersions Creel believes, as opposed to Watts, that Lao Tzu is not the work of one author, that the unity of voice however proves how good the editor is: "the editor was excellent and gives, on the whole, a remarkable appearance of homogeneity." Ancient texts differ from the modern in this. It is only fiction if I demythologize Borges, which in essence argues that he was never born, but it is called fact if I find that of Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf. We have the odd companions of fiction that read like journalism and criticism which read like fantasy. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu editors and scholars believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors. The qualities Creel cites, repetitions in the text, terse and aphoristic style, are primary facets of writers, along with contradiction and fine expression. To imagine these qualities from the hand of editors is a nineteenth century fantasy. A greater myth than Borges! As Watts says and Wouk agrees these "interpretatio europeica moderna" (European desk scholar) demo primary sources as their livelihood because it buys promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.This is true about the Pennsylvania Dutch as well as Taoists.
Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward the Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and HA, Taoist alchemy said all you had to do was sublimate energy up the spine. Breathe right, eat right, sit right, stop the wandering mind. Now the transmortal says either wait for artilect, new genes or hybridize yourself. Who knows how old you can be? It brings into question life itself if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistake loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.
Stopped Minds
Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is like stopping the mind. The mind anxious for its own anxiety feels the same with this compulsion as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. Stopped minders can be petty. Immortality is a pinched nerve. Beauty conflicts with immortality. It wants to be exploited and used. The gnarled pine, thorn and crag, hellebore bushes up the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose that is spared is the exception.
It is the difference between supermarket foods we call immortal, because enhanced, and natural foods, unimproved, or if you like, the life and death herbs. The improved "immortals" are desiccate, ragged, empty of nutrition when dried. The unimproved are full, well formed, nutritious. This analogy between two corns resembles people who cut their own lawns, do their own dishes, repair themselves by themselves, weed their gardens, do their own books, clean their house, teach their children. Those who hire maintenance so they can seek pleasure and fortune are immortal.
Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way! What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but development? Why development, but trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave a way to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here
We hardly know what immorality is. Is it physical living forever in
the body? Impossible, nothing physical is immortal. OK then is it
spiritual, a kind of struldbrug in Jonathan Swift's novel Gulliver's Travels, the name given to those humans in the nation of Luggnagg who are born seemingly normal, but are in fact immortal? However, although struldbrugs do not die, they do nonetheless continue aging. Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot.
C. S. Lewis and the Transhuman
Prometheus Unbound: Transhumanist Arguments The Transhuman organ James J. Hughes. (Trans)humanism & Biopolitics Transhuman Transformation Humanism and Transhumanism C. S. Lewis as Philosopher Transhumanism's SolipsisticUtopianism The First Transhumanist
Teilhard de Chardin and TranshumanismPrometheus Unbound: Transhumanist Arguments The Transhuman organ James J. Hughes. (Trans)humanism & Biopolitics Transhuman Transformation Humanism and Transhumanism C. S. Lewis as Philosopher Transhumanism's SolipsisticUtopianism The First Transhumanist
*Kurzweil Quaddafi is more than just a pretty phrase. Transmortals do not brook opposition. They were able to burn down one of their opponents when name calling didn't work.
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