But the effort to be immortal is the greatest anxiety. So many pills. "Exhale and inhale, to puff out old breath and draw new, stretch and crane to live long, is an induced tao." Do not let the thoughts keep working anxiously (James Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 77). Imagine all the worry these monks have to keep their sheep in the pen at night! Do you want nose, ear, eye and mind to wander like Chaung Tzu who invented Zen? All you have to do is live a certain way. '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. Van de Wetering called it Afterzen, when he saw through the sham.
Catholics say it is a sin of presumption “to know you have eternal life,” the point of the objection being this is not something one should know. Who knew they cared that much. "These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life (I John 5.13)." It was the sin of presumption, which suggests that you may without impunity know that you will die, although a young man would scarcely accept that theory. Immortality is an idea like any other, 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 the menace of Singularity!
Immortals prove greed and avarice are the necessary consequence of their old age. Proprietors of a whole nation of gross civil power, their ability to manage ends in public ruin. Chinese Taoism placed the Island of the Immortals eastward from China, while Swift put the struldbrugs near Japan. Both Taoism and Christianity represent poles, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom among Christians, Boehme, 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 among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exercises for preserving the semen sheep in the pen 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." Lieh Tzŭ 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, denying themselves. Watts teases them, "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 these 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 Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf never were. We have the odd companions of fiction that read like journalism, and criticism which reads like fantasy. The editors and scholars of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors, another kind of immortality. The editorial qualities Creel cites, repetition 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) demolish primary sources as their livelihood to buy promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.
Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and human growth hormone Taoist alchemy said that 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 the artilect implant and new genes or hybridize yourself. Who knows how old you can be? It brings life itself into question if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistakes loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.
Stopped Minds
Stopped minders can be petty. Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is like stopping the mind. The mind anxious with its own anxiety feels the same as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. 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 on the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them ruined things. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose spared is the exception. Unimproved foods 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 to do their own maintenance. 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. What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but more development? Why development, but profit and trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way!
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 petty 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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