Eternal Life as Death and Death as Life
It’s 10:14pm so I etch this time into these notes as a testament to my commitment to tuning into my practice at the expense of my immediate whims.
I just finished sitting in meditation, another of my practices that i’m seeking to make regular over this next year. In it, I had a strange line of thoughts that was quite profound.
Earlier tonight as I was scrolling through Netflix I saw the cover of a show called “The man who wants to live forever”, a series about Bryan Johnson whom I’ve seen a lot of on my Youtube home page. On the surface, his mission of optimizing all aspects of his lifestyle in order to maximize life span, and seek to find the upper limits of human life span as such, seems like something I would be interested in from the perspective of someone who knows me. Though, over the course of months as I’ve seen him face pop up on my social media feeds I’ve had a strong aversion to engaging with any of his content. Thats to say nothing poorly of him, but to highlight an aspect of me that is quite telling.
See, his life purpose is to try to use all of the power of money and science to push the boundaries on how long a human being can live. As I sat in mediation, and this aversion came to mind I sensed behind the response an instinct telling me that this intent was an subversion of the point of life; there is something about the journey of life that is left out by the pursuit to live forever. Its something akin to the cliche notion, though profoundly true, that the finitude of life is what gives it its meaning.
In meditaiton, I thought about a situation in which I was given the option to life forever - would I take it? The answer, quite immediate returned, no. Given the option, I felt that there was something on the other side that I had to see for myself. Is there an after life? Is God on the other side? Do I get reincarnated as an ant or an alien species on another planet? This grand mystery of “what exists on the other side” is too great for me to leave unanswered. I’d have to, and I do have to, see what is on the other side. I had a vision in my mind, of my consciousness or soul or whatever thing that can not be precisely defined that is the essential element that creates this great miracle of life, moving into a central space imbedded in the fabric of the universe that was like its heart. For the brief moment, before one is sent out back to revitalize the universe, there was in fact a perfect merging with the creative source of existence itself. That journey of returning home to the ultimate source from the flesh and blood experience of human life, is really what Life is all about So by attempting to extend the number of days one bodies continues to function, perhaps indefinitely, the true purpose of life itself is completely lost, not in this phase, but the next.
You see, this is a realization that feel incredibly profound to me personally, because my single greatest fear without a shadow of a doubt and with nothing second coming remotely close is my fear of death. I once had a bad LSD trip and for hours I was trapped in a position of trying not to die - had I let my efforts rest I was sure that I would collapse right there and then. Once I was able to move out of myself and into physical space I wrote in my phone, “my fear of death is the reason I do everything”. Not too long after my mother died. Not too long after I was diagnosed with a chronic disease. Mortality has troubled me beyond anything I can ever put into words. My body and nervous system had become paralyzed by my fear of death since I sensed its presence so impossibly close to me, threatening to take me away forever. The awareness of my own life itself, my foot on a concrete side walk or the shift in perception to my breath, became its own harbinger of death; for where is life there is death. I was constantly afraid it was all going to collapse at any minute. (I must say, I’ve since recovered from this state.)
So how can it be the case that given my impossible fear of death, that if given the choice to life forever, I would choice not to so that I could venture to the other side? I don’t know. That stuck me as rather add and quite profound. So I wrote it down here for no one to read and for me to rewrite a thousand times later in order to come closer to some truth i’ll need to realize more of myself.
