The Psychology of Immortality
Hidden In Plain Sight...
If the genius of invention were to reveal tomorrow the secret of immortality, of eternal beauty and youth, for which all humanity is aching, the same inexorable agents which prevent a mass from changing suddenly its velocity would likewise resist the force of the new knowledge until time gradually modifies human thought." ― Nikola Tesla, 1907
Although technology has created more leisure, it has also created more docility and slavery. The collision between insectoid values and the human forebrain has so far been won by the insects. Every new device remains in the service of the hive. This is so because nothing has been created which puts an end to fear and trembling. Death has not been conquered. When death is conquered (which in my view will happen within fifty years), a tremendous change will take place. ― To Lie is Human, Hyatt, 2004
It is precisely this ancient orientation to death which hinders us from launching a global crash movement to overcome mortality. Humans are still too death-oriented, too guilt-ridden, too submissive and fatalistic to demand immortality. To even hope for it. The Future will look back on our times amazed that humanity was so close to attaining immortality yet having done so little.
UP-Wingers, Esfandiary, 1973
From ancient times, three powerful forces have converged to shape our view of life in this world. The first such force, largely unique to the human species, is our profound capacity to love one another. The second is death, the greatest enemy of love, the stark reality that our lives and love will end in shipwreck and extinction threatens all that we hold dear. Love and Death are entirely incompatible. But the human brain is resilient, therefore virtually every known culture in the history of mankind has devised strategies to escape the labyrinth of the despair of death. Regardless of the ethereal nature of these escape plans, they provided the basis of the third force, hope. And so the hope for immortality was the direct consequence of the titanic collusion of the forces of human love and death. ― Dr. West
The idea of immortality, that like a sea has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear, beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. It is the rainbow – Hope shining upon the tears of grief. ― The Ghosts, Ingersoll
Is Religion Against Immortality?
Not at all.
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. — Revelation 21:4
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. ― 1 Corinthians 15:26
Our hope for immortality does not come from any religion, but nearly all religions come from that hope. ― Robert Ingersoll
“And the LORD God said, [about Adam having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge] "The man has now become like one of us [note the plurality of ‘us’] , knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." - Genesis 3:22
What restriction has that belief had on 3,000 years of conscious development? What ultimately is the key to unlocking our right of passage to eat from that Tree of Life and join the gods as immortals?
Hindu Yogic Monk Seeks Physical Immortality
Hindu monk and yoga master Swami Vishnudevananda Giri Ji Maharaj says:
Enough of death and birth, the same acts that animals – cats, dogs, monkeys are subjected to.
Enough of aging, enough of eating in the old way.
We need to reach a higher state of existing.
We need to change our life in all its aspects including overcoming the limitations of our physical bodies.
If we remain mortal do we really need all those devices or some other machines? (cars, materialism, etc)
If we die in the end all those things become useless.
This means the question of mortality, of overcoming and transcending mortality, the transition to immortality, is in fact the most important question in the life of a person.
I think, first of all we should declare that it is time for humanity to create a new paradigm for life, new paradigm of existence, new meanings, new values and goals.
I have been following the Advaita Vedanta tradition for more than 25 years and I have been learning the sacred texts of this tradition. So I am saying here is informed by the teachings of this traditions. The evolution of a person is imbedded in the spiritual Vedanta tradition. The human is a transient being.
Under no conditions he is the pinnacle of creation or the king of nature. In many ways the human is an imperfect being. However he or she is imbued with the ability to develop and evolve.
The Vedanta philosophy deliberates such a possibility of evolutionary development. The human must become a perfect being. And this perfect being, sooner or later, should become divine being.
The future of every person and the future of humanity as a whole are connected to the transition to the divine, to God-like beings.
If we create the desire for evolutionary development, for realisation of immortality in as many people on Earth as possible, this will surely create social demand.
My dream is that the transition to neo-humanity, the attainment of immortality would become goals number one on the agenda of The United Nations. That the leaders of G20 and G8 would come together and say:
“Let’s accept that as long as people remain mortal, as long as death is inevitable, as long as we have not achieved immortality, it makes sense for us to think and solve this problem”.
Ref: Full video transcript here http://2045.com/dialogue/30097.html Transcendental Transhumanism as the Probable Future of Humankind
the neurotic path of transference In Our Denial of Death
Nearly the entire field of psychoanalysis, as Ernest Becker explains in The Denial of Death was developed to study and treat this condition of escaping the awareness of our mortality.
"The field explains that people become neurotic and use a psychological technique called transference to project their desire for immortality into things besides the longevity of their biology. Harrington reminds us that “The idea of an indestructible, traveling soul springs up everywhere.”
They convince themselves that they won’t die because they think energy that was in the body retains the persons existence until the end of time; they convince themselves of reincarnation, ghosts, or afterlives; that immortality is real through offspring, the legacy of a book written, or good deeds done; they associate to a neurotic extent as part of a national or communal identity that they think continues on with their essence woven into it, and so forth.
Norman O. Brown notes that:
"Neurosis is not an occasional aberration; it is not just in other people; it is in us, and in us all the time."
We could consider that all those people had to go down the neurotic path of transference because they didn’t have a choice, that facing reality would have been to welcome a cripplingly dangerous traumatic stress.
“So long as, technologically, the race was in no position to do anything about death, the revolutionary goal revealed too soon would have been unbearable to contemplate.”
When your cause is immortality, you are putting in work to get the job done but also doing the most important job you could be doing, and that kind of job is self-actualizing, enables one’s spirit to transcend.
“The philosophy that accepts death must itself be considered dead, its questions meaningless, its consolations worn out.”
Ernest Becker
The insight into one’s own mortality is a younger and higher function of the conscious mind. This insight is not accessible to the equally complete, but unconscious, psychological possibilities of man.
The psyche, often referred to as a “soul” in this context, knows nothing of its limitations and mortality; in this question it is arrested in an animalistic narcissism, and completely stupid. (It is not in every question.)
This may be the deeper reason that so many half-conscious techniques for the Suppression of death are based on the idea that there is an inherently immortal part, a soul, in man – such a conception finally coincides with the psychological self-reflection of the one deceiving himself about reality, and can only develop from this one experience sufficient convincing force that a further conscious analysis of this construction will be left out for convenience.
The abandonment of this form of death-denial would promptly raise the question of the material condition of one’s own psychic part, and as a matter of fact would produce the mortality of the soul as an uncomfortable but helpful and cheerful insight.
― The Immortal Soul, Schwerdtfeger
The necrophilic character of every religion is evidently reflected in the central theme that the Grim Reaper – death – assumes in the structure of the “faith” of this religion.
The offer of religion to mankind is to transcend mortality, thus a form of transformed life is postulated. It is not particularly important whether, as in most cases, this is the psychically soothing idea of the “immortal soul”; Or whether a resurrection of the dead is postulated, as if they had only been asleep briefly; Or whether the uniqueness of the transient nature of existence in linear time is denied by asserting eternal cycles of existence, in which men reincarnate.
All of these designs share the psychologically fatal, effective denial of death.
In which is reflected. That death is the real theme of religion.
With such a construction, it is not surprising that life in all its possibilities, is rather disregarded, often even openly despised in so many religions. |
The apparent “contempt for death” of those who can sacrifice both themselves and others for their religion in cold blood is in reality nothing but contempt for life.
All religions are only a primitive and, above all, completely ineffectual defense against the imposition of individual death.
The irrationality of religion reflects the massive and oppressive fear of annihilation, the apparent rationality of religions reflects the insight into the inevitability of one’s own extinction. Every religion is a death cult.
Whoever wants to live his wretched, limited and senseless time should avoid the spiritual poison of religion just as much as he avoids other poisons.
Death is such an impertinence and a narcissistic wound to the stupid psyche of a person that the psyche even accepts the idea of immortality in an eternal hell if it only helps to ward off the idea of death, which is connected with feelings of strong unpleasure.
I find the fearful death cult of all great religions most questionable. It is quite remarkable how many religious statements refer to death and to unknowns, such as a possible life after death, and it is equally remarkable how easily these statements can be instrumentalized in order to transform life before death into a pale reflection of what is presented as hell before the eyes of people, to make them submissive with the fear caused by it.
The great respect of death always goes hand in hand with its mirror image, an equally great condemnation of life.
― Schwerdtfeger
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