But what about death?

Before I go deep into the subjects mentioned above, I need you to reconsider two basic, accepted ideas, many times discussed but never figured out completely. Then I will again explain the whole thing. And after that again from another angle.

"Third time I said that, I'll probably say it three more times you see. In my line of work you got to keep repeating things, over and over and over again for the truth to sink in. To kinda of catapult the propaganda" - President G.W. Bush.

I'll explain it from different angels, arriving at the same result. That we're a prelude to a life-form that will eventually leave this planet. In a sense we are all victims of Life’s lust/hunger for living.

Before we will actually leave this planet Life needs for us to become balanced. We can only be balanced when we know why we’re here. When we see a solution to a problem, we’ll adapt our behaviour to it, so the problem is solved. This might happen to us and will most definitely happen to who'll come after us.

Let’s be honest, we’re a physically weak species, which made us do so well in adapting nature to our needs instead of us adapting to nature. Speed, teeth, claws, night vision, sonar, scales or shells that protect and give an edge to many life-forms are absent in our existence. Our flesh tears quite easily, we’re not protected by scales or shells. We can’t outrun our fellow predators, but still we've prevailed and populate the planet with about 7 billion individuals.

The whole notion of 'Do unto others that you want others to do unto you' and 'Love your neighbour' are rooted in what we will become: Independent of our planet, but completely depending on each other. Our 10.000 year history is to experience our extremities and learn from them. It's our experience that'll shape the next generation.

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Let me catapult my propaganda as I explain the myths and reality of eternal life.



I’d like you to include what we call consciousness in the equation. How we relate to our environment. For example; you can freeze your body with cryogenics, but what if when you awake you have no recollection whatever and essentially start out again as a baby having to learn everything. Your body has ‘survived’ but your mind or consciousness is empty.

Of course I don’t know this will happen, nobody knows. But there is an opposite of this idea of eternal life that we can see everywhere around us, in life forms that have populated this planet far longer than we humans have.

Eternal consciousness as opposed to the eternal body. It’s not new. Religions, philosophies, humankind has dealt with this idea for thousands of years. In every culture at any time. But we've only known, empirically about our evolutionary past for about a 150 years. The awareness of millions, even billions of years that it took to eventually create us is brand new.

Now forget about form and concentrate on consciousness. How do we relate to our environment? How do we act within our environment?

This brings me to the second basic idea, somewhat less ambiguous. Surviving. The now accepted paradigm within the Darwinian theory of evolution is at it’s core; survival of the fittest. I do not want to go into the semantics as this being a philosophical tautology, or into the stunning complexity that life brings us. I want to observe what it is life does and how. You can observe it to and already have. Let me take you back a while.

To survive one must eat. There is no theory about life that doesn’t accept this premise. Energy is what fuels us, food is energy. Enter consciousness. How do we relate to our environment? First we eat. When we apply reduction in our search for ‘the first interaction with the environment’ feeding must stand lonely at the top. It doesn’t however. It’s replication that has topped our charts for over a century. I contest that theory.

Back to our Darwinian philosophy of survival of the fittest. To survive you feeding was and is our main priority. So if life wants to survive wouldn’t it be logical that all new bourns would be able to feed themselves? Wouldn’t it be great when being born you know what to do and are able (physically) to do that? From the outset you know where to find a meal, what is dangerous, how to defend yourself and after a while where to find your mate and procreate. And during all these lives, experiences, triumphs and failures, will be inherited by you offspring.

As you see, I am describing the opposite situation of our existence. We’re born completely dependent, physically incapable of surviving on our own.

The last description of life, us humans, stands in stark contrast with life forms we all know and existed way before even our class of species appeared in evolutionary terms. Class Mammalia.  

These life forms, essentially all except birds and mammals, when it comes to feeding have to fend for themselves from birth. We all have seen a nature program where we see a hatchling lizard go about his way as if it was just another day. I even saw a lizard, half hatched, play dead.

A rat was passing his nest right at the moment the lizard clawed through his (or her) eggshell. He somehow knew what to do. We pass it of as ‘instinct’. But nobody really knows what’s going on. Is it instinct for a spider to built a complex web? For me instinct means subconscious reactions, like veering back when somebody wants to punch me. But building a bow and arrow, the equivalent of the spiders web, is not what I’d call instinct.

In fact, we were the first class of species that evolved into ever more dependent life forms, and as you all know by heart if you were taught Darwinian thoughts, is that ‘ironically’ we humans are the most successful species ever on earth, but at the same time the most fragile and dependent creatures when we’re born.

In reality, it’s not ironic at all.

Remember this well: our class of species, mammals, evolved into existence around 210 million years ago. Life inhabited this planet over 3 Billion years!

That means that after all those billions of years, life parted from an old strategy. Before (and still) life evolved skills through experience, i.e. became conscious of and adapted to, that were passed on to the offspring  genetically. The new way created a new dimension to the genetic evolution of consciousness; real time learning. Now we have real life experiences that can be taught to your offspring, enabling them to face and survive in their environment more up to date. Learning from mistakes and triumphs, on the spot, from the one you trust with every fibre in your body. There is a simple explanation for why life started to experiment with this new and daring adventure.

I went way too far into my initial two subjects, as I always do when I’m finally writing again, so I’m going to get to the point.

Eternal life doesn’t have to be physical. The fact that many animals we know, are born with full knowledge and capability to ensure their species survival, shows this. Imagine you would die this instant, and few moments later you’ll find yourself ‘waking up’ in a babies body. You open your eyes and as your eyes and brains adjust to this new vehicle of your life, slowly you start to remember. And, for sure, after a couple of hours you are completely aware and remember everything up until you died. A new body, but transferred consciousness. That’s what we can distil from a lizards life. And a fish and an insect. Just the birds come close to our choices in our evolutionary paths.     

I hope you have distilled my core thesis. Life is an evolving consciousness, born on this planet by reacting to her impulses. This eventually made her feed and reproduce and evolve. We call this surviving. In reality it is an ever increasing complex way of feeding and procreating. To be or not to be is the most eloquent description of our predicament. We’re here for a reason, a reason old as life itself. To survive.

But how do we fit in this picture?

I’m going to explain all this and my first focus is on how to ‘redefine’ the life force. This will go right into the core of our consciousness and will answer some age old philosophical and religious questions, never answered before. I’m referring here to the most magical of numbers, strewn through religious and philosophical thought everywhere and in all times. The number 3. 

It will answer the question of the Ttrinity, holy or unholy. The three jewels of Buddhism. The three forces coming from the Tao. There all directly related to the core of our consciousness, that what made life move for the first time.  

Now forget everything I said except the idea of an eternal consciousness in contrast to an exclusively physical eternity, actually seen in nature all around us.

To help me with my argument, I will use quotes and references from religious books, philosophical writings and scientific findings from the search for truth and wisdom throughout our human history.

It will tell us that it's not the strong and powerful that seem to cohere to the theory of survival of the fittest, but that we're a part of a process trying to achive the opposite; survival of the weakest. Creating thereby a life form feasible of leaving this planet and surviving indefinitely. 

It's the sacrifices we make and endure for the other that makes up our path to completion. We call it love, but have interpreted its values in  many different ways.  

The first thing I’d like you to reconsider is your accepted idea of the term/idea eternal life. Most of us in western society equate this idea with the search for it. Cryogenics, genetic manipulation. Trying not to age, or reversing the process of aging. All these thoughts come from our rather narrow view of life being all about the physical and genetics. I’d like you to consider another idea about eternal life. You don’t have to accept it, just consider it.