Practical Physical Immortality

It seems from the feedback I have gotten already is that a number of people want some practical idea about how to attain "physical immortality". It seems that there is less of an inquiry about whether or not physical immortality is a valid theory and more of a focus on the practical aspects. It seems that people are believing that physical immortality is at least "theoretically possible", but wonder how difficult it is to attain.

I would like to mention a two points about physical immortality to further refine the theory:

(1) Physical immortality is a "relative truth". The main point is that there is no fixed end point to the human lifespan. There are still conditions that could end up killing all of us, like accidents, plague level super viruses, and powerful military weapons. While it may be possible to evolve to a point where bullets can bounce off our chests, physical immortality means that our regeneration system can reach a point where aging and death are transcended. It is a lesser attainment than becoming a superhuman indestructible god or goddess. What physical immortality means is that it is not necessary or inevitable that we must age and die. When this happens our lifespan is indefinite with no preprogramed termination point and we are able to extend a healthy and youthful lifespan beyond at least 150 years.

(2) Physical immortality may not be difficult to attain, because it is in some sense natural to not age and die. Much depends how easy or difficult it is to create the supportive causes and conditions around us. In any case, there is very little to lose by trying to cultivate physical immortality. Even a partial success means greater health, increased youthful energy, and more years of purposeful living. Even if I should eventually age and die, it will have been worthwhile to shift my lifestyle towards physical immortality, because it has already produced good results in my life. All that physical immortality as a life style needs is to simply be open to the possibility, not assume that you have to age and die, and making more skillful choices in our lives. There is merely an increase in awareness about the consequences of certain choices and the avoidance of the unwholesome ones. There is also the building up of an regenerative lifestyle which does add a few important things to the usual way of living. These few things I will share some in what follows.

There three levels of immortalist practice:

The first level is to get philosophically clear about physical immortality. It means adopting a "life in this body" positive spirituality. A body positive spirituality fully honors our precious our human life is or can be. A body negative spirituality is one which feels that Earth is not a good place to live and we can do better after we die, that our real life is in heaven or some other world. Such philosophies have problems, one being that it is hard for them to not justify a person committing suicide. Usually they only give the reason that it is wrong or sometimes wrong. One philosophy assumes that we are born on Earth because of bad karma and that when we paid off our karmaic debt then we go to a better place, and that if we do not paid it off then we will die and be reborn back to Earth or worse. It is like being held back a grade in school if we get too many "F" marks on our cosmic report card. Catholicism assumes that Earth is a place of temptation and that if we give in to too many temptations and commit "mortal sins" then when we die we burn in hell forever (permanent detention)and if we do enough good works, then we either get reborn in purgatory where we finish atoning for our remaining sins (remedial school) or get reborn in heaven because we have atoned for enough sin (a passing grade). In these views, the real life is in heaven and life on Earth is much like purgatory. Part of physical immortality is the Earth can be a form of heaven and we are meant to create this on Earth. It is does not merely have to be a place where we pay our karmaic dues and get out. In a sense, the beauty and wonder of nature shows us that it can be more than this.

Getting philosophically clear means also questioning enough to remove the "dogma of aging and death" from our minds. As mentioned in a previous blog, there is no evidence that we have to age and die. While it is true that aging and death do happen to a lot of people and may be even the vast majority of people, there is nothing that says that this MUST happen. There is not a single observation, scientific experiment, or philosophical argument that has proven that we MUST age and die. There is even less argument that says that our lifespan must be about 80 years and then we MUST die. In other time periods, the expected human lifespan was less than it is now and is why a biblical generation was considered 40 years. In other time periods, which may or may not be fables, the lifespans may have been longer. It seems that some of the Egyptian Pharaohs were reported to have lived 40,000 years. Padmasambhava was reported to have lived about 1300 years before he translated into life. Babaji attained "soruba samadhi" (conquest of aging and death) in the year 800 CE and is rumored to still live near Badrinath, India. All these suggest that a variable human lifespan without no rigid termination point, rather than a fixed human lifespan that inevitably kills everyone no matter what they do. In nature, too, amoebas and most single celled creatures are really beyond aging and death, becoming their own descendants by mitosis. The same original amoeba has been around since the dawn of its life on Earth as every single amoeba that is. In terms of other species, the Redwood Tree does not age and die unless a drought, fire, or other causes and conditions kill it. The same is true of the Creosote plant. These three examples are enough to show that not all of life is doomed to birth, rigid lifespan, and death. We may be another exception.

The reason why the dogma of aging and death needs to be questioned and released is because if we have a powerful dogmatic belief that we MUST age and die, then we will. The mind is very powerful and has the power to make our thoughts into self fulfilling prophecies. We can kill ourselves by very strong concentration on unwholesome thoughts that we believe without any doubts whatsoever. It is a wonderful thing for the mind to release the burden of such an unnatural belief. I felt this within myself, the moment when this dogma released from my brain, and felt a surge of energy recharging all my cells to a new level of functioning. It is okay to be agnostic about aging and death, to not know if you will age or die, and to believe you only MIGHT live forever. If you doubt aging and death this much, then the dogma of aging and death has been released from your brain and you are freer. Even this much doubt has more of a change that one might imagine before the mental, emotional, and energetic shift, provided that it is deep enough to enter our subconscious mind and dislodge the aging and death samskara which is there. I consider this kind of philosophical and spiritual penetration to our subconscious belief systems to be the most practical thing that a person can do to start the immortality ball rolling in their lives. It has to be powerful enough and deep enough to dislodge the dogma from the brain. Otherwise it lingers as a kind of emotional heaviness and gives power to any thought about life on Earth that makes it feel not worth living.

The second level is emotional. This is clearing out all the emotions we have repressed and pushed into the muscle tissues of our physical body. Rebirthing breathing, psychologically based body work, kundalini yoga, Chi Kung, Rolfing, Reichian bioenergetic work, Cranial Sacral work on emotional cysts, and Rajneesh's Chaotic Meditation practice are all good methods of going deep into our bodies to refeel and release the stored emotions which are there. If this is not done, the amount of energy which it takes to hold all those emotions in resistance to them surfacing and releasing jams our healing energy flows too much and will cause us to age and die. Forgiving everyone who has ever harmed us, reducing the three poisons of the mind (craving, negativity, and delusion) on both the conscious and subconscious levels are also necessary emotional work for us to embrace and move through completely (and then working through emotional issues in present time for that point on).

The third level is adopting a regenerative lifestyle. This means eating a vegan diet, having a daily physical routine like Tai Chi or Hatha Yoga, having loving supportive relationships, good friends and good lover(s), not being in any toxic long term relationship, learning how to love and be loved within our core friendships and partnerships, having good hygiene, a healthy, neat, and clean home, no monetary debts (or at least a positive cash flow), no toxic health habits, creative work that pays our bills and which is enjoyable to do, a good sense of humor, a spiritual sense of purpose to our lives (meaning an evolutionary and growth orientation), periodic cleansing of our body with skillful use of herbs, teas, tinctures, and liquids, learning to enter into deep regenerative sleep cycles, and freedom from any unwholesome addictions. When our feeling sense is awake, we can directly feel what is unwholesome for us, because we will feel like we are aging and dying if we indulge in those things.

Part of the regenerative lifestyle is, for me, to keep up with scientific research in life extension nutrients, to eat organic food as much as possible, and to devote some time to growing our own food (there is something to be learned about life from this that merely buying food all our lives does not connect with). For this reason, it is good to have an immortalist community around of us of people who similarly aspire to at least health and long life, if not physical immortality itself.

Another part of the regenerative lifestyle is to free the breath of its holding patterns and inhibition patterns. Whenever we do not want to feel an emotion, then we hold our breath. We are meant to do "natural pranayama" (getting life force energy from proper breathing all the time, not merely when we meditate for one hour or so everyday) and rise to "full lung breathing". Most of us breathe and barely even use about 10 percent of our lung capacity. This is not enough breathing to kick in a deep enough regeneration mode to help us live forever. Think of the reverse of full lung breathing. If we held our breath long enough, we would could die in less than an hour (though we would go unconscious and start unconsciously breathing before then, in other words, the body wants to live more than we do and will not knock us out and take over breathing on a bottom line level if we do not cooperate). There is a kind of breath mastery that we do need to rise to. I consider Rebirthing breathing is the most efficient training that I see for this, especially in its Vivation form.

The above is a rough outline of the practical side of this work.