The Transgenic Immortal
After word on the Immortal
The Immortals seek power like a sports event. Both Taoism and Christianity represent these poles, the Immortal, the Way of Powers (siddhi) vs. the Philosophical Way of Wisdom. Alan Watts says: [Hsien Taoism is] "a quest for immortality and supernormal powers through the gymnosophic and "yogic" practices which seem to have arisen among Taoists in the -2nd and -1st centuries. A hsien is an immortal--one who has purified his flesh from decay by special forms of breathing, diet, drugs, and exrcises for preserving the semen 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."
It is important not to miss the wit of this response which is more gentle than its condemnation by Lieh Tzŭ, who 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. They deny themselves. Watts teases "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 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 of Homer, Sappho, Moses, David, Plato, Moses, Beowulf. We have the odd companions of fiction that reads like journalism and criticism that reads like fantasy. Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu editors and scholars believe in themselves and the editorial class more than in authors. The qualities Creel cites, repetitions 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) demo primary sources as their livelihood because it buys promotion and tenure. Wendell Berry calls them the luxury politics of an academic islander.This is true among the Pennsylvania Dutch as well as Taoists.
Chuang Tzu was asked whether he would rather drag up the useless tree that was spared or the unsinging goose that was not (Legge, II, 27). Some editor thought that? '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
Watts feels that if you do certain things to live forever, that tends toward the Confucian. Before the age of resveratrol and HA, Taoist alchemy said all you had to do was sublimate energy up the spine. Breathe right, eat right, sit right, stop the wandering mind. Who knows how old you can be? It brings into question life itself if to be immortal you have to not live at all. Cut down to perfection, life free of mistake loses the thing Taoists seek most, spontaneity.
Stopped Minds
Smoothing the ocean by hitting it with a board is stopping the mind. The mind anxious for its own anxiety feels the same with this compulsion as the body hit by the same flat board in zazen. Stopped minders can be petty. 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 the path of weasels (Legge, II, 93) get to be immortal. Nobody wants them. Imperfection outlasts the straight and strong. Only the singing goose that is spared is the exception.To be mortal Chuang-tzu says, "though seventy years of age, I am still making wheels," or as Andrew S. Mack found as he traveled to Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota at the age of 71 in 1908, two years after his last letter, and Amasa Clark who fathered four children after the age of 70, though he lived to 101, the chance of survival is best when there is no anxiety to survive, but there is no greater anxiety than the effort to be immortal, to "exhale and inhale, to puff out old breath and draw new, stretch and crane to live long, it is an induced tao." Do not let the thoughts keep working anxiously (James Legge, Chuang Tzu, II, 77). Van de Wetering called it Afterzen, when he saw through the sham. Do you want nose, ear, eye and mind to wander like Chaung Tzu who invented Zen? Live.
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. The unimproved 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. Those who hire maintenance so they can seek pleasure and fortune are immortal.
Unimproved roads! Narrow is the way! What are improved roads for but more traffic? Why traffic, but development? Why development, but trade? Travel as easy as you can. Thoroughfare, freeway, inflation, consumption for its own sake pave a way to the empty fritterless corn. Immortal, happily there is a cure. A cure for immortality: here
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 TRANSHUMAN TRILLION TRILLION BRAIN
CANNOT KNOW WHAT IT DOES NOT KNOW,
BUT THE HUMAN DOES.
The purity of imperfection of human culture is built around suffering, ill health, sickness, disease and war, the struggles that make human. Utopia is only a design that works against this imperfection, otherwise as the norm it is a boredom and another denial of the body so prevalent in religious movements. The movement afoot to cure our ills and ailments by changing our DNA, the transhuman is a betrayal of every human philosophy of earth.
It's probably a designated strategy that the transmortals put up Ray Kurzweil to be their spokesman so they will not be taken seriously. When PBS last showed him on Charlie Rose with ringnecks on the fingers of either hand, he had talked of singularity as though it were an expression of the information age and that the "democratizing" technologies of cell phones and FB would prevent it being used for tyranny because of "the wisdom of crowds." But singularity is of the HYBRID AGE. That dinosaurs will be reconstituted from DNA in their bones after 80 million years with GRIN technology is considered a fantasy by the culture. It is however a serious effort of government and business not only to do that but to pair human and animal genes for human enhancement, as well as parade the nanobots in Kurzweil's brain. It is in the interest of immortals that we be lulled to sleep while they achieve singularity, all in a week it is said, trillions and trillions of brain cells coming on line in an instant. Then there will be no democratizing; life will be over in the low rent Moretell (mortal) where the longest lease is a week. Why the machines would want to continue relation with Kurzweil, James Hughes and Max Melhelm is their own fantasy. So the Terminator will come.
A fine day in the life of the transgenic immortal will go like this. Plug into SkyNet to see if they're up to us yet. The Sarah Connor Chronicles come true, but with an overwhelming difference, that being it is for real, but the movies do not make us safe. Whether AI has a malevolent wink to its trillion atoms is under discussion, here. If it does things just went from bad to worse. Continent wide wifi bubbles administered with extra cranial neural caps to ferret out even "silent talk" through EEGs, even of intended speech, already extend their "tele-presence" through mobile BCI devices into a Cognitive Threat Operative Systems. Do you think the Seals who took down bin Laden were unaltered? Do not fear, symposia like this report everywhere on your safety.
If the Artilect wars however come to pass it will cement an unprecedented unity of the cultures of humans Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists of every continent unite to save the earth for the one species that has probable cause not to have it saved since scientists have continually invited outsiders to take it over anyway, the Good People Aliens. Gary Schwartz of ASU wants to take his Sophia Project into a dialogue with the non human deceased or any discarnate beings he can can come find even if it means L. Ron Hubbard channeling Aleister Crowley, right out of the plutonian labs of C. S. Lewis' Devine. [Apologies for juxtaposing the content neutral standard with these two poles.] Perfectionists think they came to the wrong planet. Evolution was fine until it was superseded by themselves. God was fine until superseded by the world brain. This is not the World Brain of H. G. Wells that was as much ballyhooed as precursor of the Internet as C. S. Lewis' Hideous Strength is of the Abolition of Man of transmortal, transgenic fame.This reference to the H. G. Wells book of that title means to alert us to the prophetic nature of some writers, Wells of the Internet and C. S. Lewis of the Transmortal. These are much better precursors of their kind than Teilhard de Chardin is of the transmortal in The Future of Man (1955).
C. S. Lewis foresaw all this fictionally in That Hideous Strength with its detached head. No, the names are not the same, but the permutation of business and academe with mad scientists such as the JASONS of the Pentagon who game planned Vietnam as well as the Pentagon papers will have perpetuated synthetic telekinesis, super soldiers, merging with animals to gain new modes of perception, remote access brain waves in new designer children. As the Americans race the Chinese to preserve humanity by altering it, Hugo de Garis is hard at work in Xiamen and Nick Bostrom at Oxford. Does anyone else remark at their facial similarity? Oh, we'll not die immortal! This is not so new as to have not occurred in Chinese Lit before, but if you want to know you have to read of Chuang Tzu. He was a human.
IT SHOWS THE BEAUTY OF THE HUMAN NOW THAT IT IS TO BE CAST ASIDE
The First Transhumanist
Teilhard de Chardin and Transhumanism
Wikipedia
*Kurzweil Quaddafi is more than just a pretty phrase. Transmortals do not brook opposition. They were able to burn down one of their opponents when name calling didn't work.
But see Patrick Lin's defense in On Wrestling With A Pig, where we learn how to read his metaphor:
"First, I would never call someone a "pig" -- that's just rude (unless you're talking to Babe or Wilbur, who really are pigs). All I did was present an apt quote by a writer. Sometimes, a metaphor is a metaphor. Had I chosen "Don't get into a pissing match with a skunk", does this imply that the letter's author is a skunk? If I said he's "the bee's knees", does that mean I'm making a literal comparison of him to a bee's body part? (Do they even have knees?). Sep 22, 2010
NOR SHALL WE SAY THAT THIS CHATOYANCE BRINGS THE LIGHT THEY THINK THEY SEEK. Cha ching, ca ching. FLOG THEM WITH ROSE BUSHES
