Some scientists think it may eventually be possible to stop people dying by stopping or reversing the various physical processes that lead to death. If that ever happens it would mean we (or those who could afford it..) would not physically die until, eventually, I suppose we encountered some horrendous accident which damaged our bodies beyond repair (some scientists also claim we might eventually be able to "download"our minds onto a computer for transfer to another body etc, but as that seem to conflict with the idea that our essential selves are spiritual, I leave that out for the moment unless someone also has some thoughts on that).

What effect do you thik this would have on whatever spiritual path we are supposed to be travelling?

Would you take the option up, assuming you could live forever (or at least 1000s of years) and also stay reasonably young/healthy etc, or would you be too keen to move on to the afterlife and see what new opportunities are available for your spiritual growth?

No thanks. Not unless my life was extended so I can help the light.

Orlando,

Since life is already eternal and we can learn within a relatively short amount of study time to 'visit' the afterlife at will , this cure of death is not a big deal. The inconvenience of infancy can be overcome by stepping into another body at the crucual time, and there are people who claim to do that now.
;) What we need now is a clever sounding name for this (sort of like Casimir force --see OffTopics), and a scientist who will package and claim its validity!  :D

Bets

Hi Orlando-
With all due respects, that is precisely the problem for electronically maintained sentiencies in the present world. Scientists may take a long time, but silicon lifeforms abound already. All that is needed for something to be "alive" is that it make autonomous choices that determine its situation. The elctrical power grids that blanket the world are already "intelligent" in that sense.

Go forward a few hundred years and it might be that you could either be reborn as a metal-machine or a meat-machine. My wife would like that - she says that her body is getting too old and cranky and she'd like to jack up her navel and slide a new body in under it. She already has titanium knees. So instead of the bird flu we'd have problems of rust and corrosion. Ultimately, this would make a wonderfully robust and durable race of beings, capable of inhabiting planets with temperatures from slightly above 0^{o]/sup] Kelvin to slightly under the meting point of lead, a range of over 700[sup]o} Kelvin. As compared to our present life that exists from roughly -30^o K to roughly 40^o K, a relatively narrow range.

At the same time, if we lived forever, what value would life have?

And the memories. If you totally screwed up this life and were remorseful, there would be no kindly hand of death awaiting you to erase the slate. As Shakespeare phrased it in Hamlet, "To sleep - perchance to dream. To dream, aye there's the rub!" I would really be happier if I could forget what a total as* hole I've been in my earlier days! And if I were a Stalin, a Hitler, or even "Torturing George" in Washington, I'd probably find it uncomfortable to become enlightened and be forced to recognize what I really have accomplished. Perhaps memory erasure clinics could substitute for psychotherapy? :-)

dave

i definitely wouldn't stick around on earth...  if i could leave earth right now and know i was going to heaven and it was all painless and predictable, i'd leave today!  

i was reading a book by bruce goldberg, and he claims to have progressed someone forward into a future life, and in that life the person didn't "die."  they simply had their soul or whatever transferred on to a "tape" and picked out a new body, or died.  i can't remember.  if true, death would be very different than it is now.  it really doesn't matter though, because death won't be "solved" by the time we die.  

Quote:

I would really be happier if I could forget what a total as* hole I've been in my earlier days!

that may be possible in the future.  maybe they could erase all of a person's memories.  seems very possible...  they'd only have to copy the process of amnesia.  they're already lessening the impact of people's traumatic memories such as rape.   they somehow lessen the body's stress response to that memory.  in a short number of years, that may be a common practice - go to your doctor and lessen traumatic memories.   sounds plausible that one day you could erase entire memories.

Hi orlando123 I hope and pray that scientists never invent this thing of being able to stop the death as when you have lived your life,you are tired and just want to go somewhere to rest and that being the spirit world.

Love and God bless        Love juditha

There are some things scientists should not do. This is one of them.

Scientists can observe and experiment the physical world all they want, but they should not stop people from dying. Dying is part of Nature because God made it that way.

My personal take is that this is another of those flights of scientific hubris that doesn't look at the big picture and won't be delivered for a long time, if ever. Barring perhaps that some sort of ageing gene or something can be found and switched off to allow some sort of natural regeneration - because to solve the problems of ageing one by one is likely to be almost infinitely complex.

Can't help thinking that with what we're doing to our food chain, food, diet, environment and ecology with poor lifestyles, selfishness, population pressure and toxic substances of one sort or another that we're actually much more likely to experience shortening lifespans rather than the opposite in coming generations. Or perhaps life prolonged, but at the expense of very poor quality.

And that presumes that all of the factors determining lifespan are physical which I doubt. Possibly the biggest issue of all is ego. Most of us build a cocoon of beliefs and values which by the time we've got middle aged stops almost all further spiritual development - we selectively pre-conceive and make conditioned decisions to act to the extent that we end up just circling in the goldfish bowl. We're no longer open to anything very much.

Maybe the physical hard drive gets full or something too - it gets to be time for the celestial defrag.

Seems to me that there's no point living beyond that point. Judging by my own experience of the way life seems to act to force progress when we resist spiritual development I can't help thinking that maybe ageing and death will be around at least until most of us awaken.

Or at least that lifespan is in some way a reflection of the period for which we can stay open to change, learning and new insight. (not so easy - even in my 50s despite a hunger for knowledge there are large chunks of my psyche and attitudes which seem to be set in stone)

Maybe lifespan and stage of spiritual development of humanity are in some way linked.....

betson wrote on Aug 8^th, 2007 at 8:06pm:

Orlando, Since life is already eternal and we can learn within a relatively short amount of study time to 'visit' the afterlife at will , this cure of death is not a big deal. The inconvenience of infancy can be overcome by stepping into another body at the crucual time, and there are people who claim to do that now. Bets

Huh? And what happens to the other person occupying the body when you decide to "step into it'"?

But spiritual systems claim we live forever anyway, presumably if we also dealt with old age and illness etc we could go on learning in the same bodies/world? Or would that not be varied enough?


dave_a_mbs wrote on Aug 8^th, 2007 at 8:22pm:

.............At the same time, if we lived forever, what value would life have? And the memories. If you totally screwed up this life and were remorseful, there would be no kindly hand of death awaiting you to erase the slate. As Shakespeare phrased it in Hamlet, "To sleep - perchance to dream. To dream, aye there's the rub!" I would really be happier if I could forget what a total as* hole I've been in my earlier days! And if I were a Stalin, a Hitler, or even "Torturing George" in Washington, I'd probably find it uncomfortable to become enlightened and be forced to recognize what I really have accomplished. Perhaps memory erasure clinics could substitute for psychotherapy? :-) dave

Good point. I recall in Primo Levi's book If This is a Man (about his time in Auschwitz) he says both human happiness and suffering in this world are tempered by the fact neither lasts forever. it might indeed be awful to live forever in the same life/body/identity with no fresh start if you had enormous regrets or shame about something (s).

But yes, maybe memory erasure clinics will come - where you can ditch certain painful ones. Might not be a bad thing.

BTW Seeing as how people's memories can already get erased in amnesia, how does that gel with the idea that our minds/consciouness are concerned with our immortal souls and not our brains? Is it just that the brain is a kind of receptor for the soul and in those cases (amnesia)part of it (the brain) which is needed to recieve memories in the physical world is not functiniong, but the memories are still available somewhere..possibly after death?

EliteNYC wrote on Aug 9^th, 2007 at 4:45am:

There are some things scientists should not do. This is one of them. Scientists can observe and experiment the physical world all they want, but they should not stop people from dying. Dying is part of Nature because God made it that way.

But how do you define which things scientists should do and which not? Some people say genetic modification is "playing God" but what if in the future it can be used to prevent diseases and so on? You could say - taking an extreme example - that we are playing God by stopping children dying in childhood by vaccinating them instead of letting nature take its course..

wrote on Aug 9^th, 2007 at 3:25am:

Hi orlando123 I hope and pray that scientists never invent this thing of being able to stop the death as when you have lived your life,you are tired and just want to go somewhere to rest and that being the spirit world. Love and God bless        Love juditha

I believe you. i am only in my 30s but i feel pretty "tired" sometimes and wish i could go back to the kind of enthusiasm, wonder, trust and hope about life and this world (or the next one for that matter) I had as a child

Quote:

Scientists can observe and experiment the physical world all they want, but they should not stop people from dying.

too late.  every time doctors "bring someone back to life" they're stopping that person from dying.  every time you eat or breathe, you're stopping yourself from dying.

but if you mean completely... well, i guess if you got tired of life you could commit suicide.  however i don't really see the "point" in prolonging life unless you really love earth so much you want to stick around a long time (why would anyone prefer earth if heaven is so great?)  people take death too seriously.  

Upon reading about the shift in consciousness that I sense and many others tell me is taking place now and will accelerate beyond 2012, I have also read things that in the future people will be able to die when they choose to. Say we live 150 years and we have completed our path and we no longer wish to live, we can just decide to die. The mechanics of how that work may be something quite different to the common ways of 'dying' we have now.  Call me crazy but its not something I dreamed up, it is often mentioned about our future beyond the 'Earth Changes'.

As for scientifically curing death, that might be great if you have everything going well for you, but what about if you were poor and hungry and your life was full of suffering. Would the possibility of happiness in the physical world be worth pursuing if you were 'trapped' in a bad life. So what is the point of those people starving in the third world living forever? Supposedly if death could be cured would this be universal? Is this curing of death got anything to do with improving the quality of life? I'd rather live 70 quality years than thousands or millions of years of suffering. From what i hear a hell realm would be alot quicker than that.  ::)

The other thing is we really feel time in the physical world but I so often hear people say that the spirit world is a timeless realm. I don't really think I'd want to experience the feeling of so many eons of time in the physical world. There's just not enough opportunity for expansion.