The Secret of Eternal Life

I am presenting here my theory of what the secret of eternal life is, and how it has been under our noses for centuries, but as is so common we have not seen it because we have not been looking where it is. It is hidden within a few symbols, not esoteric or magical symbols obsessed by any secret society, but by ordinary every-day symbols, such as boxes and ladders and chains and stories and monsters and evil people, and scientists.

In the fifteen hundreds, during the lifetime of Francis Bacon, the scientific method took hold in Europe, and this period is often described by both scientists and historians as the beginning of the "rise of science." The rise of science would be consistent, in ways both fortunate and unfortunate, with the decline of religion. That does not mean the decline of morality, for human morality has been rather astoundingly stable over the past five hundred years. If the morality of civilization can be effectively measured, it is clear that we continue to kill large numbers of people in our wars, but we appear to have improved in the area of killing individuals because they have their own thoughts.

The rise of science, if born in the fifteen hundreds, coincides with the rebellion against the authoritarian tyranny of the Roman Church, symbolized in the Reformation initiated by Martin Luther. His Ninety-Five Theses included rejection of the most obvious of offenses against true religion: having people pay money to receive blessings or forgiveness of sins (release from guilt); having the church, supposedly concerned only with the soul, behave as though its real goal was to own the world; and the hypocrisy of male priests pretending to be celibate. Therefore, the tension between the Church and the State, and between Science and Religion -- as sources of information -- has been a central part of human life ever since. There is of course much more to world history than this, and much of the conflict over methods for discovery of truth occurred throughout the human drama. But this is the source of our times in a nutshell: we trust science, but are still attached to our religions. It is not necessary to consider this either a tragedy or a comedy. It is just a natural reality: both meet human needs.

With the rise of science humankind has thought and acted through a sense of hope that we might come to understand mysteries and the answers to ancient questions that have tortured us since our first thoughts. Who are we really? What are we? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? Why is it said that instead of dying we could have eternal life? Does the individual spirit survive after physical death? Is there a God or superior being watching over us? Interested in the outcome of human civilization? Interested in our "destiny" or ultimate achievement of the human journey?

What does it mean, or what could it mean that we could have eternal life? It might not mean that each individual lives eternally in the physical sense, but that we live indefinitely as a species. My perception, only recent, is that there does appear to be a way, rather mundane and pedestrian, rather simple but also incredibly complex, that our species could survive indefinitely. This is not the childish and egotistic concept that an individual could live forever. The way to search for the answer to how WE could live "forever" is to ask and answer convincingly how we have survived this far in the first place. This is a good question. The answers usually given are probably wrong.

We have not survived because we have language, or because we think, or because we have souls -- more so than other living things have souls -- or because we have a conscience, or self-awareness. All of these things contribute greatly to our capacities and our record of survival and growth. But I believe there are two keys to understanding why we are still here, and then why we have a chance to extend our survival into an indefinite future. But first, we have to deal with some very common and very powerful symbols.

What makes us different? What do we have or do that other animals do not have or do? This question has been asked by scientists and philosophers over the ages, and no one seems to have come up with an answer that all or most can agree with. Also, with many theories, the supposed key is soon demonstrated to be far less unique than we thought. Take language for example. Many people believed the human capacity for language, to create both a spoken and written language and communicate in precise detail, was deemed to be the skill that no other animal possessed. This theory has been proven incorrect, because other animals possess language and their capacity for communication, even in detail, is far greater than we used to think. This process has occurred many times. A key is named, then tested and found to be less unique to humans than we thought. The animals, and even plants, continually surprise us with the complexity that they possess in a small package.

The first symbol and key that has to be re-examined and replaced is the symbolic uniqueness or exclusive spirituality of humankind. We can correct this by stating that all living things possess a spirit, or holiness or "holy ghost" within, which is in fact a prevailing concept in most if not all ancient religions. We can correct this another way, the way that I recommend. Acknowledge that all living things may possess a spark or a spirit that we do not fully understand. To access the first key to understanding the secret of eternal life, we must remove or set aside the symbol of humankind as unique or superior or "set over" life, or as "intelligent beings" who somehow escape the natural constraints on animals and plants. Set aside the concept -- a symbolic concept -- that we are "intelligent beings" and therefore separated from all "lower beings" or "lower animals." We are, I perceive, technological animals. What I am saying, and I believe I am saying clearly, is that what is unique or special about us is not any special claim to holiness or intelligence, but that we possess technology. We possess the ability to count and measure and construct things to a degree that far exceeds that of any other animal. Why is this so? Is it our hands? This cannot be the answer. Squirrels and raccoons have hands. Birds do not have hands and their nests are exquisitely engineered. The lodge of a beaver family is a masterpiece of safe, secure and comfortable home life, built with rodent hands and teeth, and the power of webbed feet and a flat tail. The human hand is a work of Nature's art, but it is not the only tool that can make things. Even ants construct buildings.

I could go on and review and discuss many of the possible concepts that have been offered to establish the perceived separation of humankind from all of the "other kind." But I believe I have found the correct answer. The answer is found first by acknowledging that we are a technological animal. Then ask why are we so far more successful at technology than other animals. They have language, they can construct. They can learn. So what do we have that they don't have? What makes the crucial difference? The next step requires changing another symbol or icon. That totally obvious and crucial icon is the concept that we are separated because we have something that other animals do not have. The reverse leads in the right direction, what do we not have that all other animals have? The answer is: fear of fire. This is the point in evolutionary history when a primate became human, when the first human believed that fire could be used, could be controlled, and was not to be feared but treasured. This theory of mine makes the ancient Greek story of Prometheus the closest to the truth about who we are. In that ancient Greek religion, the moment when human history began is when Prometheus stole fire from the Titans and gave it to humans. Prometheus also learned other technological arts, such as architecture, astronomy and mathematics from the Goddess Athena.

This theory could be tested by experiments, but one could also simply ask "What animal is not afraid of fire?" There is no other animal that starts a fire or controls a fire. Most flee fire in terror. Ancient humanity used fire to hunt down animals at night and drive them to run over cliffs or into traps. I believe that the primary tools for hunting bison and mastodons were torches and ropes and nets, not spears. Other than mathematics itself, a mental skill that arises out of the human sense of proportion, there is nothing more central to technology than fire. When we dig for the signs of ancient culture, we look for pottery, made with fire. We look for metals, made with fire. The fire is still with us far more than we think during a normal day. Hear a man say, "I used to be a red sports car but after I got married I became a brown pickup truck." The car, the motorized vehicle, is a symbol, an icon of human personality or character. That is how they are made and how they are sold, as representations of the qualities and aspirations of the person driving. The all-purpose UV (utility vehicle) is the icon of a woman or man who sees themselves as a good parent: efficient, economical, adaptable, made to transport children and families and their things.

And all motor vehicles are fires, fire on wheels. In fact, the fire turns the wheels, which we call the "internal combustion" engine. Every power plant is a fire. Every home in a cold or variable climate has a fire in it. Every home has a stove or an oven. Try to imagine human society without access to fire. If you join a volunteer fire department, you will be invited to study fire. The first concept that you will be taught about fire is that there are two types of fire: friendly fire and the other type. Friendly fire is controlled and enclosed, limited for purposes of human utility. We can build with trees (wood) without fire, but we cannot make any metal object unless we have and control fire. It is a common theory that in pre-history we probably occasionally set plains on fire because we knew that many animals would be trapped and pre-cooked for our convenience. This activity would certainly introduce us to the phenomenon of how dangerous fire is, how it can change from controlled to uncontrolled in seconds, and then become the enemy of human kind rather than the primary tool. Today, having learned how to make atomic fire, we are pre-occupied with the horror that atomic fire could be unleashed by terrorists, comparable to rowdy teenagers in a pre-historic human tribe, moved by irrational emotions to show the world that they have power too, and are no longer obedient to their stuffy, conservative parents. Fire is the key. The fact that we use fire and do not fear fire is what separates us from all other animals. Whether they have hands or language, and however admirable their capacity to construct or to learn, they all fear fire. Humans, instead, believe they can keep it under control. But don't.

The Food Chain, the Circle of Life, and the Thinking Outside the Box:

There are two other key icons which I must revise in order to advance my explanation of how we can have eternal life. One is the symbol that we know as the "food chain." When one watches a documentary about grizzly bears, or sharks, one is likely to hear the statement that in grizzly territory, or in water occupied by sharks, we humans are not at the "top of the food chain." This phrase is readily understood, but the icon of the chain seems to be more like a "ladder" if it is a length where one can be at the "top" position. In any case, food chain, or food ladder, both are linear with a top and a bottom. Little fish is eaten by bigger fish, eaten by bigger fish, eaten by bigger fish, eaten by human, and if in the wrong place at the wrong time, human is eaten by grizzly bear. However, this icon of the food chain or food ladder is wrong. The circle of life is comprised of a food circle. Or, if there is a food chain it is not a line length. All of the links are connected so that the chain forms a circle, with no end, no top or bottom, but an eternal cycle. Most animals are eaten by larger animals, but all animals are eaten by microbes. The human, the shark, the grizzly bear, the lion, the eagle and the tiger, all are consumed by bacteria and maggots. The largest are consumed by the smallest. This is good. What would we do if this were not the case? Nature is efficient. Anything can be re-processed and sent back to the environment as basic building material.

This is a good place for me to explain briefly my references to "symbols" and "icons." I am designating concepts as being symbols or icons. This is the way we think. A symbol or an icon can be a concept itself. The concept that we humans possess something unique that separates us from other animals is a symbol that has been with us for thousands of years. The symbol of the larger fish eating the smaller fish is an icon of how Nature works, the food chain, but it is incomplete, because it does not show the largest fish of all rotting on the ocean floor. The food circle. We seem to occupy a special place in the food chain. We appear to consume all things, but there is no predator that eats us, or consumes us, except disease. And some diseases are voracious. But let's consider our place as consumers. We are hunters and gatherers. We harvest food. We also have a bad habit of losing control and over-harvesting animals. Why do we do this? Possibly because we can. But it makes us an adversary of the ecological process. Our habit of over harvesting animals for food or medicine, such as Do-Do birds or primates or elephants or rhinoceros or whales or cod fish or carrier pigeons or salmon suggests the problem that leads us to an understanding of eternal life, or eternal survival. Why are there no monsters that devour us? Why do we have stories both ancient and new that tell us of dragons and ghosts and vampires and extreme and vile variations of evil beings, worms, parasites, teeth like steel swords, strength to crunch us like dry sticks, giant insects or dinosaurs re-born. Why do we imagine these things? Because they do not exist, and we wonder why they do not exist. I think I know why. Again, it has something to do with what separates humans from the other animals. We retaliate. Not only can we consume and over harvest an animal to the point of extinction, but we also can retaliate. We can make a particular animal our communal target. We take care of much that we value, roses (apples, pears, plums, peaches), beef cattle, dairy cattle, pigs, chickens, fish, shrimp, corn, wheat, soybeans, barley and on and on. But when we don't like an animal, we can assign it for special treatment: elimination.

Because we have fire -- from Zeus -- and mathematics -- from Athena -- we are imaginative makers of weapons. From fire and mathematics, and an insatiable curiosity, we have chemistry. Our possession of fire makes us technological animals, and our possession of rather agile brains, makes us excel at making weapons and traps and poisons and whatever it takes to capture or kill whatever we want to capture or kill. Other animals do not do that. Lions and tigers and grizzly bear, and poisonous snakes, and even insects, can attack and kill us effectively, but they do not even come close to endangering our species. Why is that? Because if any animal, large or small, threatens us, we retaliate. This is not the same thing as a food chain or a food circle or hunting and harvesting. This is an entirely different process. We know that the gazelle living on an African plain do not organize to hunt down lions. We know that bees may attack and can kill an animal that threatens their nest, but no hive of bees has ever gone out hunting raccoons or humans because they are a threat. A school of small fish, however large they might be in accumulation, will not approach a shark to bite it to death. The same concept is true for any animal that has the capacity to harm or kill an individual human. They do not possess the impulse to kill for any purpose except to satisfy hunger or respond to an immediate danger. This has been pointed out often before. Animals (other than the human animal) kill out of necessity, for food, strictly for self-defense. Humans are the only animal who will kill, methodically, for other reasons, especially because another animal has made us uncomfortable. Therefore, we have the phenomenon, another concept and another icon, of the elimination of a predator species. Sometimes we do this in a very deliberate manner, such as in the case of hunting down wolves. Other times this occurs because a predator has food value, such as in the case of sharks. Just as European colonizers slaughtered American buffalo only for the hide, and left the rest of the extremely valuable carcass on the plains to rot, humans today kill an entire shark in order to take the fin to make soup. Perfectly logical. To illustrate the uniqueness of human behavior, instead of the relatively mild horror of a grizzly bear tearing an individual human to pieces, imagine an army of a hundred thousand grizzly bears staging a surprise attack on a town of twenty-thousand unarmed people and killing every last one within a day. That is what our world would be like if other animals behaved like humans. Compared to us, all other animals are "unarmed."

What then, does this human capacity to over harvest and retaliate have to do with eternal life? The concept could be taking shape in your mind already, but I must explain just a little further. There are no dragons or octopuses from outer space that are voracious consumers and are coming to eat humans to the point of extinction. There is no animal on earth, and probably no animal anywhere that can eat us into extinction, over harvest us or eliminate us as we can do and have done to other animals. We are therefore safe "from above" on the food chain or in the food circle. When a bear or a lion or wolf or any predator wants our territory, or makes us uncomfortable enough, we can swing into action and become the most destructive real monster in the real universe and we can eliminate or decimate any animal. How we choose between eliminating and decimating is also very interesting. When we are "enlightened," we are careful not to eliminate an animal species. It might be useful. We are often enlightened by children and responsible adults who point out that the natural ecological system produced every species for a reason, and we must not spite ourselves with the arrogant concept -- another icon -- that we can be in control and eliminate a species without unforeseen consequences. When a tiger is the predator, people will make cute stuffed tigers and stickers that say "Save the Tiger" and then the authorities will only decimate the tiger population. Kill most and move a few a safer distance from the edge of the human tide. Protection of endangered species is the institutionalization of decimation in place of elimination. We now take notice when we are close to driving a species to extinction. Our reason is summoned. We can eliminate any species, but we know that we must not exercise this power.

This process does not work exactly the same way with the microbes, the predators who appear to be far more capable than giant monster dragons to do to us what we do to others, over harvest us, kills us so efficiently as to drive us to extinction. Pandemic, plague, incurable disease, Ebola, Pythiosis, devastation and destruction of the human immune system. This too is a science-fiction favorite. The germs from outer space, or the germs created by Dr. Hate Everything. Or, the germs that just naturally evolve on Earth when there is food -- six billion human bodies -- available. This iconic concept was first addressed in a novel entitled Hot Zone, by Richard Preston, 1994, and later stolen and popularized in other books and movies. We know that we can retaliate successfully against any large animal. Although they may take a few individuals, whenever we want, we can take them out entirely, or set them back to being "endangered species." We sometimes decimate animals and plants, we know, by accident. Although, when our teenagers cause damage "by accident" we often point out that they were careless, thoughtless, irresponsible. What a mystery.

We can put our icons in order now, and our concepts, and gaze upon the secret of eternal life. Our species is not threatened by large monsters, but more so by small monsters. Because we have the technology of fire, with mathematics and chemistry, we are victorious over all large monsters. With small monsters, viruses and bacteria and newly discovered entities that behave like a fungus but are not a fungus, or that seem to be even smaller than a virus (a prion?) but capable of invading and changing a cell's structure, we are less than safe at home. Our other technology then, as technological animals, is our micro technology, especially microbiology and bio-chemistry. In order to be able to stop our tiny predators, to retaliate successfully against the micro predators that can kill humans, en mass, far more efficiently than an army of bears or sharks, we must possess totally effective micro-technology. If we know how to prevent the tiny creatures of the world from consuming us, they who are so stealthy and secretive and invisible, we have a chance to survive indefinitely, which means "forever." I learned this from the Great Pyramid, and the Valley of the Kings -- mummies -- that the Pyramid points to. Why did a very wealthy and technologically advanced people, on the banks of the Nile River many centuries past, go to the great effort required to mummify numerous men and women, and cats and dogs, and servants of noble families, and place them in special tombs that were certain to be discovered in the distant future? What have we found in the tombs of the ancient people who were both rich and powerful?

What we find in the ancient tombs are great treasures, gold artifacts that reveal an advanced ability to mine and produce metallic objects, and artistic skill that has not been surpassed anywhere at any time, and such is also found in India and China and Central and South America: treasures that reveal both advanced technology and great artistic skills. We also find writing, meaning written language more than a thousand years before Europeans learned to read and write. We find unquestionable evidence that the persons buried in the ancient tombs were rich and powerful. We focused on this first, the wealth and the power. But with a little more time and refinement of our scientific questions, and technology, we now know that these rich and powerful people were also sick. They had arthritis and other degenerative diseases. And they had not conquered the little predators that threaten us to this day. And therefore this is the hidden message, really only slightly hidden, that I received from the mummies in the ancient tombs. Although we were obviously very rich and very powerful, we were still vulnerable and we knew it. We could still be wiped out, decimated if not eliminated, by disease. How many times have human populations been set back, possibly by centuries or even millennia, by disease. The Maya of Central America and other rich and powerful tribes disappeared so suddenly we cannot offer any theory with certainty as to why they are gone. However, our most convincing theory is famine combined with sudden and devastating disease. This is the secret of eternal life. The last icon we have to revise is the symbol of heaven as a place that is not physical and does not exist in our physical universe but exists in some other level of being, some separate realm or plane of reality that is distinctly different from ours but connected by a thread of spirit or soul. Rather than heaven being this distinctly other place that is not in our physical universe, we have to acknowledge with grim but also comforting finality that we are animals after all. We live in and with the bodies of animals and our genes demonstrate beyond any doubt that we are related to and connected to every plant and animal on our blessed planet Earth. And being animals, it is as animals that we can live forever, and as for the concept of individual salvation, I will only ask how can an individual be saved and the rest of humanity lost? All of the teaching of the ancients and all of modern science tells us that we live or die as the human community. We cannot hate and then be saved by love. We cannot separate ourselves by violent force and then be saved by togetherness. In order for me to live forever I have to want you to live forever and everyone to live forever, and I have to act upon that desire. We cannot save ourselves unless we truly love ourselves, and we cannot truly love ourselves unless we understand, with great precison, exactly what we are.

The New Beginning:

As our micro-technology dramatically improves our understanding of exactly what we are, the end of our past uncertain life transforms into a new life and a new beginning. Knowing that we are safe from below as well as from above, that we can control ourselves at the cellular level as well as we control fire, gives us the hope of eternal life. That is why health care and medicine and food and nutrition are the major and endless topics of discussion for us today, because we are preparing to change our symbols and icons and all of our concepts of who and what we are, based upon the evidence.

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