Have you considered how cultural traditions as the Day of the Dead in Mexico, normalize our relationship with death, make it a part of life, and how that might influence peoples’s view of living life?
Another way humanity is like a cancer is the way our economic operating system is based on compounding interest - nonstop growth without decay. The holders of $ have an unfair advantage over goods and labor, which lose value over time. If we could emulate an ecosystem and incorporate death and decay into the monetary mechanism, it could level the playing field so the holders of money no longer have the unfair advantage. Then we might have a shot at finding balance before it’s all gone. An example is a demurrage (decay) mechanism in money. Here’s a Tedx talk I did on the concept: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s0K65v_V8Sg
Very True - and thanks for the link. I'll watch. Same with spiritual bypassing for "always" being energetically charged with positivity - leaving no room for shadow etc., in turn manifesting neurotically as both late capitalist magical thinking and hyperbolic projections of externalized evil.
your post in the bio is very interesting. evading death is insane. I think that in Europe death is seen as a failure. It is a taboo theme when it should be a recurring theme. I guess whoever is afraid of death is afraid of life. We must stop being a cancer and accept that without death there would be no life. start celebrating it as you say. thanks for the post
Yes - the "re" part of recurring should tell us all we need to know about the need to integrate it into a process of continuation. thanks for the comment.
Death is embedded into our physical bodies, via the food we eat on a daily basis! Think GMO foods.... they are programmed with a terminator gene so they do not reproduce the seed dies! Most people eat foods that have GMO's and on an energetic level, they are ingesting death..... no wonder the depression and suicide rate of our young people growing up on this food has skyrocketed over the last few years. Everything in the Universe is energy & what we put into our bodies on a daily basis matters..... I will be 80 this year & I have been paying attention to the whole person for many years....physical, mental emotional & spiritual .... this is just one issue that we need to go deeper into!
Yes it is! I’m currently reading The Tibetan Book on Death and Dying and this is precisely what it’s about. It dives deep into these concepts. Thanks for another good read, I appreciate the humor too. Much needed! And yes to more celebration and awareness on the beauty and “need” of our mortality!
May 16, 2022·edited May 16, 2022Liked by Alex Ebert
Loved your post, it reminds me of the essay book Death & Sex, by Dorion Sagan and Tyler Volk (highly recommended if you want to expand on the topic). I don't know if this is too farfetched, but I'll share the thought: Will gene editing tech like CRISPR provide prolonged, healthy life spans to the rich, adding an extra layer of discrimination to ageism? It's like, only the poor will look old, and looking old will become a low status marker, and a sign of imminent death, which might become shamed. Death-shaming. Ok, that's a far-fetched idea, but it's in kind of in the same direction. So sad.
Jan 18, 2022·edited Jan 18, 2022Liked by Alex Ebert
A Roman general once wrote: "I am not afraid of death; I just don't want to die."
From a Budhho-Hindu perspective, there is the Body, and the One-Who-Dwells-in-the-Body. The latter is easily equanimous when apoptosis is at hand; while the former screams bloody murder!
Jan 17, 2022·edited Jan 17, 2022Liked by Alex Ebert
Yes this is the truth. We destroy that which we little understand and cannot replace, in denial of our own mortality and the reality of the waste laying destruction we are inflicting upon our only home. We struggle to remain primitive instinctual infants with fun tech toys avoiding our responsibilities to each other and future generations of all species. We have one planet with one fragile atmosphere and one chance at life. In a few hundred years we have undone millions of years of priceless evolutionary treasures. Every death we create through our ignorant abuse and neglect is one more step toward a dead planet. We are still in humanity’s dark ages. Thank you for thinking…-Cynical Misanthropic Fatalist Jeff
Interesting thoughts. I take another perspective on cancer which is that the mutated cell only mutated because it HAD to in order to adapt to a stress of some type. It did so not out of spite or malfunction, but in an attempt to EVOLVE. Evolution is by nature experimental and not all experiments go as planned, and with a cancer cell the experiment did, in fact, go awry. However, the cancer cell's "refusal" to accept programmed cell-death is actually not an active refusal, in my view. It is a result of NATURE'S impulse to continually innovate, evolve, and create. Once the cancer cell is no longer resonant with the body as a whole, it no longer KNOWS apoptosis, which presumes a unified organism interested in some form of self-preservation. It is now on an evolutionary trajectory which we term "malignant", yet it is simply doing what it was instructed to do... CHANGE and ADAPT. And, as we know from cancer research, there is perhaps no cell more adept at transformation and adaptation than the cancer cell.
Sure, and depends on the ethics involved. If "change and adapt" are ends and not means, and meant to apply universally to cells rather than holistically to organs/organisms, then judgement cannot be made of it, and it must be seen as proper evolution. Still, cells "mutate" without being cancerous — by "accepting" apoptosis... So the majority of cells are indeed serving a larger self. It is these rogue cells which suddenly put their own survival ahead of the whole—refusing death—which become the cancer. And so it does feel like a fundamentally different, aberrant operation.
Well, it's like buying an album and only listening to one or two tracks. It could mean literally anything.. Or like buying a calendar and keeping it open to November for 16 years. Thanks for writing this piece.
There are other events headed our way to help relieve consumption preasures ? The baby boomers are aging out the largest demographic age group in North America, the population of the US now in China is over sixty with a billion people exiting the planet over the bext 15 yrs we have an opportunity to structurally change the way we do and think about our fate add the excelerated progress of science we may just be able to turn the tide, and you will have more than enough lives to celebrate in the near future. Also there is a natural tendency for lower birthrates when a species comes under survival stresses, a good start would be to change from a predatory capitalist ideology to one more conducive to responding to climate change and the life threatening behavior of pollution in the air and water, its mind over matter, unless we are silly enough to think it doesn't really matter.
Thank you for saying this!! Yes! I completely agree. I don't need to put my thoughts into words bc you've just said them all! I'm going to get SLAMMED for this and it is NOT that I believe people should have their rights taken in any way but I personally believe that procreation beyond 2-3 children is sad. What kind of future does anyone believe their children's, children will have? And my 25 year old daughter brought that to my attention. She said that if she decides to have a child she will adopt because SHE doesn't see futures for children.....not for long. Ok. I'm ready to be slammed. But thank you for your article. I'm going to share it like a virus! Peace!
Yes, this is a very controversial position, and gets slammed for being malthusian, but the science seems to bear this out - the carrying capacity of earth has been outpaced by human population.
Dear Alex, It has indeed. And it's not just some philosophical "thought" or "prediction." This has been happening to this planet for a long time and there is CONCRETE evidence of that for anyone who desires "proof." We cannot undo what we have done to our planet. Not "our planet", we do not own it and only think we are able to actually "control" ANYTHING on or around it. The planet that we have fortunately lived on and received sustanace to the point of over abundance of what we need to live and we've taken too much from......is now beyond saving. Yes, if we all made DRASTIC CHANGES to the way we live we can put PLANET EARTH on life support. So we can have it, just a little longer but humankind only seems to be "single minded" as to the reality of the situation in a microscopic speck of our population. The dominance of the mindset of humankind is that we "deserve" MORE! My heart has been so completely broken about this for so very long now. To quote Dr. Angela Davis, author of "Of Women, Race and Class" she said "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." This does not mean "I" can change the world. Only "I" can change my "human experience." I have the power to change things I cannot accept but I only have this "power" to actually "change" MY experience by MY actions. Being at peace with all you could and did do, in your own life. No one else's. Just yours. We're born alone we die alone. Let's accept death as a natural part of our own lives. We can share our "Good News" with a million people but that doesn't mean we can "change" their minds. I believe like-minded individuals like me, who agree in whole or in a large part, with what I've just written here. "WE" can gather in mass quantities and CHANGE our "individual" experiences, TOGETHER, if that makes sense. And by "experiences" I include all of the people that pass by or stay in our lives. The things "we" or "I" do to change what "we" or "I" can't accept. How we live....everything that encompasses "Our experience", "my experience" is actually only "our life"....."My life" and then peacefully accepting our imminent death. The end of our "human" experience. Who knows what else may or may not await us? It is part of our growth. Each of the following are "experiences" or different parts of our lives in which our physical "human" form goes through a major change. From infant to toddler to child to teenager to young adult to adult to older adult to elderly to ashes to ashes and dust to dust. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Peace, Angie
I think the ideas you presented echo beautifully the feminine heroic ideals of Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky). Thank you for this piece.
Have you considered how cultural traditions as the Day of the Dead in Mexico, normalize our relationship with death, make it a part of life, and how that might influence peoples’s view of living life?
Another way humanity is like a cancer is the way our economic operating system is based on compounding interest - nonstop growth without decay. The holders of $ have an unfair advantage over goods and labor, which lose value over time. If we could emulate an ecosystem and incorporate death and decay into the monetary mechanism, it could level the playing field so the holders of money no longer have the unfair advantage. Then we might have a shot at finding balance before it’s all gone. An example is a demurrage (decay) mechanism in money. Here’s a Tedx talk I did on the concept: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s0K65v_V8Sg
Very True - and thanks for the link. I'll watch. Same with spiritual bypassing for "always" being energetically charged with positivity - leaving no room for shadow etc., in turn manifesting neurotically as both late capitalist magical thinking and hyperbolic projections of externalized evil.
You never see a U-Haul following a hearse.....
your post in the bio is very interesting. evading death is insane. I think that in Europe death is seen as a failure. It is a taboo theme when it should be a recurring theme. I guess whoever is afraid of death is afraid of life. We must stop being a cancer and accept that without death there would be no life. start celebrating it as you say. thanks for the post
Yes - the "re" part of recurring should tell us all we need to know about the need to integrate it into a process of continuation. thanks for the comment.
Death is embedded into our physical bodies, via the food we eat on a daily basis! Think GMO foods.... they are programmed with a terminator gene so they do not reproduce the seed dies! Most people eat foods that have GMO's and on an energetic level, they are ingesting death..... no wonder the depression and suicide rate of our young people growing up on this food has skyrocketed over the last few years. Everything in the Universe is energy & what we put into our bodies on a daily basis matters..... I will be 80 this year & I have been paying attention to the whole person for many years....physical, mental emotional & spiritual .... this is just one issue that we need to go deeper into!
Thanks for this reflection. I find the notion of the energetic transfer from gmo powerful.
Yes it is! I’m currently reading The Tibetan Book on Death and Dying and this is precisely what it’s about. It dives deep into these concepts. Thanks for another good read, I appreciate the humor too. Much needed! And yes to more celebration and awareness on the beauty and “need” of our mortality!
Loved your post, it reminds me of the essay book Death & Sex, by Dorion Sagan and Tyler Volk (highly recommended if you want to expand on the topic). I don't know if this is too farfetched, but I'll share the thought: Will gene editing tech like CRISPR provide prolonged, healthy life spans to the rich, adding an extra layer of discrimination to ageism? It's like, only the poor will look old, and looking old will become a low status marker, and a sign of imminent death, which might become shamed. Death-shaming. Ok, that's a far-fetched idea, but it's in kind of in the same direction. So sad.
A Roman general once wrote: "I am not afraid of death; I just don't want to die."
From a Budhho-Hindu perspective, there is the Body, and the One-Who-Dwells-in-the-Body. The latter is easily equanimous when apoptosis is at hand; while the former screams bloody murder!
Yes this is the truth. We destroy that which we little understand and cannot replace, in denial of our own mortality and the reality of the waste laying destruction we are inflicting upon our only home. We struggle to remain primitive instinctual infants with fun tech toys avoiding our responsibilities to each other and future generations of all species. We have one planet with one fragile atmosphere and one chance at life. In a few hundred years we have undone millions of years of priceless evolutionary treasures. Every death we create through our ignorant abuse and neglect is one more step toward a dead planet. We are still in humanity’s dark ages. Thank you for thinking…-Cynical Misanthropic Fatalist Jeff
Interesting thoughts. I take another perspective on cancer which is that the mutated cell only mutated because it HAD to in order to adapt to a stress of some type. It did so not out of spite or malfunction, but in an attempt to EVOLVE. Evolution is by nature experimental and not all experiments go as planned, and with a cancer cell the experiment did, in fact, go awry. However, the cancer cell's "refusal" to accept programmed cell-death is actually not an active refusal, in my view. It is a result of NATURE'S impulse to continually innovate, evolve, and create. Once the cancer cell is no longer resonant with the body as a whole, it no longer KNOWS apoptosis, which presumes a unified organism interested in some form of self-preservation. It is now on an evolutionary trajectory which we term "malignant", yet it is simply doing what it was instructed to do... CHANGE and ADAPT. And, as we know from cancer research, there is perhaps no cell more adept at transformation and adaptation than the cancer cell.
Sure, and depends on the ethics involved. If "change and adapt" are ends and not means, and meant to apply universally to cells rather than holistically to organs/organisms, then judgement cannot be made of it, and it must be seen as proper evolution. Still, cells "mutate" without being cancerous — by "accepting" apoptosis... So the majority of cells are indeed serving a larger self. It is these rogue cells which suddenly put their own survival ahead of the whole—refusing death—which become the cancer. And so it does feel like a fundamentally different, aberrant operation.
Well, it's like buying an album and only listening to one or two tracks. It could mean literally anything.. Or like buying a calendar and keeping it open to November for 16 years. Thanks for writing this piece.
There are other events headed our way to help relieve consumption preasures ? The baby boomers are aging out the largest demographic age group in North America, the population of the US now in China is over sixty with a billion people exiting the planet over the bext 15 yrs we have an opportunity to structurally change the way we do and think about our fate add the excelerated progress of science we may just be able to turn the tide, and you will have more than enough lives to celebrate in the near future. Also there is a natural tendency for lower birthrates when a species comes under survival stresses, a good start would be to change from a predatory capitalist ideology to one more conducive to responding to climate change and the life threatening behavior of pollution in the air and water, its mind over matter, unless we are silly enough to think it doesn't really matter.
I’ll go with yes....
ha
Thank you for saying this!! Yes! I completely agree. I don't need to put my thoughts into words bc you've just said them all! I'm going to get SLAMMED for this and it is NOT that I believe people should have their rights taken in any way but I personally believe that procreation beyond 2-3 children is sad. What kind of future does anyone believe their children's, children will have? And my 25 year old daughter brought that to my attention. She said that if she decides to have a child she will adopt because SHE doesn't see futures for children.....not for long. Ok. I'm ready to be slammed. But thank you for your article. I'm going to share it like a virus! Peace!
Yes, this is a very controversial position, and gets slammed for being malthusian, but the science seems to bear this out - the carrying capacity of earth has been outpaced by human population.
Dear Alex, It has indeed. And it's not just some philosophical "thought" or "prediction." This has been happening to this planet for a long time and there is CONCRETE evidence of that for anyone who desires "proof." We cannot undo what we have done to our planet. Not "our planet", we do not own it and only think we are able to actually "control" ANYTHING on or around it. The planet that we have fortunately lived on and received sustanace to the point of over abundance of what we need to live and we've taken too much from......is now beyond saving. Yes, if we all made DRASTIC CHANGES to the way we live we can put PLANET EARTH on life support. So we can have it, just a little longer but humankind only seems to be "single minded" as to the reality of the situation in a microscopic speck of our population. The dominance of the mindset of humankind is that we "deserve" MORE! My heart has been so completely broken about this for so very long now. To quote Dr. Angela Davis, author of "Of Women, Race and Class" she said "I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept." This does not mean "I" can change the world. Only "I" can change my "human experience." I have the power to change things I cannot accept but I only have this "power" to actually "change" MY experience by MY actions. Being at peace with all you could and did do, in your own life. No one else's. Just yours. We're born alone we die alone. Let's accept death as a natural part of our own lives. We can share our "Good News" with a million people but that doesn't mean we can "change" their minds. I believe like-minded individuals like me, who agree in whole or in a large part, with what I've just written here. "WE" can gather in mass quantities and CHANGE our "individual" experiences, TOGETHER, if that makes sense. And by "experiences" I include all of the people that pass by or stay in our lives. The things "we" or "I" do to change what "we" or "I" can't accept. How we live....everything that encompasses "Our experience", "my experience" is actually only "our life"....."My life" and then peacefully accepting our imminent death. The end of our "human" experience. Who knows what else may or may not await us? It is part of our growth. Each of the following are "experiences" or different parts of our lives in which our physical "human" form goes through a major change. From infant to toddler to child to teenager to young adult to adult to older adult to elderly to ashes to ashes and dust to dust. "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Peace, Angie
I think the ideas you presented echo beautifully the feminine heroic ideals of Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky). Thank you for this piece.