Everything Is Perfection in Golden Eternity

Reflections on failure, futility, death, rebirth

Jack Kerouac

All human existence is a story of failure. Even those who enjoy the most successful careers plus wealth plus beautifully charmed love stories will decay with age, or find some other avenue to eventual bucket-kicking. When you are young, death seems a very distant concept. Life stretches ahead with a quasi-infinite vastness. As you get older and people you know — celebrities, older family members — start to drop off, your own approaching encounter with oblivion starts to feel more plausible, if still intangible and very unlikely.

So much of modern civilization is based on the fear and rejection of death. This is largely because of the materialist worldview which can’t allow for any possibility of transcendence. But materialism is an obsolete ideology. Monistic or analytic idealism makes so much more sense.

My mother now approaches ninety. Her field of human connection has narrowed greatly as many friends and even old enemies give up the ghost. If we still lived like indigenous people, the village children would gather round her each evening to hear the stories from the vanishing past. In this society, sadly, our bonds of intergenerational care and connection are largely severed. Reaching great age is like its own form of marathon or extreme sport; I am not sure it is for everybody.

Some lessons I learned: Human nature is very malleable and human life is very fragile. I suppose, in some twisted and insane sense, there is a strain of Luciferic punk-rock rebellious nobility in the efforts underway by the NxReactionary tech elite to secure immortal life for themselves and their coterie, through some fusion of synthetic intelligence and biology. They hold the idea that the goal of human existence is to become like gods, impervious to suffering and beyond the taint of failure. I suspect their hubris will cause their downfall, in some appropriately mythic way.

Illuminati hand sign

My issue is not with their quest — I admit I wouldn’t mind another fifty years to work out my own destiny — but with the exploitative means they employ to pursue it, bringing so much destruction to cultures, populations, and the planet itself. The Illuminati ideology is based on the amoral proposition that the ends justify the means. From my ethical humanist anarchist perspective, I believe the opposite: The means are the ends. The personality that gets formed from the pursuit of instrumental power at all costs will be permanently diseased and distorted by the cruel, deceptive means they have used to attain it. That being’s continuity in an a-mortal body can only deepen its own short-sighted ignorance, grasping, and unhappiness.

In my opinion, a core group of humans who face the threshold of mortality accurately are Buddhist adepts like those Tibetan monks who meditate for thirty years and attain Tukdam at death, able to maintain their undecayed bodies while in a subtle state of consciousness for several weeks. During this time, they explore bardo realms, choosing their next incarnation. They manage to transcend the failure and futility of the ordinary human condition by connecting with the transcendental vertical of primordial awareness — pure consciousness — recognizing the individual self as an illusion.

According to Buddhist teachings, we lack a fixed, permanent, personal self.