We all scatter. Only death brings us together, which means there is no parting.
There is a huge meeting.
So someone suddenly
hugs the shoulders in the dark, and full of darkness
and full of darkness and peace, we all stand together over a cold, shiny river. - Joseph Brodsky.
An essential aspect of the vision announced by modern forerunners of the future, in particular by technological transhumanists, is the ideology of victory over death.1 Transhumanists strive to overcome the material and biological limitations facing humans, mainly hoping for a radical improvement of the technologies available to mankind. The triumph over death and old age is an important component not only of transhumanist thought, expressed in the works of socially active futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, but also of a very pragmatic advanced scientific and medical agenda.
Promotional video:
Death has dominated humanity and the biosphere throughout the history of the world known to us. And now modern scientific and technological advances in the field of medicine and related fields, according to the forecasts of futurologists, will allow in the near future literally - and not metaphysically, or allegorically, or mystically - to trample death. Trample, at least, death due to old age and disease.
The optimistic scenario outlined by futurologists consists in a radical transformation of biological organisms of our species by technological means, the creation of cybernetic hybrid organismic environments, and even a hypothetical transfer of consciousness to silicon carriers. On a global scale, this (at least in the rosy ideas of some futurists) will be accompanied by the transformation of the material environment, the emergence of (post) human civilization into the galactic expanses, the creation of a galactic federation and, possibly, a meeting with other intelligent life forms.
The slogan in the illustration: The victory of transhumanism is inevitable.
Unless, of course, before that our planetary civilization has not been swept away by some mega-catastrophe, including a man-made one (the likelihood of a nuclear war has not been canceled, but we are also talking about nanorobots who have gone crazy and turned against the biosphere - some kind of smart dust that will devour humanity - or scenarios Skynet or "Animatrix", when some powerful artificial intelligence leads to the destruction or enslavement of people, or an apocalyptic release of deadly microbiological weapons of mass destruction; in general, as social critics less optimistic about the future say, a great many things can "go wrong") …
However, let's say a planetary catastrophe won't happen in the near future. For several decades, new medical technologies will radically (and potentially, indefinitely) extend human life and make it as comfortable as possible. Trampling on death has become an almost religious grail that research teams have rushed in search of, probably in every major country in the world.3
With all this trend, it is not the global apocalypse or anything else that worries me personally. Ultimately, the apocalypse is always approaching (be it positive or negative), whether it comes or not, no one knows, and it seems that it does not particularly interfere with living. However, as I don the cowboy hat of a non-professional futurist, or at least a forecaster, I see one problem over and over over the last few years that I don't think is usually talked about.
This problem is often ignored, since, as a rule, neither technological transhumanists, nor, even more so, the so-called “commoners” immersed in a more mundane consensus reality, pay special attention to the complex inner realities of consciousness and culture. Usually, their reasoning is limited almost exclusively to the world of external objects and systems of material or, at best, informational interchange. And the problem I'm talking about here is the problem of death as a multidimensional phenomenon of human life, which has not only biological, but also psychological and spiritual facets.
This problem, in my opinion, has a radical and pervasive character. And it is connected with the fact that with an insufficiently balanced approach that does not take into account all facets of human existence (quadrants and other components of Ken Wilber's integral AQAL matrix) approach to life extension and related socio-cultural transformations, death will be trampled on only materially, but human consciousness will remain in her hostages psychologically and spiritually.
Human civilization is known for its repression and obsessive fear of death. Everyone is scared, and I am no exception. The death or termination of subjective life in the current organism is projected onto all sorts of processes, both internal and external, which are alarmingly blocked by consciousness in its unwillingness to cross the border of the unknown, to totally transgress the status quo. Any unknown potentially becomes a veil, or black mirror, onto which the mentally produced premonition of death is projected.
At the same time, many who work in psychological, psychotherapeutic and psychospiritual paradigms know that death is not only a foe, but also an ally. Any act of transcendence, or transcendence, transgression of the limitations of consciousness in terms of its states or structures (as well as way of life, everyday life, and even eating patterns) can be accompanied by a premonition of psychological death. Often a person stumbles on the edge of the seeming abyss of the unknown for a long time before deciding to surrender himself into the hands of psychospiritual death, which usually leads to rebirth in a new form. In order to germinate, the grain dies, undergoes a metamorphosis, and a new psychological structure is born that allows embracing something deeper and previously unknown in the psyche of the individual and the collective field inextricably linked with it. What seemed like deathon the other side of the process of psychological dying-rebirth, it becomes a disidentification and a gate without a gate, freeing the psychic being of a person from the superficial.
When humanity on a mass scale is faced with the elimination of physical death, the psychological and semantic component that is associated with death-transcendence may be redirected and re-projected onto something else. For example, the inner frontier with its many limits. Moreover, not having to die physically will give rise to an entirely new condition of life. A condition in which, within the framework of comfort, the question of allowing psychological death-rebirth can be complicated many times over. The provision that two deaths will never happen, one cannot be avoided, and the horror of the unknown, of that veil that has now become unattainable, may not disappear, but rather intensify a thousandfold.finding themselves sewn into the very fabric of social and cultural life (and already quite poorly coping with pressing existential issues).
Imagine the grief of a parent who has lost a child. There is some consolation in humbly accepting death as a natural aspect of life and turning to the inner depths. Now imagine the grief of an immortally living (but not necessarily psychologically mature and wise) parent who is terribly afraid of losing a child not even just in an accident (for example, in a technologically advanced civilization, he is afraid that he will fall on a spaceship in the sun or black hole), and in the psychological sense - as an object of selfhood, or self-object, to which the individual consciousness of the parent has become attached at the level of deep psychological attachment, saturated with millennia of life. The stakes are increasing tremendously.
Perhaps such a turn with alienation from internal meanings and the facets of death will not happen, but seeing the difficulties that the modern Western society of consumption and materialism is already systematically facing, there is every reason for fears and calls for taking action to develop more optimistic, wise, balanced and harmonious scenarios of the posthumanistic future. Scenarios in which the complex realities of psychological life are taken into account and perceived holistically.
Integral futurist Jennifer Gidley, in her book The Future, warns of the problem of dehumanizing transhumanism, which must be opposed with a holistic vision of the future potentials of posthumanity:
Liberation from lesser sub-egoic and egoic identifications, liberation from restrictive identifications with various layers-structures of reason and mind (as well as many other things) requires the subject to continue his evolutionary development. This requires a qualitative transcendence, or death-dying for these identifications lying in the domain of the already known. Then the unknown expands the subject and reveals a new world space through this evolutionary expansion.
In the process of the same psychotherapeutic transformation, a person often projects fear of death onto such a transcendence. What is usually terrible about death, more precisely the thought of death or the alarming premonition of death? Pain, collision with the unknown, symbolic containment of everything negative, repressed by consciousness away from awareness.
Death serves as an important background, shading the radicalism of our presence here-and-now, that fragile beauty of the present moment, which is unstoppable and lost in the flow of time. Sakura blossom. The uniqueness of the moment in spite of all (pre) egoic fantasies about grandiose omnipotence. Death also serves as a great limit beyond which, as traditional spiritual views believe, potentially lurks a great immortality, gained through the essential recognition of the truth of life. Immortality is not in time and space, but in reunification with the eternal, timeless and extradimensional principle. The substance of the universe, the heart of the Cosmos, the conscious basis of Being. Immortality in a biological organism, which means in time and space - that is, an endlessly lasting extension of life - does not contradict this transcendental immortality,but it is something incommensurably smaller, a part of the dream from which - and in which - you need to awaken.
How can a person cope with the task and understand the deep streams of his soul, his multidimensional and multilevel, fluctuating consciousness, so that trampling on physical death does not become an expression of the repression of death-as-transcendence, does not serve as a tool that prevents death-rebirth, does not fetter us yet more by the shackles of the material and hypersimulation, did not make us prisoners of the collectively alienated dimension of death-as-a-gift?
Will the man of the future be able to use this newly emerging possibility of infinitely prolonged life in such a way as not to collapse into a purely materialistic epistemological and ontological system of coordinates, or a descending matrix (as Wilber calls it in A Brief History of Everything 5), but to direct the freed up time to the truly essential the transformation of consciousness and culture, the internally experienced fabric of life in this amazingly mysterious and hiding precious secret of the Cosmos? If we fail, then death can become a luxury, a rare jewel that not everyone can afford.
In order to respond constructively to the challenges that threaten us (in no way limited to the problem discussed in this essay), it is extremely important in our evolution to keep up with scientific and technological progress, but to bridge the gap between technology and the depth and embodiment available (at least to the avant-garde) consciousness. It is important to promote the emergence, preservation and penetration of the ways and trajectories of growth and development of consciousness, transcendence and gradual liberation from identification with lesser forms of self-awareness, participation in the emergent creation of our individual and collective evolution on the basis of deep wisdom and compassion into the common human culture.
Evgeny Pustoshkin
