Leary - Alternatives to Involuntary Death

The cybernetic age offers a fascinating set of consumer choices suddenly appear on the pop-up menu of The Evolutionary Caf.

Alternatives to Involuntary Death

Copyright 2009: The Futique Trust & Beverly A. Potter

ISBN: 978-1-57951-096-1

Published by

Ronin Publishing, Inc.

PO Box 22900

Oakland, CA 94609

www.roninpub.com

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or translating into another language, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the author or the publisher, except for inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Production:

Fonts:

FornicatorChank Diesel

Goudy Old StyleURW Software

ZektonRay Larabie

Library of Congress Card Number: 2008942193

Distributed to the book trade by PGW/Perseus

Derived in part from Chaos & Cyber Culture with additional content prepared by Beverly Potter

Lets be bold about opening up a broad spectrum of Club-Med post-biologic possibilities of re-creational dying.

If you expect to be death when you die, you will be disappointed.

PMH ATWATER

You Dont Die

Ronin Books for Independent minds

by Timothy Leary

High Priest

Chaos & Cyber Culture

The Politics of Ecstasy

Psychedelic Prayers

Change Your Brain

The Politics of Self-Determination

Start Your Own Religion

Your Brain Is God

Turn On Tune In Drop Out

Musings on Human Metamorphoses

Evolutionary Agents

The Politics of PsychoPharmacology

The Fugitive Philosopher

CyberPunks CyberFreedom

Table of Contents

Death is lifes greatest event.

TIMOTHY LEARY

M ost human beings face death with an attitude of helplessness, either resigned or fearful. Neither of these submissive, uninformed angles of approach to the most crucial event of ones life are ennobling. Weve been schooled and counseledprogrammed to act out life scripts based on our worst tendencies toward fear and self-doubt.

Ive been looking forward to dying all my life. Dying is the most fascinating experience in life. Youve got to approach dying the way you live your lifewith curiosity, hope, experimentation, and with the help of your friends.

TIMOTHY LEARY

Design for Dying

There are many practical options and methods available for navigating the dying process. Passivity, failure to learn about them, might be the ultimate irretrievable blunder. Pascals famous no-lose wager about the existence of God translates into modern life as a no-risk gamble on the prowess of technology.

Pascals Wager

Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, theologian, mathematician and physicist with significant contributions to science. He invented the syringe and helped to create the barometeran early calculator, as well as contributing to the development of modern probability theory.

Pascals Wager is a pragmatic rather than an evidential argument for belief in God. The argument presupposes an agnosticism, which is the view that it is impossible to either prove or disprove Gods existence.

The theistic tradition holds that our ability to comprehend God is limited because our concepts are derived from our experiences, and our experiences are of flawed and finite existence. Thus we lack the conceptual tools necessary to understand what God is really like.

Pascal argued that because we are unable to determine by reason whether or not God exists, we should base our belief on self-interest. We should play it safe by believing in God and living out a Christian life.

Submission to Authority

For millennia the fear of death has depreciated individual confidence and increased dependence on authority.

True, the loyal members of a familial or racial gene pool can take pride in the successes and survival tenacity of their kinship. For example, around the year 1600, at the height of the obedient, feudal stage Chinese philosopher, Li Zhi, wrote a revealing essay outlining five ways to die.

Five Ways to Die

1. Death for a worthy cause;

2. Death in battle;

3. Death as a martyr;

4. Death as a loyal minister, unjustly attacked;

5. Premature death after finishing some good piece of work.

Thus we see that the aim of the good life was one of submission to authority. If your life was dedicated to serving the gene pool, then, logically, your death is the final, crowning sacrifice of your individuality

Instead of treating the last act in your life in terms of fear, weakness, and helplessness, think of it as a triumphant graduation.

TIMOTHY LEARY

Design for Dying

But for the humanist who believes in the sanctity of the individual, these traditional prospects are less than exalted. Lets be honest here. How can you be proud of your past achievements, walk tall in the present, or zap enthusiastically into the future if, awaiting you implacably around some future corner, is Old Mr. Dthe Grim Reaper?

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

VLADIMIR NOBOKOV

What a PR job the wordmakers did to build this death concept into a primetime horror show! The Grave. Mortification. Extinction. Breakdown. Catastrophe. Doom. Finish. Fatality. Malignancy. Necrology. Obituary. The End.

Note the calculated negativity. To die is to croak, to give up the ghost, to bite the dust, to kick the bucket, to perish. To become inanimate, lifeless, defunct, extinct, moribund, cadaverous, necrotic. A corpse, a stiff, a cadaver, a relic, food for worms, a corpus delecti, a carcass. What a miserable ending to the game of life!

Being born is not a crime, so why must it carry a sentence of death?

ROBERT ETTINGER

Fear of Death

In the past, the reflexive genetic duty of top managementthose in social control of the various gene poolshas been to make humans feel weak, helpless, and dependent in the face of death. The good of the race or nation has ensured at the cost of the sacrifice of the individual.

To fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not; for it is to think one knows what one does not know. No man knows whether death may not even turn out to be the greater of blessings for a human being, and yet people fear it as if they knew for certain that it is the greatest of evils.