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    Alternatives to Involuntary Death
    Alternatives to Involuntary Death
    Alternatives to Involuntary Death
    Ebook142 pages2 hours

    Alternatives to Involuntary Death

    By Timothy Leary

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    About this ebook

    Death is increasingly on the agenda for baby boomers moving ever closer to it. Timothy Leary brings some startlingly fresh ideas to this topic.

    Fundamentally, he claims, we have been brainwashed by our institutions government, organized religion, the healthcare industry to accept death as an inevitable end. Leary argues instead that death is misunderstood, that we don't have to die, and that there are "commonsense alternatives." His theory rests on the transhumanist approach that says human beings are evolving into spiritual machines beings that are part human and part machine and eventually will not die as the term is commonly understood. Being fitted with machine parts like bionic knees is part of this process. And as we evolve through the cybernetic age, he says, we will gain new wisdom that broadens our definition of personal immortality and gene-pool survival the "postbiologic option of the information species."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRonin Publishing
    Release dateApr 1, 2009
    ISBN9781579510961
    Alternatives to Involuntary Death

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      Book preview

      Alternatives to Involuntary Death - Timothy Leary

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

      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:

      Fornicator—Chank Diesel

      Goudy Old Style—URW Software

      Zekton—Ray 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

      Let’s 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 Don’t 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

      1. The Dying Process

      2. Factory Assembly Line Death

      3. Re-Creational Dying

      4. Demystify Dying

      5. Achieving Immortality

      6. Re-Creational Alternatives to Involuntary Irreversible Metabolic Coma

      7. Life Extension Diet

      8. Lifestyle

      9. Somatic-Neural-Genetic Preservation

      10. Electronic Immortality

      11. Brain-Computer Transfer

      12. Re-Creational Reprogramming

      13. Mummification

      14. Voluntary Dying

      15. Cloning

      16. Pre-Mortem Hibernation

      17. Celebrating Andy

      18. Timothy Leary’s 23 Skidoo

      Author Bio

      Ronin Books-for-Independent-Minds

      Death is life’s greatest event.

      —TIMOTHY LEARY

      1

      The Dying Process

      Most 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 one’s life are ennobling. We’ve been schooled and counseled—programmed to act out life scripts based on our worst tendencies toward fear and self-doubt.

      I’ve been looking forward to dying all my life. Dying is the most fascinating experience in life. You’ve got to approach dying the way you live your life—with 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. Pascal’s famous no-lose wager about the existence of God translates into modern life as a no-risk gamble on the prowess of technology.

      Pascal’s 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 barometer—an early calculator, as well as contributing to the development of modern probability theory.

      Pascal’s 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 God’s 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. Let’s 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. D—the 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 management—those in social control of the various gene pools—has 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

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