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Moshe-Mordechai van Zuiden
Psychology, Medicine, Science, Politics, Oppression, Integrity, Philosophy, Jews -- For those who like their news and truths frank and sharp

No More Death

Utopia could become Reality

I’m making three points about in the future humans not dying anymore:

1. I will present a roadmap on how to get to physical immortality.
2. Adopting this aim will require us to stop the worst things we’re doing.
3. A side result of this one goal will be a perfect world without hatred.

A return to paradise on earth, including to physical immortality, may not come from a supernatural miracle one day mysteriously descending upon us or from finding one or several magic potions. Neither from a flight of wishful thinking born from our fear of death. Rather, it may be the result of hard and persistent planning and work, as I will now detail.

Some religious thinkers would object that G^d should effectuate such a thing. I suggest that He’s waiting for us (or He could’ve done it yesterday).

Most science fiction is far too near-sighted, not far-sighted enough. It’s still full of primordial aggression and addiction and ugliness. But a vision of perfection could become reality really not so long from now.

The best reason for striving for physical immortality is that it’s an inborn potential that we should stop ruining — not just because we’d hate to die.

A Proper Perspective Reassures and Heals

When humankind arrives at its final destination, even the horrors of the past will become less horrible. They will be seen as stages we needed to go through to get to universal peace and goodness on earth.

We will understand why physical death once was needed. We used to get sick and age and if we wouldn’t have died, later generations would have been so overburdened with taking care of the elders that no time or energy would have been left to take care of, raise and save the kids. And humans are born relatively helpless to allow parents to have their (good) influence on them for years. (Just like the world awaits our stewardship.)

We will be so grateful for having arrived at a stage of no one dying anymore and we would have great honor and respect for all those who lived before us and got us there.

The Nature of Dangers to Our Survival Has Changed

It used to be that threats to our immortality mostly came from outside. Dangerous animals, famines, colds, microbes, etc.

But now, the endurance of our species is mostly threatened by ourselves. Climate change, destruction of the environment, war, greed, etc.

These challenges may be sturdier but they are also more directly under our control — as soon as we master to control and behave ourselves.

If we’d move to other planets, who knows if we could survive the different radiation, gravity, night-day cycle, etc. But for sure we should be able to learn to live with ourselves and each other in peace and harmony, to the benefit of everyone on this planet. And clean up the mess we made.

Surpassing Blind Nature

At first, Nature dictated that we should get to know as many microorganisms as possible because, in the distant past, our DNA and our cells were enriched by some of them. How could our bodies at any time close the door to such golden opportunities for any further enrichment?

But, we’ll get to a stage that we could make any improvements of our bodies in the lab without going through the costly process of everyone getting sick, hardly ever giving us better bodies but costing many lives.

Discovering and creating artificial antibiotics was a good step in human history but much better was when they made our cells impenetrable to microbes. Enough was enough. And too much plenty. Nature’s experiment with our cells was over.

Next Stages Leading up to Physical Immortality

Then we should find out how to stop and prevent all cancers and autoimmune disease. It would be worth all the time, effort, and money.

Next will be the campaign against wear and tear and aging. We stopped it. And then we would learn to reverse it.

Then we’d employ emergency stations all over the planet. As soon as someone would get hurt, an enormous apparatus would come into action to get them back to health. The number of ingenious tricks will be sheer limitless and to repair almost any hurt. That will cut back on death too.

The next challenge would be to help everyone so that we wouldn’t hurt ourselves anymore. Real nutrition and rest and an alternative to any addiction that would solve the underlying unhappiness. People learned to clean up their brains better than any baby ever was allowed to. We cried and laughed, shivered and perspired, stretched and yawned until we had no distress in our memories left. We got out of it so much happiness, energy, unity, and wisdom.

Sophisticated lab work might make us able to biosynthesize all vitamins and other essential molecules. Chlorophyll in our skin cells could make it unnecessary to eat. Like trees, we’d only need water and minerals.

The Last Stage was the Toughest

And then would come the fight against the greatest killer of all times: inter-human aggression. That won’t be so simple to stop. Millennia of hatred and negativity need to be cornered and ended — even just to enable healing.

The whole fallacy of “it’s us or them” must be replaced by “what is really good for anyone is good for everyone.” We’d need to clean up the planet to make it hospitable again. It’ll take time; and many lives.

Important is to stop hurting children, to stop hurting each other and to stop hurting ourselves. Discovering a simple therapy to heal all emotional hurt should help, when applied constantly by more and more people.

If the End is Well, All is Well

But we’ll get there. Especially those who always thought so. The best peace on earth that we could have wanted will be. Not just quietness and friendliness; we’ll become physically immortal. We’ll earn all the time to get to know everyone and everything that we wanted. The religious will feel good because they always had predicted a return to paradise; and the humanists felt good because they always had put their trust in people.

True, after some global discussion, we all decided not to have children anymore. To past generations that would have sounded like a tremendous loss. What they didn’t know is that in a way, we all had become like children again: easy and lovely to connect to and love. We lost nothing but death and aging itself.

Looking Back to the Future

What had been crucial was the early recognition that death itself was the enemy. That whatever stopped our fight for physical immortality had to be defeated. And that is the message I give us all today. Let us fight for paradise on earth for all. That will give us direction: to stop hatred and war, egotism and jealousy, exploitation and bossing people around, addictions and self-neglect, arrogance and servility, us-vs-them thinking, etc.

What also will help not to give up is to understand that the road to paradise would alternate between uphill and downhill tracks. For some reason, sometimes things will really progress and sometimes will standstill or even regress. Anyway, it’s important to persist because the end will be well.

There was a time that most people had died by 30, then 40, then 50, then 70, then 90, then 110 and who knows if we live already in a time in which there people alive today who will never die!

Hope to see you in the world where no one dies anymore! Let’s work for it.

***

The above is greatly inspired by the pamphlet Is Death Necessary? from Harvey Jackins. He dared to question what most take for granted. (Though not me ever.) Not to flee a fear of death but rather to confront hopelessness that seems overblown and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He made a clear distinction between the apparent uselessness of human death and our inability to reach physical immortality yet. Fifty years on, physicians of renown are working on ending all illness. A next step is clearly to stop and reverse aging. (I’m preparing a big book about it.)

————

This is the last of three blog posts in honor of the 20th anniversary, July 12, of the death of the greatest person I ever met, Harvey Jackins.

I gladly refer you to three inspirational websites that talk about his work:
The official website: https://www.rc.org/
An official site for beginners/outsiders: http://reevaluationcounseling.org/
An alternative critical website: https://dearestharvey.wordpress.com/

About the Author
MM is a prolific and creative writer and thinker, an almost daily blog contributor to the Times of Israel, and previously, for decades, he was known to the Jerusalem Post readers as a frequent letter writer. He often makes his readers laugh, mad, or assume he's nuts—close to perfect blogging. He's proud that his analytical short comments are removed both from left-wing and right-wing news sites. * As a frontier thinker, he sees things many don't yet. He's half a prophet. Half. Let's not exaggerate. He doesn't believe that people observe and think in a vacuum. He, therefore, wanted a broad bio that readers interested can track a bit about what (lack of) backgrounds, experiences, and education contribute to his visions. * If you don't know the Dutch, get an American peek behind the scenes here: https://youtu.be/QMPp6h6r72M * To find less-recent posts on subject XXX among his over 1600 archived ones, go to the right-top corner of a Times of Israel page, click on the search icon and search "zuiden, XXX". One can find a second, wilder blog, to which one may subscribe, here: https://mmvanzuiden.wordpress.com/. * Like most of his readers, he believes in being friendly, respectful, and loyal. Yet, if you think those are his absolute top priorities, you might end up disappointed. His first loyalty is to the truth. He will try to stay within the limits of democratic and Jewish law, but he won't lie to support opinions or people who don't deserve that. He admits that he sometimes exaggerates to make a point, which could have him come across as nasty, while in actuality, he's quite a lovely person to interact with. He holds - how Dutch - that a strong opinion doesn't imply intolerance of other views. * Sometimes he's misunderstood because his wide and diverse field of vision seldomly fits any specialist's box. But that's exactly what some love about him. He has written a lot about Psychology (including Sexuality and Abuse), Medicine (including physical immortality), Science (including basic statistics), Politics (Israel, the US, and the Netherlands, Activism), Oppression and Liberation (intersectionally, for young people, the elderly, non-Whites, women, workers, Jews, LGBTQIA+, foreigners and anyone else who's dehumanized or exploited), Integrity, Philosophy, Jews (Judaism, Zionism, Holocaust, and Jewish Liberation), the Climate Crisis, Ecology and Veganism, Affairs from the news, or the Torah Portion of the Week, or new insights that suddenly befell him. * His most influential teachers (chronologically) are his parents, Nico (natan) van Zuiden and Betty (beisye) Nieweg, Wim Kan, Mozart, Harvey Jackins, Marshal Rosenberg, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and, lehavdil bein chayim lechayim, Rabbi Dr. Natan Lopes Cardozo, Rav Zev Leff, and Rav Meir Lubin. * One of his rabbis calls him Mr. Innovation [Ish haChidushim]. Yet, his originalities seem to root deeply in traditional Judaism, though they may grow in unexpected directions. In fact, he claims he's modernizing nothing. Rather, mainly basing himself on the basic Hebrew Torah text, he tries to rediscover classical Jewish thought almost lost in thousands of years of stifling Gentile domination and Jewish assimilation. (He pleads for a close reading of the Torah instead of going by rough assumptions of what it would probably mean and before fleeing to Commentaries.) This, in all aspects of life, but prominently in the areas of Free Will, Activism, Homosexuality for men, and Redemption. * He hopes that his words will inspire and inform, and disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. He aims to bring a fresh perspective rather than harp on the obvious and familiar. He loves to write encyclopedic overviews. He doesn't expect his readers to agree. Rather, original minds should be disputed. In short, his main political positions are among others: anti-Trumpism, anti-elitism, anti-bigotry and supremacy, for Zionism, Intersectionality, and non-violence, anti those who abuse democratic liberties, anti the fake ME peace process, for original-Orthodoxy, pro-Science, pro-Free Will, anti-blaming-the-victim, and for down-to-earth, classical optimism, and happiness. * He is a fetal survivor of the pharmaceutical industry (https://diethylstilbestrol.co.uk/studies/des-and-psychological-health/), born in 1953 to parents who were Dutch-Jewish Holocaust survivors who met in the largest concentration camp in the Netherlands, Westerbork. He grew up a humble listener. It took him decades to become a speaker too. Bullies and con artists almost instantaneously envy and hate him. * He holds a BA in medicine (University of Amsterdam) – is half a doctor. He practices Re-evaluation Co-counseling since 1977, is not an official teacher anymore, and became a friendly, empowering therapist. He became a social activist, became religious, made Aliyah, and raised three wonderful kids non-violently. For a couple of years, he was active in hasbara to the Dutch-speaking public. He wrote an unpublished tome about Jewish Free Will. He's being a strict vegan since 2008. He's an Orthodox Jew but not a rabbi. He lives with his library in Jerusalem. Feel free to contact him. * His writing has been made possible by a (second-generation) Holocaust survivors' allowance from the Netherlands. It has been his dream since he was 38 to try to make a difference by teaching through writing. He had three times 9-out-of-10 for Dutch at his high school finals but is spending his days communicating in English and Hebrew - how ironic. G-d must have a fine sense of humor. In case you wonder - yes, he is a bit dyslectic. If you're a native English speaker and wonder why you should read from people whose English is only their second language, consider the advantage of having an original peek outside of your cultural bubble. * To send any personal reaction to him, scroll to the top of the blog post and click Contact Me. * His newest books you may find here: https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AMoshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&s=relevancerank&text=Moshe-Mordechai%2FMaurits+van+Zuiden&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1
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