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User:Paine Ellsworth/Mystery/Life

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Semper curiosus
Liza Minnelli sings Life Is a "Cabaret" Ol' Chum‍[1][2]

I started this think page as a subpage of /Mystery because I anticipate that it will become longer than the usual entries we see on the /Mystery page. And, of course, this is the greatest of all the mysteries for us, don't you think?

See also: User: Paine Ellsworth/L.E.E.

It comes as no mystery to me that this turns out to be the greatest, most mysterious enigma of all. We live in a time when the human condition, set here on a relatively large pale blue dot in an unimaginably huge place we call the Universe, having achieved a technology that's the highest and best we've ever known, is exceedingly both drama and comedy at one and the same time.

  • Life is so dramatic due to all of the difficult troubles of our age. Pestilence still plagues us as does war, stormy weather, human trafficking, murder and mayhem, racism, misogyny, misandry, religious bigotry, political upheaval and so many other challenges.
  • Life is so comedic because of the poor and bumbling way we handle these challenges, as well as the slapstick portrayals we play when we try so hard to land on our feet. And yet, as funny and inefficient as we are, we have still managed to make many things better than they once were. And that's worth another bumbling try – and another, and another.

Life is the greatest puzzle because even our best, cutting-edge technology has still been unable to duplicate it, to turn non-living organic material into living material. I've touched on this a little in some of the text on the /Mystery page, but here and now we shall dig deeper and deeper...

I think (and I've seen this nowhere else, so it's just me), I think that the reason we humans have not been able to stumble upon the answers is because we've yet to fully study the mystery of life much beyond the level of chemistry. Life goes down in a much smaller realm than that. If you take a cell that was once alive and empty it completely so that all that you have is the cell's fluid enclosed within a membrane, and then take another cell that is alive, and carefully place each of its contents into the first membrane, you still will have just a dead cell, a non-living container of non-living contents, no matter how much you zap it with electricity, no matter what else you do. Whatever it was that once made those two cells alive is gone, and no amount of hitech seems to be able to bring it back, to reboot the cells' "aliveness". We have not been able to replicate the animating principle that separates the living from the non-living, the alive from the dead.

  • We may or may not understand science. Either way we should accept that good study methods will lead to the answer to this mystery. And I think that if we study more in-depth beyond the level of cells, that the answers lie in the realm of atomic or subatomic structure. Such studies are presently underway in a discipline called quantum biology, but they are still in their infancy.
  • It is my stretch of the imagination that whatever it is that makes us alive, that makes us different from rocks and other non-living things, it will be discovered on the atomic or subatomic level. There may actually be such a thing as a living atom or even a living proton, neutron, electron or quark. When we find what the difference is between a living atom and a non-living atom, then the mystery will be solved. We might never be able to replicate life (except of course for the natural act of reproduction), but it would be great just to know what now mystifies us to the power of n...
    • What exactly is it that we have now, which we won't have anymore when we die? What, if anything, leaves us when we die, and where does it go?

Life truly is a concern for the living. This concern gives rise to the survival instincts of all living things. It is responsible for the aggressive tendency to do anything to stay alive, to prosper. It's complicated, of course, as seen by suicides, mental changes in old age, and so on, but if it hadn't been for genes of aggressiveness there would be nothing alive today. Life fights for itself. It fights tooth and nail for continued existance, either for the individual or for the group, or for both.

Now I've come to a conclusion about life that I'm certain is true, and I'm also certain that this truth will be denied and rejected by almost everyone.

My conclusion
Everyone, even everything, that is alive today in the present moment, all have what is sometimes called a "death wish". I call it the "non-survival instinct".

The concept of a death wish is not new. What is new is the concept that every living thing on this planet, every human, every other animal, every plant, fungus, bacterium, even virus, every individual (perhaps even every group of individuals) that is living or even somewhere very close to being alive, such as the virus, has a non-survival instinct. Just as we all have an aggressive instinct to survive, we, all of us, also have an aggressive instinct to die. And every moment these two instincts are in conflict with each other deep within each of us!

Life wish / Death wish
  • For most of our lives we have a strong survival instinct and only a weak non-survival instinct. Circumstances. They change, and if the events of our lives change in a depressing way, then the non-survival instinct can grow stronger while the instinct to survive may get weaker. If one is, say, diagnosed with a devastating disease that will get worse and worse and more painful as time goes on, that might be depressing enough to make one wish so hard for death that suicide can begin to seem to be the "only choice". It appears that Robin Williams succumbed to this.
  • Maybe it's not you who has been diagnosed with a bad disease. What if it's someone you love, and they come to you with their wish to end it before the suffering gets too great to bear? They ask for your help. What do you do?
  • Someone you love. If he or she passes away, and you loved them very much, it could distress you enough so that you want to join them. So many men and women have joined their spouses just a few weeks or months after they died. Johnny Cash died less than four months after his wife, June Carter, passed away. Many of us have older relatives who died shortly after their spouses died. The more distressed we become about life and death, the larger the non-survival instinct may grow.
  • Perhaps one might wonder, what with all the different religions with their many beliefs and possible afterlives – heaven, hell, reincarnation, ancestral deities, oblivion, one god, many gods, no gods, etc. – just what really does happen when one dies? The older one gets, the more one thinks about it. This could increase the strength of the non-survival instinct to the point of curious, investigative suicide.
  • Those who are risk takers are in their own category. Do they take risks because their non-survival instinct is almost as strong as their survival instinct?
    • I have a pilot license. It's not "current" as I have not flown for many years. I did have some close calls as I learned to fly in a Cessna 150 and 172, and it was exhilarating to be up there flying around alone. Events like my volunteer service in Viet Nam with the USAF, my first solo flight, my volunteer service in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps, and other adventures give me an inkling that perhaps my non-survival instinct has always been a bit stronger in me than it is in most other people. So far, my instinct to survive has been the strongest of the two.
    • The 1994 film Natural Born Killers just came to mind, another strong non-survival instinct vehicle. Only in this film, the death wish is projected onto others. Both the man and the woman inflict death on those who get in their way. In their common conflict they have "found" each other, and together they embark upon a bloody killing spree. The two natural born killers are sort of a very dark Mork and Mindy unleashed on the world.
  • Being a bit of a sci-fi buff and a lover of science I sometimes wonder what would happen if scientists actually were to confirm the existence of extraterrestrial sentient life? Every one of Earth's religions would have to back pedal in some way, and there are some analysts who think that the suicide rate would skyrocket! This might be a good secondary reason why higher beings don't initiate "first contact" (the primary reason being that they want to avoid our dangerous crosshairs).
Life or death, it often comes down to a choice. If and when you are given a choice between life or death, you should most often choose to live. Remember the stotting tommie, the gazelle who risks their life to warn other Tommies of danger nearby. The only time, the ONLY time you should choose death is to patriotically save your society, or a segment of it, from harm, like the spy who takes a poison pill to avoid torture and the spilling of important information to the enemy. Any other time, choose life! Fight the tendency to succumb to the non-survival instinct, fight it tooth and nail. Keep your survival instinct strong and healthy! (Believe me, that suggestion is just as much for myself as it is for you or anyone else who reads this.)

To all of the above I would say, "Be aware, remain in the present moment, 'do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light'. So mote it blessed be."

How then does one answer the question, "What exactly is it that we have now, which we won't have anymore when we die?" Not to worry, for when we solve this mystery, and we will solve it, there will always be other fascinating mysteries to grab us and hold us in – perpetually – just as long as there are sentient beings on this planet, biological beings or not, and probably elsewhere in the Universe. So until we do shimmy, shake and "shuffle off this mortal coil", either as individuals or as a species, and maybe even afterward, there will forever be:

< * and more to come * >

Notes

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  1. ^ Minnelli's "Cabaret" on YouTube
  2. ^ Later version of Minnelli's "Cabaret" – note that the older and wiser Liza adds a word to this great song; can you discern it?

WP-article see also

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Un-article see also

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For dates of creation of these "think pages", see this page.

on my Philosophy – 3rd

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