"I think it, so I am IT," said Bernadeane, co-founder and Co-director of People Unlimited, who has has spoken and written on radical life extension and physical immortality for over four decades. Her thinking kept her hip and fit dancing around the stiff number 90 with a boy friend who's maybe 50. "IT" for her is immortality. She is immortal. No discussion.
Don't we love the power of our thoughts? Mind over matter becomes more and more true and even scientifically proven. I'm a queen of What if??? always playing with thoughts others find weird. Living forever isn't a strange concept for me at all. As a kid I let my thoughts wonder and stories would pour in before I was falling asleep. A few times I had a very strange physical feeling like being in a space under water, no sound, no air just this dark but bearable pressure. The words that lit up were; death isn't real, death is an illusion. The feeling stayed with me like a never-ending memory.
Living forever? Sure.
Of course when I realized that I could then actually visit the next Universe, a childhood dream of mine that also never died, I held my breath for a moment. One of the possibly Earth-like exo-planets, Kepler-452b, 60 per cent larger than Earth, with a rocky surface, oceans and orbiting a star like our Sun at a habitable distance, is 1,400 light years from Earth. Each light year is 5.88 trillion miles - which means it would take the best part of a millenium-and-a-half to reach it if a spacecraft could travel at the speed of light.
Eternity is a long long time.
After that discovery I changed my goal to "living as long as I like." Hip and healthy of course. One of the thought exercises I came up with was the idea that truly living in the moment, where space and time do not exist, could mean that we don't age. Eckhard's NOW might be the answer. It's an idea that tickles me but then, as I writer of an upcoming Sci Fi fantasy (2019) I'm constantly in the future and in the past. Unfortunately that thought form wouldn't work for me.
But there's also science and an amazing longevity movement where I had met Bernadeane and her team. That she loves to support her radical thoughts with science gives me hope that mind over matter has an actual chance.
I visited the RAAD fest in San Diego twice and intend to be there again this year, it's coming up in two weeks.
At a life extension party a few months ago.
The line up is amazing. I am a fan of Ray Kurzweil , who's bestseller "The Singularity is near", was on one of my side tables for years until I was finally ready to read it in 2013. Good stuff if you're not tight minded. He'll be there this year, so are Suzanne Somers, Aubrey de Grey, Liz Parish and Dr Natasha Moore and many other innovative speakers. I interviewed a some of them last year and met Aubrey and Liz twice.
Walking my dog this morning I spoke a couple notes into my Iphone; what do I want to blog about longevity? That I find the idea of us living forever would change the world in a really amazing way as everybody would be worried that they would have to reap the fruits of their (evil) actions? No more polluting the world, adding more and more species to the endangered list, a possible stop to global warming... I had a website years ago called "La Femme Futura" and was hitting readers over the head with innovative and often far out science news I didn't quite understand myself. Should I talk about living forever? I had bumped into a lot of resistance last year, is it time now? While dictating Siri and rolling my eyes as she's not good with my light (!) German accent and garbles my words I saw a mini library, one of these oversized bird houses packed with books. I pass them often, added a couple books but didn't look inside. Today I did. I picked up every single book searching.... I found an interesting looking vintage piece and took a picture of it, the title was about love. I took it. Why not. Maybe I have time to read.
Book in one hand, dog leash in the other and waiting at the red light I opened the book; it’s the stories of Lazarus Long, an eternally living man, one of the few heroes in one of the few books I liked when I lived in Portugal. I see myself in my bed reading dreaming that this man would be real.... I heard Lazarus in my head. He said, "go now, write a blog post about living forever. And come to the RAADfest. I'll be there."
Natasha VIta Moore Aubrey de Gray
The conference motivates us to break out of the box of ageism and to eliminate beliefs that are "so last century."
Who wants to join me?