Johannes Tan, Indonesian Translator & Conference Interpreter
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Part 22

9/28/2015

 

Between Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome
Part 22: There is Something Immoral in Immortality

Picture
A man named Sei Weng owned a beautiful mare which was praised far and wide. One day this beautiful horse disappeared. The people of his village offered sympathy to Sei Weng for his great misfortune. Sei Weng said simply, "That's the way it is."

A few days later the lost mare returned, followed by a beautiful wild stallion. The village congratulated Sei Weng for his good fortune. He said, "That's the way it is." Some time later, Sei Weng's only son, while riding the stallion, fell off and broke his leg. The village people once again expressed their sympathy at Sei Weng's misfortune. Sei Weng again said, "That's the way it is."

Soon thereafter, war broke out and all the young men of the village except Sei Weng's lame son were drafted and were killed in battle. The village people were amazed as Sei Weng's good luck. His son was the only young man left alive in the village. But Sei Weng kept his same attitude: despite all the turmoil, gains and losses, he gave the same reply, "That's the way it is."

The horse that went away is the horse that came back—that's the way it is. The aforementioned Taoist parable illustrates the non-duality of fortune and misfortune, gain and loss, life and death poignantly. More importantly, it underlines the importance of a counter balance—something does not exist without its opposite. "Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites," wrote Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1913) in The Book of Tea (1906). Note the emphasis on comprehension—a deeper and more comprehensive level of understanding. The brutal truth is that no matter how the religion-industrial complex has been sugarcoating death at all costs to sell their Zoroastrian afterlife contractual program merely in order to assuage the fear of death, there can never be life without death. On a species level. On a personal level.

Even on a cellular level, death and renewal can even be described as a prerequisite to life—as cited by science writer Guy Murchie (1907-1997) in his illuminating The Seven Mysteries of Life (1978). Based on radioisotope tracings of numerous chemicals that continuously enter and leave the human body, Dr. Paul C. Aebersold of the Oak Ridge Atomic Research Center concluded that about 98 percent of the 10 octillion (thus a 1 with 28 zeroes) atoms in the average human body are replaced annually. The crystals of bones are continually dissolving and reforming; the stomach's lining replaces itself every five days; skin wear and tear is completely retreaded in about a month; and a new liver is formed every six weeks. Chemistry professor Donald Hatch Andrews of John Hopkins University even estimated that one's physical body is completely renewed down to the very last atom within about five years. This constant change is normal.

What is abnormal is cancer, "the emperor of all maladies." Cancer is caused by abnormal cell growth that potentially invades or spreads to other parts or organs. Only recently have scientists understood the fundamental difference between a normal and a cancerous cell. As argued by Robert Hazen and Maxine Singer in Why Aren't Black Holes Black? (1997), the great irony of cancer is that it results from the failure of cells … to die. A normal cell is supposed to age and die naturally. On the other hand, a cancerous cell is immortal because its regulating clock is either turned off, constantly reset, or just ignored.

Therefore, whether on a cellular, personal or species level, death is inevitable. Blindly pursuing immortality—either by blowing oneself up for heavenly rewards of 21 virgins or through the ridiculous process of cryopreservation (low-temperature preservation of the human body with the hope it may be resuscitated in the future) does not only reflect selfishness and megalomania; it reflects perversion and immorality.   

The truth remains that our life in this little corner of the universe is but fleeting and transitory. Because of it—not in spite of it—this temporariness should make us realize that life is even more precious and beautiful. Carpe diem. There can never be any justification to sacrifice life merely as a dubious investment to secure a better afterlife. "I have little confidence in any enterprise or business or investment that promises dividends only after the death of the stockholders," argued author Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899).

Death—as illustrated by the Roman emperor philosopher Marcus Aurelius (121-180) in his Book 4 of Meditations—is indeed the Great Equalizer: How many doctors have died, after furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others' ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal. How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others.

Further on, without mincing his words: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

Thus—the yin and yang of life, and inevitable death. "Those with their great desire to go on living;" Italian astronomer and philosopher Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) once said, "they do not reflect that if men were immortal, they themselves would never have come into the world."

[To be continued.]

Johannes Tan, Indonesian Translator & Conference Interpreter 

Part 21

9/21/2015

 

Between Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome
Part 21: The Disembarkation Process


Autumn Leave
Talking about extinctions, according to Robert Hazen and Maxine Singer in Why Aren't Black Holes Black? (1997), more than 99 percent (by some estimates more than 99.9 percent) of all species that ever lived have vanished. In the worst Permian-Triassic mass extinction that occurred some 245 million years ago, as many as 96 percent of all living species are estimated to have vanished in a brief geological interval of less than a million years. This mass extinction eventually gave rise to the dinosaurs, albeit 'only' for the next 180 million years. Unfortunately, even dinosaurs had to go about 65 million years ago, when they went extinct after a giant meteorite crashed to Earth near the Gulf of Mexico. (Although some scientists disagree that this giant meteorite was a direct cause of dinosaurs extinction.) In any case, their extinction eventually spurred the rise of modern mammals (including humans) as outlined by John Roach for National Geographic News of June 20, 2007.

Indeed most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct—as argued by astrophysicist Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in Part 18 (Our Spatial and Temporal Insignificance in the Universe). Extinction is the norm, survival the exception. The first of the genus Homo appeared on Earth about four million years ago, and already half a dozen species of the genus are now extinct. If on a global level, deaths and mass extinctions are natural phenomena and simply unavoidable,  then how 'natural' is death on a personal level?

In Book 2 of his timeless Meditations (translated by Gregory Hays), the Roman emperor philosopher Marcus Aurelius (121-180) poignantly described death as nothing but "a process of nature, which only children should be afraid of." In Book 3, he emphatically compared death to a disembarkation process, in which nobody—not even physicians, rulers, conquerors, philosophers—is immune to it:

"Hippocrates cured many illness—and then fell ill and died. The Chaldaeans predicted the deaths of many others; in due course their own hour arrived. Alexander, Pompey, Caesar—who utterly destroyed so many cities, cut down so many thousand foot and horse in battle—they too departed this life. Heraclitus often told us the world would end in fire. But it was moisture that carried him off; he died smeared with cow shit. Democritus was killed by ordinary vermin, Socrates by the human kind.

You boarded, you set sail, you have made the passage. Time to disembark. If it's for another life, well, there's nowhere without gods on that other side. If to nothingness, then you no longer have to put up with pain and pleasure, or go on dancing attendance on this battered crate, your body—so much inferior to that which serves it. One is mind and spirit, the other earth and garbage."

There is indeed no question that the death of a loved one, family member, or close friend, causes the deepest sorrow a human can ever experience. Throughout millennia, innumerable authors, philosophers, poets, and composers have written and composed countless works about death and mortality. Indeed death does not only mean an unbearable and irreversible loss; it also reminds one of his or her own mortality. This may explain the most intimate relationship between death and religion. When all is said and done, even hard-core atheists may have to agree that religion may be needed to assuage the fear of death. American essayist Gore Vidal (1925-2012) once said: "You need a religion if you are terrified of death." As has often been observed, one of the most important functions of religion is to comforts us to deal with hardships, tragedies, sickness and death. Therefore it's easy to see why Zoroastrianism tenets as outlined in Part 19 (No Religion is 100% Pure and Built from Scratch) regarding heaven and hell, afterlife, and the resurrection of the dead have always sounded so appealing and were swiftly embraced by Judaism, then Christianity and eventually Islam.

However, the fact that Abrahamic religions perceive the Big Things—live and death, body and soul, heaven and hell, rewards and punishment—in black and white polarities or dichotomies, does not mean that all religions are burdened by the same duality. Eastern religions like Buddhism and Taoism (some scholars even refuse to classify these as religions) apply a rather non-duality philosophy. Instead of black-and-white dichotomies, non-duality (literally meaning “not two” or “not separated”) is the belief that all things are basically interconnected in a holistic fashion, while at the same time retaining their individuality. Compare it with the tails and heads of a coin, if you will. Indeed Buddhism and Taoism do not talk about afterlife at all, much less promise anything about resurrection and heaven. Taoism even perceives the binary opposites of life and death as interconnected as yin and yang. Something does not exist without its opposite.

[To be continued.]

Johannes Tan, Indonesian Translator & Conference Interpreter 


Part 20

9/14/2015

 

Between Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome
Part 20: On Souls and Thanatophobia 

Cemetery
The truth never harmed anyone.
What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
-MARCUS AURELIUS (121-180)

Zoroaster's appealing tenets regarding heaven and hell, the last judgment, and the resurrection of the dead—eventually adopted by Judaism, Christianity and Islam—cannot be separated from the belief (more precisely, hope) that human souls survive death and continue to live in afterlife. 


But what is actually a soul? Oxford defines soul as the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal. Merriam Webster defines it as the spiritual part of a person that is believed to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as (a) a part of humans regarded as immaterial, immortal, separable from the body at death, capable of moral judgment, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state, (b) this part of a human when disembodied after death.

In many religious, philosophical and mythological traditions, the soul is regarded as the incorporeal and immortal essence of a living thing. Abrahamic religions believe that immortal souls only belong to human beings. Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) argued that all organisms have souls, but only human souls are immortal. On the other hand, non-Abrahamic religions—especially Hinduism and Jainism—believe that all biological organisms have souls. Other religions with animistic flavor (such as Japanese Shinto) even believe that non-biological entities (rivers, caves and mountains) possess souls. 


The first philosopher in the Greek tradition, philosopher and mathematician Thales of Miletus (624–546 BCE) even believed that any object that moved itself 'under its own power' showed evidence that it had soul. This caused physicist Jerome W. Elbert to ask (in his essay Does the Soul Exist: From the Mythological Soul to the Conscious Brain): "since a magnet can move itself toward a piece of iron, do magnets have souls?" Go figure.

Then there is the concept of anima mundi (the world soul), which is "an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body." Anima mundi originated with Plato who stated: "Therefore, we may consequently state that this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related." To a certain extent, this Neoplatonic view is also shared by several Eastern philosophy and religions. Hinduism connotes the metaphysical concept of Brahman as a single binding unity behind the diversity in all that exists in the universe.

In Chinese culture, qi or ch'i is recognized as 'material energy', 'life force', or 'energy flow' that is the central natural force in traditional medicine and martial arts as well as in Taoism. Mahayana Buddhism recognizes Dharmakāya which constitutes the "unmanifested, inconceivable aspect of a Buddha, out of which Buddhas arise and to which they return after their dissolution." Yogis believe that yoga a technique to align mind, body and soul. So far so good, but, still, what is a soul? (Full disclosure: Although I consider myself an agnostic, one of my favorite tunes is "Be Still My Soul" composed by Jean Sibelius.) 

While Abrahamic religions believe that human souls will survive death and continue to live in afterlife, non-Abrahamic ones do not talk about afterlife souls or promise anything beyond death. There are a few exceptions, however. "Where does the soul go when the body dies?", asked Lutheran mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). "There is no necessity for it to go anywhere," stated Boehme who once was enlightened in the oneness of man, God, and the universe upon staring at the light reflected in a pewter dish. Death, according to Boehme, is the end of the soul. Indeed in the age of 16th- and 17th-century Reformation Wars, Boehme's idea about the soul was considered scandalous, to say the very least.

Hence what is a soul? While there are multiple definitions in dictionaries, and many beliefs recognize its existence, has anyone actually ever seen, touched, or measured a soul? Is it in the form of solid, liquid, or gas? What is its color and shape? Is it opaque or transparent? Is it located in the heart, brain, or elbow? The only obvious thing is that we don't have a verdict on souls. But while we can never be sure about souls—much less where they go after death—we can be surer about death itself. An existentialist philosopher, whose name I don't recall, once mused that the minute a baby is born, he basically starts to crawl to his grave.

As cruel as this sounds—yes, philosophers can be unusually cruel—can there ever be life without death? Can there ever be renewal without regeneration? Can there ever be beginnings without endings? Can there ever be evolution without extinction? Obviously not. As the primary beneficiary of the evolution process, we, Homo sapiens, should know better, and overcome our thanatophobia or irrational and pervasive fear of death. Indeed this fear of death is a natural manifestation of our basic instinct of self-preservation, without which we would not have survived.

Yet, the death of a caterpillar means the life of a butterfly. The extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago spurred the rise of modern mammals, including us. Thus from a biological perspective, it can even be argued that death and extinction could be necessary evolutionary tools to maintain natural equilibrium and ecological sustainability.

[To be continued.]

Johannes Tan, Indonesian Translator & Conference Interpreter


Part 19

9/7/2015

 

Between Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome
Part 19: No Religion is 100% Pure and Built from Scratch


ZoroasterZoroaster
An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it.
-Don Marquis

In the history of religious figures, nobody is probably more influential, yet less known, than Zoroaster. We all know Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, but Zoroaster? Also known as Zarathustra (as in Friedrich Nietzsche's novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra), he was the founder of the world's oldest monotheistic religion of Zoroastrianism and the author of the Yasna Haptanghaiti and the Gathas liturgical hymns. Known as a native speaker of Old Avestan who lived in the eastern part of the Iranian Plateau, historians and scholars still argue about his lifetime. Most scholars agree that he lived in the late-6th century BCE (between 625 and 550 BCE), though others believe that he lived in north-east Iran sometime earlier, between 1400 and 1200 BCE. One thing is certain however: Zoroaster is widely regarded as the sage who introduced earth-shattering ideas during his lifetime: the concepts of heaven and hell, the last judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and the final apocalyptic war between good (Light) and evil (Darkness). Most of Zoroaster's teachings were eventually adopted by Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). His signature ideas can still be recognized today in the forms of binary opposites of rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, good and evil.

As they say, the rest is history.

Initially Zoroastrian influenced Judaism, then Christianity, and later Islam. Indeed Christianity may have received Zoroastrian beliefs third hand. About 1,000 years after Zoroaster's life, the extremely influential Christian theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354-430) proposed similar tenets. Augustine may have been indirectly inspired by Zoroaster, since before converting to Christianity, he was actually a Manichean which was influenced by Zoroastrian. The point I'm trying to make is that no religion is 100% pure and built from scratch—whatever this means—because each known organized religion has always adopted tenets from other religion(s) that existed before. Buddhism derived from Hinduism, Christianity from Judaism, Islam from both Judaism and Christianity.

And yet, as we have witnessed in exasperation, human civilization has been littered with inter-religious wars, persecutions, cruelty, violence, zealotry, crusades, inquisitions, stonings, witch-burnings, jihads, fatwas, decapitations, suicide bombings, abortion-clinic murders, religious persecutions even genocide. All of those acts have been committed—ironically—for the sake of salvation in life after death. To repeat Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello as stated in Part 12, What is God's Religion?: "Religion as practiced today deals in punishments and rewards. In other words, it breeds fear and greed—the two things most destructive of spirituality." As had been stated, but still worth repeating, religion derives from the word religare (Latin) which means 'to bind.' Hence the dreadful situation in which we are kept as hostages by our own beliefs. Most of us are still bound and hung up by the binary opposites of hell and heaven—thanks to Zoroaster.

Therefore what we believe can always be taken with a pinch of humility, if not with a healthy dose of skepticism. No religion should take itself too seriously. More than 2,300 years had passed since the Greek philosopher Plato (428-348 BCE), in his famous Allegory of the Cave, warned us about mistaking shadows on the walls for real objects. Many things that we think we "believe" are actually based on a misperception of objective reality. Too often we believe in fallacies and—as if that is not bad enough—disbelieve facts. In the name of "belief", we endorse falsifications and resist verifications.

Often with tragic results.

In Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality (1990), Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello relayed a story about a group of people who were stranded on a raft off the coast of Brazil, perishing from thirst. They strongly believed that the water they were floating on was undrinkable salt water, instead of fresh water. The reality? Actually the river was coming out into the sea with such force that it went out for a couple of miles, so they had fresh water right there where they were. Kept as hostages by their own beliefs, they perished from thirst. If only one among them was open-minded enough and would cup his or her hand to taste the water, the entire group might have been saved. If only they would examine their belief…

Hence the critical need to understand ourselves. We have always been susceptible to make decisions based on false perceptions. Not taking ourselves too seriously is a serious business. Constant re-examination of our beliefs is a sine qua non to understand ourselves. As Socrates once said, the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

[To be continued.]

Johannes Tan, Indonesian Translator & Conference Interpreter 


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