On Apr 28, 2005, at 9:37 AM, medwards520 wrote:
Vaj, What's the source of this information? Thanks.
Peace,
Marc
It originally came from a Mormon biologist I knew. A paper on it used to on the website of Dr. Michael West, the man who owns the patent. Last I saw, it was kind of hidden on his website. Not sure it's still there. Here's an old blog entry I made on it a couple years ago:
Immortality East and...West
A lotta discussion on one of the Nath lists on immortality.
Physical immortality that is.
I was first told about "aglets" by a Mormon biologist about 10 years ago. There was a discovery that the ends of our chromosones, the telomeres, have a coating on them much life the little sleeves on the ends of our shoelaces, aglets. Every time a cell divides the aglet gets a little shorter. When a cell divides so many times it will reach a limit where it cannot divide any longer. And it dies. This is a great mechanism since it helps prevent mutations from entering.
Then enter Dr. Michael West, the first person to clone human cells. He found that when you clone a human cell and make it begin cell division the aglets are LONGER. Clone this clone and those aglets are even longer. The idea for longer life spans is that you could take a geneticaly engineered retrovirus (like a benign version of the AIDS virus) and use it to swap out your old aglets for new ones. A recent editorial in the NY Times guesstimates that this technology will be usable by 2010--and that human lifespan will take a jump--to about 600 hundred years.
It is interesting the reaction this creates in people. Most are happy with life the way it is, with our cellular 'timeclocks' slowly counting down to some unknown date. To Naths and yogis, attachment to life is a block in the path. After all how can you ever fully experience samadhi if you don't want to "let go"? Some actually react almost violently to the idea of such life extension.
So what of the techniques of the past, used by the yogins of yore which could extend life considerably? Were they an advantage or disadvantage? Why were they generally praised rather than raged upon?
I think the answer is, in part, that in order to extend life by these methods you already needed to have a certain level of attainment, i.e. you need to be able to go through death BEFORE you die and make it simply part of who you are (i.e. samadhi). Easily said, not so easily done. Consider the adept Tapasviji Maharaj who lived 185 years. He had to undergo the arduous Kaya Kalpa regime three times in his life--the first time growing back all his teeth and a new skin--so as to extend his sadhana. When this advanced adept performed the Kaya Kalpa regimen (30-40 days in almost total isolation) on others, the results were not as marked. It would seem these people were not as advanced in their own surrender to the life-current and the result was they lost 10 or 15 years in their biological age. Their state of awareness determined the limit of what they could do.
Nonetheless, given the fact that human birth is rare, it may be desirable--either to attain some permanent enlightenment or for the benefit of a garden of disciples--to extend oneself in time.
Should consciousness be the limiting factor or should we allow scientific materialism to perform this miracle--even though we don't have the awareness to support it? What if we do it because we are attached to life? What is the real end result of that?
I was recently reminded by a wise Nath from Seattle that one of the classes of beings above the human life-form but below that of the Gods is the Asuras, the "non-Gods". Like Gods, they too present as beautiful Celestials, stellar beings. They offer humans seemingly wonderful things like immortality. But there is no Dharma taught in their dimension. So what IS it that they are offering?
I have to ask the molecular biologists and genetic engineers the same question.
