If we choose to consider evolution - the process through which natural selection brings us into being - as a process or a machine, then I think it would be fair to label it an Anti-Death Machine. Right down to the DNA, evolution outputs organisms that are conditioned to avoid death and to procreate. Their very nature is based around certain protocols.
Protocols like:
conserving energy
maintaining homeostasis
surviving threats
reproducing
Evolution churns out creatures based around such protocols. These types of protocol can be grouped together and termed negative feedback loops. These negative feedback loops forever monitor our inner and outer landscape and bring things back into balance, avoiding the concept and the actuality of death.
For animals, their consciousness seems to be entirely bound up in these protocols. They have little notion of anything outside of them, little sense of individual agency or selfhood.
For humans, however, with our developed frontal lobes, it has slowly become possible for us to unbind some of our consciousness from the core protocols that evolution furnished us with. We can consider options other than maintaining homeostasis or finding sexual partners, conserving our energy or avoiding predators.
Such freed-up consciousness inevitably has a rebellious tone to it. We have clawed it back from the anti-death machine that created us. We have beaten the system.
Yet, the system inevitably still lingers. We might crave to be remembered after our death - perhaps seeking fame and thus rememberance through diverse fields of endeavour, such as art, sport or politics. For those of us feeling less positioned to achieve in such fields, we might nevertheless uphold society and friendships in the hope that something of us will remain when we are gone. We are, in short, still beholden to the anti-death machine that created us.
The notion of death thus forever haunts the deepest recesses of the human psyche, actually in a quite irrational manner. It is not especially rational to avoid death, given that we have no clue what it looks like. It is simply that we are the product of a machine that inevitably churns out organisms that do just that.
To truly free up our consciousness from the machine that created us, we have, I think, two options.
Firstly, we could simply die. Though this seems to me a little extreme, given that no one has yet come back, possibly because death is so wonderful that no one wants to. But, more likely, I think, because that isn’t an option that is available.
Secondly, we could try to overcome our fear of death. We could investigate what is going on with ourselves and death on a personal level. We could take action to not priorize mindless clinging to life within society. We could start to have some proper conversations about death, as opposed to it being taboo, because we were created by an anti-death machine. I think that this is important. If we are to move forwards as a species, in these challenging times, where humanity may need to seriously step up if we are to avoid extinction, not being quite so terrified of dying seems like a good start.
Lemurian Pushback by Devaraj Sandberg
Please find an Illuminated Understanding of death, evolution and everything else too via these references:
http://beezone.com/1main_shelf/death_message.html
http://www.adidaupclose.org/death_and_dying/index.html
http://beezone.com/2main_shelf/fiveevolutionarystatesoftrueman.html
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html The Seven Stages of Life
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds38.html
On health and healing http://www.conductivityhealing.com
Fascinating! I think it is a curious paradox that death sustains life through the processes of continual renewal. Among many great lines I especially like your: 'We could take action to not priorize mindless clinging to life within society.' My own experience is that, because I am now in sight of an end, I have accepted its inevitability and am learning to live every moment as though it is my last. It is this lesson that I wish I had had the intelligence to learn at the other end of my life. I didn't because I believed the clerics and doomsayers knew more than I - now I ignore them and savour the joy in this moment...