Dismantling Modern Mythologies

In a recent post, John Michael Greer - whose work I follow - explored themes of modern mythologies and critical theory, and one of his main points was that modernism is rife with mythologies of all kinds, even though we fancy ourselves "enlightened" and feel that we have arrived at an understanding of how the world works.    JMG reminds us - rightfully so - that this is far from the truth, and that the reality is that we have barely begun to even comprehend what kind of world we live in, much less understand its mechanisms and meanings.   I encourage you to read the post, because he says a whole lot more than this there, but I'm utilize his basic theme to demonstrate an important concept here as it relates to biomechanical death. 

The simple, unvarnished truth?  We simply don't understand what happens. 

Modern science claims expertise in understanding nearly all-phenomena, and what it doesn't understand, it dismisses.  This is why we have the hypothesis that life ends at death.  But it is only a hypothesis.    And academia (which now includes science) is mostly comprised now of social prestige and attempts at further grant funding - so no academic will have the balls enough tackle this problem for quite some time to come. 

Nevertheless - we are at the beginning of our journey toward understanding, and this gives me hope.    With explorations by Hoffman and Lanza - and others - we can at least start toward an understanding. And the ultimate understanding may be to realize that there is far more than can be understood by one set of humans at any given time.  I suspect that this will be the case. 

When DNA's double-helix structure was deciphered,
our modern science myth enlarged a little.

Studies of DNA and the human genome mirror this.  Back when Crick was credited as having deciphered the double helix model  (he was taking LSD when he did that, by the way, but that's for another day) he wasn't concerned with what would eventually come to be labeled as "Junk DNA." All he did was initialize the journey toward understanding the information transfer in biochemical models - or what we call living matter. Interestingly enough, he was also consumed at - but unsuccessful in - finding how the human brain spawns a cosncious mind.   He was not, however, the final student in this learning experience.  He merely created a platform upon which future students would build.  Incidentally, and even a bit unrelated, Crick wasn't solely responsible for this deciphering - there were others involved as well, but we seem to forget that over time in our desire to finalize myths and assign hero status. 

My point here is to demonstrate how modern mythologies arise.  In Crick's time - and shortly thereafter - he was heralded as having found the keys to life.   We now know, many years later, that his discovery was only the beginning - there is much more to DNA than we even currently know and understand.   This is how cultural myths - especially the ones where we deem ourselves as having "arrived" at some final summit of knowing all there is to know - arise.   We check boxes to satisfy our need for definition - for a finite measurement of our environment, perhaps, who knows? - and we move on.  Except later, much like with DNA and its double helix, we learn that what we discovered initially wasn't the final rule - there's always more to be discovered, more to be unlocked, more road to be traveled. 

For this reason, I want to keep the dialogue open.  I want to keep exploring the horizons of biomechanical death. I want to remove the cultural myths that have surrounded it for so long.   I am no scientists. I hope never to be considered an academic, either.  But I do - almost more than anything - want to be involved in propelling us forward in our understanding of what death really is, so we can either evolve its definition (or eliminate it entirely) from our modern lexicon, and move toward a horizon where it has become irrelevant or nonexistent.