How to live forever in 7 easy steps

The smartest people I know are obsessed with living forever. I've spent the last few months learning about immortality, since I felt I needed to figure out what all the fuss is about.

I obviously assume immortality is possible, and you want to live forever. If you have a miserable life and want to die, you might want to insert the pre-step of: love yourself and love your life. I'm also assuming there are already immortals walking the Earth today, as a how-to manual is easier to write than describing an invention that doesn't yet exist.

Step 1: Replace anger and hate with love
Only the most advanced humans are going to be able to live forever. The easiest way to become advanced is to get rid of all of your anger and your hate. It's actually pretty easy to do this. Hate always results from letting anger stew around too long, and anger is always a secondary emotion.

The primary emotion behind anger is almost always embarrassment or fear. However, it's easier to say, "that guy really pisses me off," rather than, "that guy really embarrassed me last Wednesday," and so we often take the anger route rather than the emotionally mature route.

By love, I don't mean just human love. Mother nature isn't going to let folks who continually kill tons of other organisms and who generate literally tons of plastic waste per year live forever. Being an eco-friendly vegetarian doesn't guarantee you'll live forever, but it will help.

Step 2: Eliminate suppression, by feeling all of your feelings
A lot of people call this living in the moment. It's a little different and a little the same, because this means acknowledging every single feeling you have.

Feeling your feelings is a tricky balancing act, because the more you focus on an emotion, the stronger it becomes. You can test it out now, by focusing everything and all of your efforts on a small pain you have. If you're able to focus almost 100% on that pain for over 24 full hours, what was once a minor hurt will become almost unbearable. The trick is to be brutally honest with yourself with every emotion, but then quickly move on from the negative emotions to focusing on something positive that's happening now. That's where living in the present ties in.

Step 3: Learn every lesson

If you feel time is getting faster and faster, then you are slowly dying. Time speeding up for you is the biggest sign you have lessons to learn that you're not learning. Have you said lately, "This week has gone by so quickly?" or "I can't believe it's summer already!" or "Didn't 2010 just fly by?" If you say this kind of stuff, you aren't learning the lessons you should be, and time is speeding up for you so you die a quick, relatively painless death.

Contrast that to immortals. They are always learning. Jesus is a great example, since he was still learning and being tested throughout his documented history.

Step 4: Have a strong connection to a god that tells you to live forever

I'm not completely certain about this step, but I think unless God tells you that you should live forever, you're never going to muster up enough emotional intensity all by your puny mortal self to be able to pull off immortality.

To complete this step, simply find a god, ask that god to give you a witness you should be immortal, and then wait for your answer. I guess if you don't get an answer, you can keep moving on to different gods until you find one that tells you that you should be immortal.

Step 5: Nutrition
This is an optional step, as it's theoretically possible to generate everything your body needs by using the molecules of just the stuff you breathe in through the air. However, I think the only immortal who could pull this off is Jesus. The rest of us should take this step seriously.

Both Alobar and Ray Kurzweil are immortal wannabes who have dedicated a large portion of their lives to figuring out their unique nutrition and supplement profile that will maximize their chances for immortality. I think everyone, with our different bodies, has a nutrition profile unique to us that will maximize our chances at immortality. If we can figure that out, we'll have a much better shot at immortality.

As a minimum first step, take a multivitamin and a fish oil pill every day.

As a second step, find a nutrition guru like Alobar, and read everything this guru publishes, and try out all of the stuff the guru recommends.

As a third and final step, become a guru yourself, because your nutrition profile and needs are going to be at least a little different than your guru's.

Step 6: Regenerate yourself
This should be a little easier than levitating yourself, and it involves roughly the same steps. Here are the steps for both:

• Become obsessed about levitation/regeneration
• Learn everything you can about it
• Start practicing on something that would have happened anyway. For levitation, put a piece of paper in a windy field, and using just your mind, make this paper blow away. For regeneration, when you get a small cut, practice healing yourself as rapidly as possible
• Supplement your growing knowledge by intense study of areas of the brain you think are related to levitation/regeneration
• Practice weird/unusual exercises to hyper-develop the parts of your brain you feel are related to levitation or regeneration
• Gradually increase the intensity of levitation/regeneration until you are able to levitate yourself and others, or you are able to instantly heal or regenerate anything on yourself

If you practice every day for about 12 hours, over about a 20-year period, you should be able to easily levitate yourself. And because regeneration is easier than levitation, then regeneration should take a year or two less. And, this will be a cool step, because you'll be able to regrow hair, or de-grow hair in embarrassing areas, or build big muscles without working out, or turn your body into any shape or appearance you want it to be in.

Step 7: Insert regenerative nanotechnology into your bloodstream
This is obviously an optional step, since there are probably already immortals now without nanobots, and since this technology doesn't yet exist. All nanotechnology does is makes the above steps easier, or lets you make more mistakes on the above steps, so you can be a lot sloppier of an immortal than the immortals who really take immortality seriously.

Save up money now. These nanobots are going to be expensive.

Links:

• 3 minutes with Ray Kurzweil
• Alobar discussing how we are all immortal for a very short time
• List of immortals
• A whole book on how to become immortal

Photo purchased from istockphoto

I'm trying to be like Jesus

I won a poker game in a bar last week and got fifty bucks. Winning poker seems exciting, but I'm trying to avoid gambling addiction, so I have this vow to not keep any money that I win when gambling. My logic is that if I can never win and if I always lose when I gamble, even if I win, then it's really not gambling, and I'll never get addicted.

So, I decided to give away the fifty dollars I won.

I like convenience stores, and usually folks who work at convenience stores make only a stitch more than minimum wage. My plan was to drive down the street, stop at the first convenience store I saw, and give the gas station attendant my filthy lucre.

As I drove up to the first gas station, I could see through the window that the cashier was a dude. I decided that wouldn't be any fun, so I changed my rules a bit. I drove hurriedly away without going inside.

I could see there was a female cashier inside the next gas station, so I parked my car and walked inside.

The person behind the counter was really closed up. She just didn't seem friendly at all. This was the first strike against her. Usually if I give something to someone, I'd like them to appreciate it, and this woman seemed like she wasn't ever going to appreciate anything for a very long time. I started to think I'd do what I did at the first gas station and change my rules a bit and then go from station to station until I found someone who wasn't so mad at life, but I decided to play this out just a little longer.

Besides me in the gas station, there was a couple shopping. They both had some kind of disability, and they were taking a very long time to finalize their purchases. I wanted to be the only person in the store when I dropped off my gift, as that's another one of my gifting rules.

Waiting, I stared at sodas, pretended to be deciding what I wanted, as long as I thought was feasible, without appearing suspicious.

But the couple wasn't budging, so I grabbed a soda and walked to the counter.

The couple must have done something funny, or maybe the cashier didn't like people with disabilities, because she derisively said, “Some people!” and looked at me with an approval-soliciting sneer.

That was the second strike against her. First, she had a bad attitude, and second, she made fun of people with disabilities.

If it had been a month ago, I would have only paid for the soda and then walked out because of her two strikes. But something snapped inside of my head, because I've been reading about Jesus.

I counted out exact change for the soda, and said, “This is for the soda.”

I then gave her the fifty I won in poker and said, “and this is for you for a Christmas present.”

She said, “What?”

I started walking away while I said, “Well, I won it in a poker game, and I can't keep it because of my um vow to not keep gambling winnings, and um, um.”

She said, “What? Are you serious?”

I said, “I'm serious, merry Christmas,” and I left. While I was leaving, she said a couple other things out loud trying to comprehend my random gift, but then I was gone.

Of all the stuff she mumbled back, she never said thank you, which I thought was interesting, but also fitting.

I drove off with a smile, and thought about what happened.

Avoiding gambling addictions wasn't being like Jesus. Giving away fifty bucks wasn't being like Jesus. Randomly picking someone to give money to wasn't being like Jesus. Gifting money to someone I thought was probably poor wasn't being like Jesus. Doing those things was probably more like a Buddhist.

The thing that was like Jesus was breaking the laws I had in my head of who deserved my charity. As far as I can tell, Jesus' main message was that even though you have a bunch of rules you follow that make you think you're a good person, there's still a lot higher you can stretch yourself and there's still a lot better a person you can be.

It was a really cool experience, because if I hadn't been reading about Jesus in the last month, I would have missed all that.

On the other hand, cleaning out the figurative temple during the poker game was probably a little like Jesus, too.

Links:

• Wikipedia article for the Sermon on the Mount
• An overview of Buddhism
• Handheld Electronic Pocket Poker Game

Photo purchased from istockphoto