Text and Photography by Harvey Lloyd

Secrets of Eternal Youth

The Blog of Everything

From A Globe Circling Forever Youthful Adventurer Artist/Photographer

Who Hangs Out Of Helicopters Flying “The Dead Man’s Curve”
Around the World

With New Studies On How To Keep Your Brain Young

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.
— JOHN MUIR

Senegal

No intelligent designer or feckless God could have made a sloppy, ruthless mess like us! Hurrah for the mess, quantum uncertainty and an indeterminate world! What you and I don’t know is the bare beginning of wisdom and intelligence. Whether you’re religious or not, the world is never what it seems.
I repeat, “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring . . .”

Eternal youths, guys and gals, drink like you are in a desert filled with fabulous ideas buried in crystal clear pools deep beneath tall and windswept sand dunes. Drink like you are in an oasis with sparkling spring water. Eternal youths, dance on the dunes like a flock of white tall cranes, graceful, wings fluttering. Knowledge is the miraculous wine of the gods.

Senegal
Richard Dawkins, the famous biologist-atheist on YouTube has a debate with a Catholic scientist and minister who had been the head of the Vatican Observatory, He said he believes along with the pope in much of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and was equally certain the Jesus walked on water, turned water to wine, created miracles, and rose from the dead after the crucifixion. Maybe all of that happened. Dawkins said, “Where’s the evidence.” Dawkins is deliberately politically incorrect like the god that he says doesn’t exist. As a fan of the horned devil Satan who preferred to rule in hell instead of bowing to omnipotence in heaven, Dawkins is a helluva a lot more fun.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential megalomaniacal,sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. 

–RICHARD DAWKINS, The God Delusion

Bishop in North Senegal

There’s politically incorrect and it’s a ball to read his blather even if spiced with rather too much angry hyperbole. What did God ever do to Dawkins except make him famous? Sit in a pew if you want to be bored to death. You ain’t goin’ to heaven, and, eternal youths, guys and gals, if you listen to this book and strain your back and your brain, you ain’t goin’ off this green earth for a long, long time, and, you are coming back! Faith cannot rely on evidence alone. Belief comes from deep inside and may or may not be right or wrong.

“There are more things on heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s nearly omniscient intuition is enough evidence for me and I hope for you guys and gals. I believe there is a spiritual world (a little at a time) and we are a part of the mysteries. The embrace of quantum mechanics, physics and metaphysics with Lao Tzu and the TAO reinforces these ideas.

God is not a spectator, but a fellow-sufferer, who has himself absorbed the full force of evil. In the lonely figure hanging in the darkness and dereliction of Calvary the Christian believes that he sees God opening his arms to embrace the bitterness of the strange world he has made. The God revealed in the vulnerability of the incarnation and in the vulnerability of creation are one.
He is the crucified God, whose paradoxical power is perfected in weakness, whose self-chosen symbol is the King reigning from the gallows.
–JOHN POLKINGHORNE

It’s a good argument from Polkinghorne, and a good argument is half the battle.
John went from being a leading quantum physicist to man of the cloth and got well paid, a million or so for doing it by the Templeton Foundation. Polkinghorne is a gifted juggler who tosses Jesus in the air and spins him around. Belief, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. Eternal youths, gals and guys, take the Sermon on the Mount as a profound religious poem.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

A Catholic scientist arguing with Dawkins said he was certain that the living god was a person who spent time helping him the scientist to understand and that He had made the universe. Maybe too much time! He probably could have done a much better job here and on the rest of the earth. But what the hell do I know? Polkinghorne is a renowned quantum physicist who put on a white collar and got well paid for it, a million or so from a Catholic organization. I like his chutzpah and laugh at his antics. A brilliant monkey is still a monkey. Darwin proved the descent from the trees, but not everyone came down. No insult intended John.

The galactic light show is fine! How many necklaces of stars does it take for God or an intelligent designer to make a galaxy filled universe John? I’ll hang around for the next few acts or forever. We gotta love, chortle and laugh at many of the scenes He made here on the green earth anyway. Learn the scriptures, learn the atheist’s way, learn Einstein’s battles against discovery of quanta and quantum physics and metaphysics, enjoy Dawkins, Polkinghorne and the rest, learn it all, the entire Internet! Try it! Good for keeping your plastic brain young.

The Quest For Immortality

(Excerpts from CBS 60 Minutes: Daniel Schorn)

While most scientists talk about increasing longevity by a few years, Dr. Aubrey de Grey says he is talking about the “indefinite extension of longevity.”

”Average life spans would be in the region of 1,000 years,” he says. “Seriously.”

De Grey, while still in his early 30s, published groundbreaking work in theoretical biology and earned an international reputation. His day job is managing a fruit-fly database.

But the work that consumes him involves larger game – humans. And he does his best thinking in the same 17th century pub where Watson and Crick refreshed themselves while unlocking the mysteries of DNA. De Grey believes he has unlocked the mysteries of immortality. 

”The aging process is really a buildup of side effects of being alive in the first place,” he says.

De Grey has identified the biological processes he thinks are responsible for aging, including the mutations that cause cancer and the gradual buildup of useless, toxic junk . . .but de Grey has gone way beyond describing the causes of degeneration. In a series of papers he has developed a theory he calls “Engineered Negligible Senescence”. Simply put, it says science will soon enable us to grow old without aging . . .

But realistically, who wants to live to age 500 or 1,000?

” What I’m after is not living to 1,000. I’m after letting people avoid death for as long as they want to,” he says.

Who wants to live to age 500 or 1,000? We eternal youth do! And much longer as curious and passionate eternal youths, joyful immortals. Life’s creative forces, our constant devouring of new information, using our creativity in a thousand trillion ways whether artists, scientists or business oriented will never end. We ride the merry-go-round of the Internet, social media, new media and information of every kind in the thousands of rings circus of eternal life with the gusto and glee of infants let loose in a galactic playpen constantly filled with enticing new toys.

One thousand, one million or many more ages on into infinity,it will be up to us as we enter and reenter our endless cycles of immortality. The will to live and grow is the most powerful force in the universe. Bergson called it elan vital, the upward movement of life of every kind in the universe. The universe exists because of our will, whether of a God, an “intelligent designer,” or undoubtedly the omniscient, chaotic and omnipotent blind quantum force that reverses entropy to create order out of disorder. We are here because it is our will to be here.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.
–ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Man is immortal; therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea; it can only find itself in changing forms.
–RABINDRANATH TAGORE