Barring disease and accidents, humans normally live seventy to eighty years. Modern medical technology, with heart operations and such, has extended that for some people. The occasional exception lives as long as 110-120 years, but that seems to be the limit.
Does it really matter how long you live? After all, you can never experience anything but the present moment. Yet some projects do take a long time. “Making a soul” may take longer than a typical lifespan.
Old age results from a program. Why do people live as long as we do? Why does a dog have “dog’s years?” It’s essentially the same organism as we are. Each species of animal has a characteristic length of life, programmed into its genes. A cat lives longer than a dog, a horse outlives them both. Some birds such as parrots can live to be a hundred, some whales even longer.
Evolution requires the death of the organism, so that the species can evolve. But humans have surpassed genetic evolution, replacing it with the much faster memetic, or cultural evolution.
The body regenerates. Skin regrowing over a wound illustrates the body’s miraculous self-regenerating capacity. A salamander can grow a new limb if it loses one. This animal derives from Class Amphibia, but still the same phylum as humans, so genetically not far removed.
You can’t grow new teeth. Once they fall out, that’s it. Why? You grew new teeth before, when you were a child. Why not now? Some older men lose the hair on their heads, but the body hair grows even more. Some people’s hair turns white, others not. Programs.
An intriguing mystery: the long lifespans cited for ancients in the Bible. No scholar has offered a good explanation for it. Calling it some kind of code doesn’t account for the length of life gradually diminishing over time.
In the Book of Genesis, Adam lived 930 years, his son Seth 912 years, and the generations after that lived similar life spans until Noah.
Noah also lived 950 years. But his son Shem lived 600 years. Shem’s son lived 438 years. For 2 more generations they lived around 400 years. Then the next 3 generations lived about 230-240 years. The next lived 148 years, and the next 205. Then came the famous Abraham (born Abram), who lived 175 years.
Abraham’s son Ishmael lived 137 years. His other son Isaac lived 180 years, Isaac’s son Jacob (Israel) 147 years, Jacob’s son Joseph 110 years.
Four hundred years later: Aaron died at 123 years old, Moses 120. Joshua 110 years. So the lifespans at the time of the Exodus had diminished to the upper limit of the present era. Official maximum lifespan now remains about 120 years.
Psalm 90:10 gives the normal length of life as seventy years, eighty for a strong body, which sounds like modern times. Tradition attributes this psalm to Moses, but no one knows for sure. Since David wrote many of the psalms, perhaps he or a contemporary wrote it.
G. I. Gurdjieff, (Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, 1950) says people lived much longer in ancient times, “for as many as twelve, and some of them even for fifteen centuries,” because they lived under a different principle than animals. Later they came under the same principle as animals and so then lived similar spans.
Gurdjieff also claims (Life is Real Only Then, When ‘I Am‘) to have met men over 200 years old. He reiterates that the shortness of human lives is the major difficulty which blocks humans from realizing their true destinies.
Chaucer agreed: ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” By the time you start to understand your situation, you’re too old to do anything about it.
John G. Bennett met and wrote a book about the Indian yogi known as “Shivapura Baba” (Long Pilgrimage, 1965), who died in 1963 at the age of 137.
Some people now may be living very long lives but just don’t want to make it public.
The multi-centenarians cited in the Bible may have been initiates with special knowledge who transformed their bodies in certain ways, just as Shivapura Baba received the secret traditions of yoga from his grandfather. They must have been special to gain a place in the passed down oral traditions.
Working out the genealogies given in the Bible indicates about six thousand years from the beginning, as in the Jewish calendar. But possibly these ancient, long-lived people lived much farther in the past.
According to certain traditions, Adam lived about forty thousand years ago, and led the work group which first invented cultures as we know them. The stories of Noah (Bible), Utnapishtim or Ziusudra (Gilgamesh legend), and other great flood myths may refer to the end of the last ice age. Some scientists believe, based on evidence, that pieces of a comet or asteroid struck the Earth 12,800 years ago (the Younger Dryas Impact Event), suddenly melting parts of the great ice sheets which then covered much of North America and Europe, causing catastrophic flooding.
Possibly some people had by then developed the craft of building ocean-going ships (see R. Buckminster Fuller, Seapeoples) and so survived the flooding and tidal waves.
The Atlantis legends may also refer to that time, as after that the sea levels rose drastically.
The length of lives as cited in the Bible stayed steady from Adam to the flood, and then dimished quickly at first, then more gradually. Perhaps the flood cut off some lines of transmission of secret knowledge. Adam to flood: 40,000 years ago to about 13,000 years ago = 27,000 years. Abraham lived about 4000 years ago: Noah to Abraham = about 9000 years, lifespan diminishing from from 900 to 175 years. Moses lived around 3400 years ago, from Abraham to Moses 600 years, lifespan diminishing from 175 to 120 years, not longer than the longest lived people of modern times. King David, about 3000 years ago, lived for 70-75 years, his son King Solomon less.
In 9 millenia, lifespans reduced by about 700 years, a little less than a century of lifespan per millenium. In 600 years from Abraham to Moses, another 55 years reduced, which is about the same rate. If Psalm 90:10 was written at least 400 years later and referred to then contemporary lifespans, the rate of reduction would be similar: 110-120 years to 70-80 years.
Human lifespan did not reduce more because humans by then lived similar lifespans to animals. They had finally come completely under the same principle governing animal lifespans.
So then, it seems, even possessors of esoteric knowledge no longer lived exceptionally long lives, or else the ones that did hid it for fear of persecution. The knowledge may have been lost, or diluted over time, and/or tightly controlled in small isolated groups.
We will probably never know for sure if people really lived as long as 900 years. Our modern Western culture, based as it is on machines, tends to see living organisms also as machines. But organisms don’t wear out like an automobile – they do self-regenerate.
What is the principle Gurdjieff alludes to which allowed people to live 1500 years?
In a nutshell, top-down versus bottom-up. Animals live bottom-up, their organisms subject to the cycles of ordinary matter/energy. Humans have the possibility to live top-down, to channel higher energies through their organism. If done perfectly, this could certainly lead to much longer life-spans.
Take seeing for example. According to William H. Bates (Perfect Sight Without Glasses, 1920), people see only partly with the eyes, and more with the brain. That means, it’s possible to see using conscious energy. But people that don’t use conscious energy to see, see their vision declining with age. They think they see only with “physical” processes, and therefore believe that the only way to see better is to use a physical aid: glasses, which inexorably further the degeneration.
In a similar way, every organ could run more with conscious energy, and then even higher energies: creative, erotic or unitive, and transcendent. (See John G. Bennett, The Dramatic Universe, vol. 2, page 233, for a description of the energy levels.) If the entire organism were running on transcendent energy, it could be quasi-immortal. Of course that theoretical “perfect world” does not exist. We cannot escape “the shocks that flesh is heir to.”
Will may also extend life. J. G. Bennett states that after Gurdjieff died, the doctors that performed the autopsy found all his organs in such an advanced state of degeneration that none of them could understand how he had lived so long. He himself expected to die much earlier than he did. He had suffered during his life three major gunshot wounds, various diseases which, as he said, “left permanent calling cards,” a car crash that nearly killed him, and towards the end of his life another serious car crash. So you could say that his will kept him alive.
Those with no “raison d’etre” die sooner. Anecdotal evidence shows that humans who retire and thence live without any overriding interest or passion, often die within a few years.
Modern science, by working on curing or preventing diseases and investigating the physical aspects of aging, may help some, but essentially misses the most important point. Roy Walford, a well known gerontologist, applied his discoveries to himself. He hypothesized that people can live 120 years, mainly by controlling diet, but died of disease at eighty.
Could people live much longer than they currently do? Did certain ancient traditions possess knowledge about this which has been lost?
Gautama Buddha, generally acknowledged to have been an enlightened being, died at eighty. Or did he? Who knows?
In the Sumerian myth, Gilgamesh, after his friend Enkidu died, searched for and finally found Utnapishtim (Ziusudra), upon whom the gods had bestowed immortality after he survived the great flood. Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that there was no formula for immortality. After he challenged Gilgamesh to remain awake for seven days (a test which Gilgamesh failed), he revealed to him a secret about a certain plant which, if he ate it, would restore his youth.
This myth, first written about 4000 years ago, and supposedly passed down orally for 1000 years before that, may have been based on distorted stories from long before. Perhaps something like this: Utnapishtim of the Seapeoples culture with connections to proto-Sumerian people, survived the floods on his ship. Being the only survivor with longevity knowledge, those few others after the flood viewed him as being immortal – though he wasn’t, just lived much longer than them. The proto-Gilgamesh figure sought him, crossing a body of water to do so (Arabian Sea?), and found him (in India?) Of course not actually being immortal, he didn’t have a “formula” for it, but did transmit to this Gilgamesh at least some of his secret knowledge (the plant).
To gain this “plant,” Gilgamesh had to “dive to the bottom of the sea,” and endure the “pricking.” This may be a metaphor for going so deep into the subconscious that he could gain some control over the autonomic processes of the body, which would naturally resist this, thus the “pricking.”
Even now, yogis with “siddhis” can control the body in “miraculous” ways, such as consciously slowing the heartbeat, surviving being buried alive, going about naked in extreme cold, levitation, very fast running, etc. Until recently the last three items were part of regular curricula at Tibetan tantric universities. So why not also longevity?
So where does that leave us? People who live motivated by similar values as animals: pleaure/pain, praise/blame, power positions in their community, riches/poverty – will probably live similar lifespans as animals. Evolution requires the organism to live only long enough to reproduce and ensure the survival of the next generation. When the naturally given energy wanes, the organism declines and then dies.
Those who develop will, have strong personal aims, strive to understand the total situation and master their organism, may, with luck and the right knowledge, live longer. At least they will live more intense and purposeful lives while they do survive.
If knowledge about long living existed before and has been lost, perhaps some humans can rediscover it. In the meantime, make good use of the time that you have, and strive to remember that it will soon pass.