Category Archives: Immortality Medicine

In some ways, Hazel Sinnetts life has been a privileged one. Shes a young noblewoman from a wealthy family who has been given all the advantages that her familys money can afford.

But, frankly, 17-year-old Hazel hasnt ever taken an easy path. She hasnt simply relied on her attractiveness and position to help her find a suitable husband and start a suitable family. In fact, she has run determinedly away from suitable at every turn.

The idea of healing the human body has always consumed Hazels attention. Shes wanted nothing more than to become a doctor. A surgeon, in factthough she is forbidden to do so in 19th-century Edinburgh. She has lied, deceived, disguised herself as a boy and worked diligently to absorb every shred of medical knowledge she can.

Of course, if Im being absolutely truthful, thats not the only thing Hazel has ever desired. There was also a young man.

Their meeting was, shall we say, unusual. In an effort to procure human corpses to autopsy and learn from, Hazel turned to young Jack Currer, a desperate sort who stole freshly buried bodies from the graveyard for a living. During their secret interactions and late-night conversations, they fell in love. And then everything else fell apart.

Hazel nearly lost her life. And Jack likely did.

Now Hazels world is turned upside down. She is alone.

Amid losing Jack and any chance of accreditation, her clandestine work treating the broken bones, torn flesh and rotting teeth of the poor caused her great trouble. One case brought Hazels activities into the public eye. And it got her thrown in jail for murder.

Hazel is currently wasting to skin-and-bone in a filthy jail cell. She has no one there to help. No one to care. But even as her life wastes away, there is hope. For Princess Charlotte in London is mysteriously ill. And she wont let her male doctors touch her.

Hazel, however, is no male doctor. And even people in the royal court are, lately, whispering about the lady doctor in Scotland. After losing nearly everything, Hazelwho can never be a doctormight just be called to doctor a royal.

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Immortality: A Love Story - Plugged In

How far back do reports of body theft and sale of human remains stretch?

The theft of dead bodies, whether for science, exploration, or nefarious aims, has long been a part of human history. Some forms of excavation are more socially and historically accepted than others, however.

Archaeologists have been digging up graves for centuries. In January this year, archaeologists in Egypt excavated a mummy covered in layers of gold.

Long before medical schools set up donation programs, they obtained cadavers by unsavory methods grave robbing to meet their instructional needs. Grave robbing, especially in Black cemeteries, was common.

In the late 1700s in Massachusetts, dissection of a human body was limited by state law. So several faculty members and students at Harvard University traveled to graveyards and dug up dead bodies to use, according to The Harvard Crimson.

Harvard student Joseph Warren founded the Spunker Club, with the purpose robbing graves for medical research. These men, called resurrectionists, were present across the country, Carney said.

In response to the Spunker Club, Massachusetts enacted the Act to Protect the Sepulchers of the Dead in 1815, outlawing the disturbance of buried people. The medical schools solution to this, the Crimson reported, was purchasing cadavers from New York body snatchers.

As the years went by, more laws were passed to provide easier access to cadavers for medical students. The first was the Anatomy Act of 1831, which allowed students to dissect unclaimed bodies deemed indigent, insane, and imprisoned.

When the ability to transplant organs was achieved, all 50 states adopted the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act in 1968, allowing people to donate their bodies to science.

James Davidson, an archeology professor at the University of Florida, wrote that grave robbing of Black bodies around the Dallas area continued into the early 1900s.

Carney said that 60,000 skeletons were being sold out of Calcutta, India, in the 1980s; the practice was outlawed only after authorities learned that the bodies of many children were among them, he said.

There are little to no reports of people digging up graves in the United States in present day, but a grisly underground market for body parts still exists. A recent Reuters investigation found that the body-breaking industry profits off of poor Americans, offering to cremate bodies for free in exchange for the ability to sell some of the parts for medical research.

Former Harvard Medical School morgue manager Cedric Lodge, 55, is not accused of selling body parts for science; he allegedly was part of a ghoulish black market of curio collectors and crafts artists. According to Carney, that practice has gained popularity in recent years.

Jon Pichaya Ferry, known as JonsBones on TikTok, is one example of a modern-day bone enthusiast. Ferry, who has nearly 500,000 followers on the platform, gained popularity by showcasing his collection of human bones. His website states he only sells legally procured specimens.

Ray Madoff, a professor of law at Boston College and author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead, pointed to the complexity in American law surrounding dead bodies.

American law is grounded in this principle, that when a person dies, their body belongs to no one, she told the Globe. This is the foundational principle.

With the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, people could donate their bodies to medical schools, for example. But once donated, the new owner could use the body how they pleased. There are no legal protections if somebody donated their body for science to an institution that instead chose to use the cadaver as a crash test dummy, Madoff said.

Nobody has a property interest in a dead body, she said. This is what allows these cases to kind of proliferate.

Elllie Wolfe can be reached at ellie.wolfe@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @elliew0lfe.

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Harvard morgue scandal: The history of selling body parts - The Boston Globe

Yoga is incomplete without Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), Dhyana (meditation) and Dharana (focused concentration)

The history of Yoga in Indian culture is more than five thousand years old. Many complex physical diseases and mental disorders can be cured by various yoga asanas, pranayama, deep breathing, meditation, and mindfulness. There is also improvement in the personality. Due to these benefits, the popularity of yoga as a preventive therapy is increasing progressively all over the world. Yoga counsellors have been appointed in allopathic hospitals in many countries around the world including India.

The global popularity of yoga is not without reason, psychologists and doctors themselves have wholeheartedly accepted its positive effects on the body and mind. In the transition period of Covid-19, one can lead a stress-free and happy life by practising yoga. This unique way of life of the Indian sages teaches a person to live happily and also provides liberation to those who move forward on the path of Yoga. The sages created this knowledge for self-welfare so that they can get freedom from the hassle of worldly traffic and lead a prosperous life.

Today, yoga is being spread more in the context of health protection than from a spiritual perspective. There are three stages of yoga education - medicine, immortality, and salvation. After the scientific interpretation of Yoga Vidya, it is being used significantly all over the world to make the body healthy as well as to get rid of mental diseases.

According to a research work published in May 2020, in a prestigious research journal, the 'Indian Journal of Psychiatry', the Lab for Molecular Reproduction and Genetics of the Anatomy Department of AIIMS and the Department of Psychiatry together concluded that the treatment of depressed patients due to genetic causes is also possible through yoga.*

Under this research, a comparative study was done by a group of doctors on 160 patients undergoing treatment for depression. They were divided into two groups of 80 each - One group was restricted to medicine only, while the other group was made to practice yoga asanas for twelve weeks along with medicinal treatment. On completion of the research work, blood samples from both groups were tested. The report gave astounding results. Only 29% of the patients taking only the medicines benefitted, on the contrary, 60% of those who practised yoga along with medicines availed benefits.

*The Corona epidemic resulted in a rapid increase in the patients of depression in all the countries of the world.

By the research of AIIMS, Dr Reema Dada suggested that practising asanas like Surya Namaskar, Mayurasana, Vrikshasana, Tadasana, Bhujangasana, Janushirasana, Pawanmuktasana, Shalabhasana, Paschimottanasana, Anulom-Vilom Pranayama, Bhramari, Kapalbhati can significantly help in curing depression and other diseases like arthritis.

Mayurasan and Ardhamatsyendrasan are considered a panacea for diabetes and abdominal disorders. Apart from physical and mental balance, yoga is also effective in maintaining efficiency, a well-organized routine, and a lifestyle. Yoga has special importance in changing the sanskaras of the mind.

Although India has had many sages of Yoga, the most famous and prominent among them is Maharishi Patanjali. Today, yoga is directly related to disease prevention, keeping the body flexible and healthy. In reality, this is not yoga but only a means of 'Ashtayoga' of Patanjali Yogasutra. Patanjali has specifically defined yoga in the Yoga Sutras 'Yogaschittavrittinirodha' i.e., restraining the violent and malevolent instincts of the mind by practicing Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dhyana, and Dharana respectively.

On International Yoga Day, emphasis is given to the practice of physical postures and workouts. There is hardly any discussion on Pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), Dhyana (meditation), and Dharana (focused concentration). Yoga is incomplete without imbibing these three steps of the Yogasutra. It paves the way to make a person's body, mind, subconscious and soul work smoothly in one rhythm. It is a method of establishing an interrelationship between man and nature. Patanjali was an intense psychologist; he observed that man's personal life is full of sorrows. These sorrows are directly related to the change in the mind and so, Patanjali talks about living a disciplined life by methodically practicing the middle way of meditation Ashtanga Yoga.

However, in today's era, yoga is associated with Hinduism, and there is also an attempt to take political advantage of it. But the concept of yoga was born even when the concept of religion was not clear and is used for thousands of years to get rid of physical distress and worldly sorrows. Thus, it is propagated today at the international level due to its positive impact on the health of human beings and the welfare of humanity.

(The writer is a Yoga Expert and Naturopathist. Views expressed are personal)

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Imbibe yoga in its true spirit on the International Yoga Day - Daily Pioneer

Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in Secret Invasion

In the beginning, there was Fury. Samuel L. Jackson made his first appearance as the enigmatic director of S.H.I.E.L.D. 15 years ago, in a post-credits scene at the end of Iron Man. Youve become part of a bigger universe, he told Robert Downey Jr.s Tony Stark. You just dont know it yet. He might as well have been talking directly to the audience.

That moment launched the franchise weve come to know as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Of course, the MCU has come a long way since then, and so has Nick Fury. As of now, hes appeared in 11 films (The Marvels will make it an even dozen when it comes out in November), plus a handful of TV series and shorts, usually lurking in the background, influencing events with a subtle hand.

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After a decade and a half in the shadows, though, Fury finally steps into a starring role for Secret Invasion, a new series premiering June 21 on Disney+. Before you sit down to watch Marvels take on the spy thriller genre, it may be helpful to track Furys winding journey from soldier to spy to fugitive and back to spy again. If youve caught all of his MCU appearances on the big and small screen, this refresher may help put them in context. And if you havent, it should bring you up to speed on everything hes been up to lately.

Marvel Studios Secret Invasion | Official Trailer | Disney+

Many great comic-book characters have convoluted origins, and Nick Fury is no different. Originally created by Marvel legends Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, he first appeared in 1963 as the star of his own series, Sgt. Fury And His Howling Commandos. Up until 2001, the character was a cigar-chomping Italian-American tough guy who served in World War II, then became a CIA operative, then the leader of a secretive government agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. (the meaning behind the acronym has changed so many times it scarcely matters what it stands for anymore). If youre wondering how he stayed in such great shape all that time, the answer is: its a comic book, dont worry about it. (The actual answer is an immortality drug called the infinity formula, if you really wanna know.)

Story continues

When Marvel launched its Ultimate imprint in 2001, Nick Fury was among the heroes reimagined for a modern era. His redesign was based on the likeness of Samuel L. Jackson. This was years before Jackson had even been approached about playing the character on screen. Before that, the only other actor to portray him in live-action was David Hasselhoff, who starred in a made-for-TV movie on Fox in 1998 titled Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. After Fury was introduced in the MCU, Jackson became so closely associated with the character that Marvel retired the original version in the comics and replaced him with his son, Nick Fury Jr., who bore a strong resemblance to the Ultimate character, and thus the actor who inspired him. Jacksons Fury had come full circle.

The MCU wouldnt be what it is without Nick Fury. There certainly wouldnt be any Avengers without him. It was Fury who came up with the idea for the Avengers Initiative in the mid-90s, after meeting Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), a.k.a. Captain Marvel, and realizing that the planet needed a powerful defense force to protect it from otherworldly threats. He would later describe it as an idea to bring together a group of remarkable people, to see if they could become something more. To see if they could work together when we needed them to. To fight the battles that we never could.

As weve already mentioned, Fury first approached Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative at the end of Iron Man in 2008. He plays a bigger role in Iron Man 2, actively assessing Starks suitability for the team with the help of undercover S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), codenamed Black Widow. Fury ultimately determines that Stark is not a team player, but brings him on as a consultant anyway.

His next recruitment effort is focused on Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, after hes recovered from the ice thats kept him in stasis for almost 70 years. The last few pieces fall into place in The Avengers, with the additions of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Fury brings them together and gives them something to fight for, but ultimately couldnt keep the team under his control. With Phase One complete, it was on to more shocking revelations and perilous endeavors.

One of the most significant canon events in Nick Furys story happened in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. With the discovery that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated by agents of Hydra, Fury becomes a target for elimination by corrupt bureaucrat Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). He escapes elimination by faking his own death, taking Pierce by surprise before taking him out. Only a handful of trusted allies know the truth, including Steve, Natasha, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders).

On his way out the door, metaphorically speaking, Fury also pays a visit to his former protege Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) and gives him a digital toolbox full of classified information. He orders him to rebuild S.H.I.E.L.D. as its new director (though his authority to do that comes into question later). With that accomplished, he heads underground, officially deceased but continuing to operate as a free agent on his own terms.

Fury pops up again in Clint Bartons barn in Avengers: Age of Ultron, to scold Tony for building a sentient murderbot and rally the Avengers after their psychologically crushing defeat at the hands of Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen). He also helps them evacuate the residents of Sokovia in the midst of Ultrons attack by providing a helicarrier to take them to safety. Thats the last we see of him for some time.

The next time Fury appears (in chronological time), its in another post-credits scene at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. He becomes one of the unlucky half of the population to disappear after Thanos snap, but not before he sends out a very important distress call via modified pager. That hastily composed message brings Captain Marvel back to Earth and into the Avengers fold. Fury is brought back by Hulks snap in Avengers: Endgame, along with everyone else. His appearance at Tony Starks funeral seems to indicate that hes no longer pretending to be dead, or at least the knowledge of his existence has expanded to a wider circle.

In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Fury investigates a series of attacks by elemental beings in various locations around the world, and recruits Spider-Man (Tom Holland) to help defeat them. But all is not what it seems. The monsters are actually projections created by an egomaniacal scientist named Quentin Beck (Jake Gyllenhaal). Also, the Fury we see in the film isnt actually Fury. Hes Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), a shapeshifting Skrull sent to take his place while Fury vacations on a S.W.O.R.D. space station.

With the exception of a few episodes of the animated series What If...? Nick Fury was largely absent for most of Phase Four. The last we saw of him, he was getting ready to end his space sabbatical and get back to work. Now that Phase Five is underway, we expect to see him back to his old secretive ways, making surprise appearances in post-credit scenes and tying the disparate threads of the MCU together as it builds toward the next big team-up. Weve already seen him in trailers for The Marvels, but there are still six episodes of Secret Invasion to get through before we go back to space. The timelines still a bit murky, but it will eventually sort itself out. Until then, the omniscient spy whose secrets have secrets is keeping it to himself.

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Everything you need to know about Nick Fury as Secret Invasion arrives - Yahoo Entertainment

I hope I am not boring you with my posts on Adipurush, a movie that you seem to hate as I believe it has shown certain things that hurt Hindu sentiments. People have been criticizing Lord Ram and Sitas attire, Bajrang Balis facial hair, and also the way Ravan has been depicted in Adipurush. However, mind it that I am not really praising the action-adventure drama Adipursuh, but I am singing the praises of the original Hindu epic Ramayana, which you must be very well familiar with.

So, in this post, I am presenting some interesting facts about Ramayana which some of you may be familiar with if you are a Hindu like me. I have acquired knowledge of Ramayana over the decades and these are very minor portions of the massive knowledge of Ramayana that I have accumulated. If you want proof of these facts, I would advise you to read Ramayana by yourself.

International researchers have found that the Ramayana, which was written by Sage Valmiki 10,000 years ago, is actually based on a chronicle of events and characters recorded by him. This is not a work of fiction. This really happened during his era.

People justify the existence of Lord Ram with the Ram Setu a.k.a. the Adams Bridge, which is a chain of natural limestone shoals connecting India and Sri Lanka. But the major conflict with this concept lies in the fact that Sri Lanka was not the actual Ravans Lanka. In Ramayana, the location of the island nation of Ravans Lanka is somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean where the Mauritius Islands and British Islands are situated at present. So I would like to ask you, how come Lord Ram built the Ram Setu to travel to Sri Lanka when Sri Lanka was not the actual Ravans Lanka? Think logically!

As of now, there is no actual proof of the existence of Lord Ram. But there is proof of the existence of Lord Bajrang Bali. It is said that Bajrang Bali, being an avatar of Lord Shiva, had the superpower to alter his form and assume the height of a behemoth giant and he could even become small like an ant. Near Ashokvan in Sri Lanka, where Ravan was supposed to have kept Sita, there are massive footprints of Lord Bajrang Bali. These footprints are from the time when Bajrang Bali traveled to Lanka to meet Sita. Note that it is still unsure whether Sri Lanka was Ravans Lanka. The footprints are massive! While he walked, the footprints differ as he changed his form from his enormous size to his original size upon reaching Lanka. But does this mean then Sri Lanka was actually Ravans Lanka? Who knows, these all happened very long ago for anybody to estimate the correct facts. If Bajrang Bali was real, and Ravan was real, which I will be proving in the next sections, so was Lord Ram.

Legends say that after rescuing Sita from Ravan, Lord Ram doubted her chastity. She had to go through the Agni Pariksha, which means trial by fire, to prove her purity to her husband. She had to enter a burning pyre to prove herself as pure. She proved her purity as the fire did not burn her, and she came out unscathed.

Legends also say that as Ravan arrived to kidnap Sita, she prayed before the Fire God Agni Dev and the Fire God created her exact double. It was Sitas exact lookalike, not her, whom Ravan had actually taken to Lanka while the Fire God took the real Sita to heaven with him. Therefore, Ram was bound to perform the Agni Pariksha on Sita. When the lookalike of Sita was made to enter the fire, the Fire God destroyed the lookalike and restored the real Sita. This was the actual reason why Ram performed the trial by fire on Sita, according to other legends.

After my research on Lord Hanuman a.k.a Bajrang Bali, who was Lord Rams biggest devotee, I came to the conclusion that he was no half-man and half-monkey. He was a human being just like you and me. A big, tall, sturdy man, even bigger than any giant WWE wrestler you have ever seen. I will now tell you the reason, why he has been depicted as a man-monkey in Ramayana. Actually, he belonged to the Vanar sect of the then society. The word Vanar means monkey and thats the reason people usually imagine him as a monkey. In reality, he was neither a monkey nor a half-man and half-monkey. He was a forest-dwelling man. So, were the other Vanars. Just like Bajrang Bali, they were not chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons, but they were forest-dwelling men who went with Lord Ram to Ravans Lanka to rescue Sita.

You might have heard of Bollywood star Tiger Shroff. Does his name Tiger mean that he has a head of a tiger and a body of a man? No! Jokes apart, the same is the case with Bajrang Bali a.k.a Hanuman. People simply cant stop imagining him as a half-man and half-monkey just because of the section or caste of the then society to which he belonged as per Ramayana.

When Lord Ram first met Bajrang Bali, he talked to him and was impressed with his wisdom. He told his younger brother Lakshman about Bajrang Bali. Ram asked Lakshman in the Sanskrit language

II Na Ana Rigved Vinitasya Na A Yajurved Dharina

Na A Samved Vidusha Shakyam Evam Vibhashitum II

This means, The person with whom I just talked to was well-versed in all the four Vedas. Who is this enlightened man who is well-trained in the Rigveda, has enormous power to remember the Yaajurvda, and has achieved scholarly knowledge of the Samveda? The manner in which he talked to me, this type of impressive conversation is impossible without Vedic knowledge!

So, do you think that such a learned man who had achieved all the wisdom of this world, can be a monkey? No! Never! Lord Hanuman or Bajrang Bali was a human just like you and me.

Bajrang Bali was the avatar of Lord Shiva. There are tales where Bajrang Bali went to Sita and asked her for some food. Sita then started preparing meals for Bajrang Bali and kept on serving him. But the more she served, the more he ate! This continued until Sita became worried that very soon all her supplies will be over if Bajrang Bali kept on eating like that. Bajrang Bali kept on asking for food and Sita went on serving him. Sita then pleaded before Lord Shiva that if Bajrang Balis hunger is not satiated soon, all her supplies may get over. It was then Lord Shiva appeared behind Bajrang Bali. Sita saw to her amazement that it was Lord Shiva himself who was devouring her supplies, as Bajrang Bali was none other than an avatar of Lord Shiva. Lord Shiva, in fact, was testing her. It was then Lord Ram who gave a tulsi leaf to Sita with his name written on it and asked her to feed it to Bajrang Bali. Upon consuming the tulsi leaf, Bajrang Bali gave a massive belch as his hunger was satiated.

As per Valmikis Ramayana Uttar kand 36.23, Lord Brahma said to the God of the Winds, Your son, Bajrang Bali, will be terrible towards enemies and will be invincible to friends. No one can defeat him in wars! And thats how Bajrang Bali was. He was invincible and possessed divine powers to do things that would seem impossible to anybody.

According to Hindu mythology, Bajrang Bali possesses the gift of immortality. As a celestial being and an incarnation of Lord Shivas divine energy, it has been said that Bajrang Bali will reside on the Gandhamadan mountain in Kaliyug (which is now), transcending the boundaries of time and mortality. You may not believe this but as per reports, he is still alive, but is in the form of energy. He is an avatar of Lord Shiva and so, he is not visible to the naked eye in Kaliyug. It is said that, at present, he is meditating in the mountains.

You must be thinking, what rubbish I am speaking of. These are facts based on my research and let me tell you, I am from a science background. Science does not believe in God. But there are certain things on this planet that science fails to explain.

Ravan was actually a half-Brahmin and half-demon. Thats why he is often referred to as Brahmasur. Ravans father was Vishwashrava, who was a Brahmin and his mother was Kaikasi, who was a demoness.

I would like to clear up the misconception that most people have regarding Ravan. Ravan has been represented as a demon with ten heads. Thats what we think! Because Ravan represents evil, so we imagine him as a demon with ten heads. But this is far from reality. Ravan was a human with great powers, and he lived 10,000 years ago. There is no arguing to the fact that the man was huge! He stood at a staggering height of 16 to 18 feet, thats why he is often represented as a demon. And also because of his evil manners, where tales reveal that he once tried to rape a damsel named Rambha who was the consort of Nalakuvara, the son of the God of wealth Kuber. So, the angry Nalakuvara cursed Ravan that if he tries to even touch any woman without her consent, his head will blow up into pieces. And mind you, in earlier times, the curses of Gods and sages were so powerful that if they cursed someone, that person was sure to be doomed. As a result, after Ravan abducted Sita, he didnt do anything wrong to her. Thats the reason Sita remained pure in Ravans captivity. He never touched her.

Now, I would like to talk about the ten heads of Ravan. You are wrong if you think that Ravan used to have ten heads or that those ten heads appeared whenever he wished them to. Actually, ten heads signify how learned and wise Ravan was. If you think that he was a cruel and wicked ruler, then you are mistaken. As a ruler, Ravan was magnificent, and he was also a great devotee of Lord Shiva. Under him, the kingdom of Lanka shone with gold and prosperity. The ten heads of Ravan actually represent that he had mastered all of the six Shastras and four Vedas in Hinduism. Thats why he is said to possess the wisdom of ten heads. He did not actually have ten heads. Also, Ravan and his kingdom of Lanka depicted in Adipurush are absolutely fake. The kingdom of Lanka shown in Adipurush has been depicted to be covered in darkness and surrounded by monstrous creatures. This is far from reality! The real Lanka. described in Ramayana, used to shine in gold and was the most glamorous kingdom you would have ever seen.

Talking about Ravans existence, he did exist around 10,000 years ago. He had authored books like Ravan Samhita which focuses on Lord Shivas worship, astrology, and medicine. He had also written the book Arka Prakasham which focuses on Siddha Medicine. I have both the books with me and they have been legitimately written by Ravan. I have to tell you, instead of abusing Ravan, if you read the books which he had written, you will become one of the wisest persons in this world. Ravan was also a maestro veena player and he himself had composed the Shiv Tandav Stotram which Hindus chant even today.

If you ask me, I would say that Ramayana may be a semi-fiction that had been woven around a great learned king who ruled over the land of Lanka many years ago. If you think, the airplane was invented by the Wright Brothers in 1903, then too you are mistaken. Ravan had his own airplane in which he had abducted Sita. There was no Godzilla-sized flying vampire bat that has been shown in Adipurush. Ravans airplane was called Pushpak Viman and he used to fly from Lanka to India crossing the Indian Ocean on that. It is said that Ravan actually had stolen the Pushpak Viman from Lord Kuber, the lord of wealth.

Ravans kingdom of Lanka which has been mentioned in Ramayana, was exactly at the location where at present the Mauritius Islands and British Islands are located. It is not the country of Sri Lanka. Who knows, maybe the Mauritius Islands and British Islands were conjoined into the land of Lanka 10,000 years ago.

Ravan had asked for a boon of immortality from Lord Brahma. Lord Brahma politely declined the immortality boon and instead gave Ravan the boon to become invincible. Brahma also said to Ravan that his life would be at his navel. While giving Ravan the boon of invincibility, Brahma mentioned that no God or Demon can kill you, but he forgot to mention human beings! God Vishnu, thus, incarnated himself as Lord Ram and came to earth as a human being to kill Ravan. On the tenth day of the battle between Lord Ram and Ravan, Vibhishan (Ravans younger brother) told Ram to strike an arrow at Ravans navel, thus, killing him.

Now if you ask me, why Ravan kidnapped Sita? Was he so lustful that he would marry her at the cost of his life? No! The fact is that Ravan himself wanted to die at the hands of Lord Ram! Surprised? Well then let me tell you that facts reveal that Ravan actually knew that he was destined to die at the hands of Lord Ram, who was an avatar of God Vishnu. He was told that he would be killed by an avatar of Vishnu, and he knew that the Vishnu avatar was none other than Lord Ram. Thats the reason he abducted Lord Rams wife because he wanted Ram to come for him and kill him. After being killed by Lord Ram, Ravan attained salvation, which means he would never be reborn on Earth ever again. He died at the hands of God!

After Lord Ram shot Ravan, and he was on the verge of dying, Ram told his brother Lakshman to hurry and take blessings, words of wisdom, and life lessons fromRavan.

Lakshman approached the dying Ravan, stood at his head, and said, O the great learned Demon King, do not let your knowledge die with you. Share it with us and wash away your sins. The dying Ravan did not respond to Lakshman and looked away.

An angry Lakshman went back to Ram and told him that Ravan was too arrogant to tell him anything. Ram comforted his brother and asked him softly, Where did you stand while asking Ravan for knowledge? Lakshman said, Next to his head so that I can clearly hear what he had to say.

Now, Ram walked to where Ravan lay. Lakshman watched in astonishment as his elder brother knelt at Ravans feet. With palms folded, he bowed before the dying Ravan. With extreme respect, Ram said to Ravan,O Lord of Lanka, you abducted my wife, a terrible crime for which I have been forced to punish you. Now, you are no more my enemy. I bow to you and request you to share your wisdom with me. Please do that for if you die without doing so, all your wisdom will be lost forever to the world. To Lakshmans surprise, Ravan opened his eyes. He raised his arms to salute Ram and said, If only I had more time as your teacher than as your enemy.

Ravan further continued, Standing at my feet as a student should, unlike your rude younger brother, you are a worthy recipient of my knowledge. I have very little time, so I cannot share much but let me tell you one important lesson I have learned in my life. Things that are bad for you, seduce you easily; you run towards them impatiently. But things that are actually good for you, fail to attract you; you shun them creatively, finding powerful excuses to justify your procrastination. That is why I was impatient to abduct Sita but avoided meeting you. This is the wisdom of my life, O Lord Ram. I salute you, and these are my last words. I give it to you.

It was then Lakshman stood at Ravans feet respectfully and then Ravan narrated to him some life lessons which I am presenting before you.

It has been revealed by the Sri Lankan government that they have kept Ravans corpse preserved in a coffin which is 18 feet long, inside a cave in Sri Lanka. It is not known whether this claim by the Sri Lankan government is legitimate or not.

To end this, I would like to conclude with the saying

II Rmdivat Vartitavya Na Tu Rvadivat II

This means, One should behave like Lord Ram and not like Ravan.

Ram and Ravan are two men of contrasting characters in the Ramayana. Both had knowledge, wealth, and power. Ravan was a great learned man and he had studied the Vedas but he did not possess any sense of modesty or humanity. He tried to rule the three worlds, heaven, hell, and earth all by himself. He used his power to harm the noble and the pious. In contrast, Ram used his power and wealth to serve the people.

And also if you think that Adipurush has been taken from Planet of the Apes, then again you are mistaken. It was actually the Planet of the Apes that was hugely inspired by the Hindu epic Ramayana. Guys, I can go on narrating about Ramayana for eternity. But I believe this much knowledge of Ramayana is enough for the time being. I will see you guys in my upcoming reviews on The Movie Blog!

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Some Interesting Facts On The Hindu Epic Ramayana - The Movie Blog

Do humans need a new Bible written by artificial intelligence (AI)? Biblically, the resounding answer is no. But Professor Yuval Harari, contributing author and conference speaker for the World Economic Forum (WEF), recently claimed otherwise. In a videoed interview, Harari remarked that AI could not only write a new Bible, but also a correct oneimplying that Gods Word is incorrect.

For context, Harari had been explaining how AI is different from all other previous technological breakthroughs because its the first technology that can make decisionsincluding decisions about humansand generate ideas.1 To illustrate, Harari noted that the world-changing breakthrough of the Gutenberg printing press could generate copies of the Bible. But the printing press could not create new content to include in the Bible, nor could it interpret or evaluate the Bible.

However, Harari continued, AI can create new ideas, can even write a new Bible. . . . Throughout history religions dreamed about having a book written by a superhuman intelligence, by a non-human entity. He then stated (although not entirely accurately2) that every religion claims its holy book originated from superhuman intelligence while other religions rely on manmade texts. Harari continued, In a few years, there might be religions that are actually correct, thatjust think about a religion whose holy book is written by an AI. That could be a reality in a few years.3

What should we make of these remarks? Lets look closer at who Harari is and what technology he was talking about, so we can understand these comments significance.

Along with being a historian, futurist, and Israeli university professor, Yuval Harari is a well-known author and contributor to the World Economic Forum. Hes written two popular books, one titled Sapiens that chronicles the (supposed) evolutionary rise of humanity and a second attempting to predict the rise of a new human specieshence the title Homo Deus, meaning God Man.

Noteworthily, Harari does not view this foreseen new human species as divine. He does not believe in any form of supernatural. Instead, he views homo deus as superhuman, much like the Greek gods who were not omniscient or all-powerful, but simply had powers that made them appear godlike to the people in Greek mythology. Harari believes that homo deus will be that kind of person.

While Harari self-identifies as an atheist, the group he is most commonly associated with, the World Economic Forum (WEF), openly courts faith leaders. A range of religious leaders, from Pope Francis to Rick Warren,4 has spoken at the Forums annual meeting in Davos. And Christianity is far from the only religion present at Davos. The Forum collaborates with all faiths. Just what is the WEF?

The WEF is an NGO noted for lobbying governments to enact progressive policies. However, they go far beyond mere lobbying. WEF founder and leader Dr. Klaus Schwab admits that the Forum penetrate[s] the cabinets of world governments to achieve their agenda.5 They do this through a program called the Young Global Leaders. Notable alumni of the program include the current leaders of Canada, France, and Belgium. The program also includes royals from at least two countries (including the crown prince of Norway); journalists from major news organizations like the Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News; CEOs and VPs from major companies like Citi Bank and Verizon; founders of major brands like Airbnb, Facebook, and Wikipedia; parliamentarians from Chile, Israel, Nepal, New Zealand, and Finland; and professors from universities like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and UC Berkley. Schwab has not just penetrated a handful of cabinets, but the much wider world.6

An organization with tentacles as widespread as the WEFs should be taken very seriously. It is important to know what they are about and why they would care so much about using AI to reprogram religions. It may help to know that in 1974, Dr. Schwab insisted on hosting an openly Communist Brazilian archbishop named Dom Hlder Cmara at the Forum in Switzerlandeven though Switzerlands laws against Communism made Cmaras appearance there illegal.7,8

Many of the ideas espoused by the WEF itself are Marxist or neo-Marxist in nature. For example, Schwab advocates for increased governmental control of economies through public-private partnerships to push society toward desired goals.9 To do this, he calls for what he terms a Great Reset, borrowing from WEF contributor Richard Floridas book of the same name.

Richard Florida explicitly calls for renting instead of home ownership,10 reduction in car travel,11 and reduction in energy consumption.12 His solution to achieve these goals is either a 15-minute city or a 15-minute baseline, where everything you need is within a 15-minute walking/driving distance except in exceptional circumstances.13 The only way to enforce such a system would be checkpoints or a complete change in values, eliminating freedom of movement.

Schwab echoes Richard Floridas desire to reduce private property but goes a step further by openly calling for global governance to fix the issues.14 Harari appears to concur, writing in Homo Deus that the goal of government has morphed into providing people with happiness.15 To ensure this happiness, Harari also calls for a global government.16 To do this, Harari advocates providing chemicals that induce happiness in the brain, either by bioengineering or by turning humans into godlike cyborgs.17 This is transhumanism in a nutshell. Harari postulates a future in which the elites of society are effectively made immortal by medicine and technology while the useless class are cared for by the state.18

The combination of Hararis ideas about happiness and the Marxian reduction of private property led the WEF to release a video in which the sentences Youll own nothing. And youll be happy featured prominently.19 Importantly, these ideas are not new but have been part of a long-running agenda openly linked to spiritual darkness. As this article documents, a prominent nineteenth-century advocate for communism named Robert Owen wrote that sance spirits he communicated with endorsed a globalist form of socialism in which people would essentially own nothing and be happy. The spirits told Owen that they would gradually persuade people to adopt this scheme, even if nobody believed Owen at first.

Now were apparently watching that prediction unfold in real time. The WEFs deadline for many of their stated goals is 2030as of this writing, less than seven years away.20

The problem the WEF and other likeminded organizations has is that the vast majority of the worlds population is religiousand religion tends to value private property and human rights, at least to some extent. The Bible is explicit that both life and property are inviolate and cannot be taken without process of law. The Ten Commandments clearly state that both murder and theft are wrong, with no exceptions. The WEF recognizes that the values people hold often come directly out of their faiths.21 Therefore, faiths must change.

Correspondingly, the WEF partners with world leaders to change the religious practices of a given faith to better suit their agenda. During the Ebola crisis in West Africa, faith leaders were coopted to change burial practicesostensibly to reduce death tolls, even though people felt that their religious convictions were being violated.22 Whether the burial practices were causing extra deaths is immaterial. The point is, religious convictions were reshaped, from the top down, to suit the agenda of an outside group. What has happened once, can and will happen again.

Put into context, Hararis comments about AI seem much more concerning. Harari views himself as a prophet, proclaiming potential doom unless humanity does something. He views religion in general with disfavor, but the idea of an AI-generated religious book that lacks what he terms the myths of other religions appears more palatable. Such an idea would also align with the WEFs stated goals. After all, an AI-generated religious text could be programmed to promote the values of the WEF: lack of private property, restricted freedom of movement, and transhumanism. These values also meld perfectly with Hararis view that liberty, including cognitive libertyalong with equality and rightsis a socially constructed myth.23 Keep in mind, Harari said such a religion would be essentially correct. He does not believe in absolute right and wrong, so the only correct is that which aligns with his views.

Essentially, AI is software programmed in ways that try to replicate human intelligence.24 Like an artificial brain, AI can be designed to receive sensory input from devices like cameras or microphones, interpret the data, and perform specific actions in responseincluding by means of an artificial body (a robot).

Weak AI, which is programmed to perform highly specific tasks, is already widespread. But strong AI, which would theoretically equal or surpass human intelligence, is still speculative. Weak AI relies mainly on rote learning, or memorizing information from past experiences to solve specified problems. Strong AI, however, would supposedly achieve general intelligencethe ability to apply knowledge from past experiences to solve new problems.

Already, some researchers believe they have found sparks of general intelligence in ChatGTP-4.25 This program, the latest version of the AI language model thats been making global shockwaves, can generate complex written content in secondsincluding stories, poems, movie plots, essays, sermons, answers to abstract questions, and much more.

Just what is ChatGPT? While the chat part alludes to the programs function as an advanced chatbot, the GPT bit stands for generative pre-trained transformer. Transformer indicates the type of AI system involved, which is designed to work like an artificial network of neurons (brain cells). Pre-trained means the program has already learned to function by analyzing massive sets of datain this case, text from sources across the internet. And generative refers to the programs ability to create humanlike written materials based on that data.

Ultimately, AI is a toolalbeit an incredibly powerful one. And like any tool, humans can apply AI (whether intentionally or unintentionally) for helpful or harmful purposes.

Already, a wide range of AI applications exist to make tasks easier, quicker, and more efficient. Current or prospective AI technologies may benefit multiple fields including medicine, agriculture, business, finances, education, and the military. For instance, one research team observed that AIs benefits for medicine alone include improving diagnostic accuracy, detecting diseases before they express, improving prevention, designing patient-centred care pathways, enhancing epidemiology, supporting population health management, and reducing the negative impact of social determinants of health.26 However, the researchers continue, The same technologies pose some critical threats to patient privacy and safety, care providers safety from liability, opportunities for employment, patient engagement, clinician trust and scientific progress itself.27

These observations highlight how even within one field, the same technology can harbor both benefits and risks we need to consider if were to use the technology wisely. One foreseeable risk, for instance, is that growing reliance on AI for written content may contribute to a dumbed-down society of people who cannot think, research, or communicate for themselvesand are therefore easy to control. Professor Harari also noted several additional risks in the interview quoted above, explaining how abuses of AIs abilities (including its potential for manipulating peoples political opinions) could undermine democracy, fuel an arms race between nations, and leave only dictatorships surviving.28

Others fear even worse scenarios. For instance, a recent opinion editorial published by Scientific American claimed,

Still others, however, laud these qualities in hopes of creating AI gods. For instance, as AiG has previously reported, Elon Musk has stated that Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, wanted AI programmers to develop digital super-intelligence, basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.30 If mixed with humans, the goal could be to create the homo deus that Harari writes of.

Gods Word clearly answers such attempts to elevate creationincluding human creationsto a godlike status. Here are just a few examples:

Although far more sophisticated than the statue idols that people in biblical times worshipped, digital gods are still the works of human handslifeless things that cannot love, cannot save, and cannot redeem creation from its sin-cursed state.

Relatedly, because AI programs have human developers and rely on text from human authors, AI is prone to being tainted by the errors and biases of fallen, finite, fallible humans. (You can see just a few important examples of these errors and biases in this video with AiGs Bryan Osborne.)

For all these reasons, humans must not fall into the trap of looking to AI as the ultimate authority for truth. Only the Word of our all-knowing, infinite, infallible God can fill that role. But voices like Professor Hararis seem to suggest that AI should function as humanitys authority for truthat least, for spiritual truthby generating new holy books. Harari cannot say these books would be correct without setting himself as the authority for truth above Gods Word, as humans have attempted to do since Eden.

Even without overtly worshipping AI or revering AI-generated text as a holy book, Christians may still fall into the trap of looking to AI for other forms of spiritual leadership. Recently, for instance, a church in Germany hosted a service entirely produced by AIfeaturing AI worship leaders, an AI pastor, and an AI-generated sermon. Such services not only harbor the risk of importing biased, unbiblical messages into the teachings rather than rightly handling the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15), but AI church also contradicts the biblical concept of church. Biblically, church is not a spectator sport where people download entertainment and information from whatever sourcehuman or digitalhappens to provide it. Church is the fully human body of Christ, who gather in fellowship around the worship, Word, and remembrance of our fully divine and fully human Savior. Robots do not belong either as participants in the pews or pastors in the pulpits.

On that note, another way churches might forfeit spiritual leadership to AI is if pastors increasingly use AI to generate sermons. While AI could be applied for helpful purposes to assist with research, summarizing sources, or similar tasks, pastors who relegate their exegetical duties to AI put themselves and their congregations in danger on multiple levels. For starters, conceding spiritual authority to AI opens the door for unbiblical (or simply non-factual) teachings to reach congregantsespecially if pastors are not staying in the Word themselves to catch such errors. But perhaps more significantly, reliance on AI cheats the pastor out of his biblical responsibility to study to show himself approved, diving into the Word of God for himself to become complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.31

In summary, Hararis recent calls for an AI-generated Bible did not appear in isolation but are embedded in a much broader agenda that sets up humans (or human technology) as the authority for truth. This agenda, apparent in the openly stated goals of the WEF, envisions a new form of humanity united under a system of global governance, shared property, and manmade spirituality. These realities highlight the appeal of an AI-authored holy book which could provide spiritual guidance in line with the worldview beliefs specified for the new society.

AI would make for an especially compelling spiritual leader figure for this type of society, as AIs superhuman-like powers might easily distract people from the reality that its answers are not neutral but the result of programming by fallible, fallen, biased humans. AI is not God, cannot function as humanitys authority for truth, and must not be treated as a spiritual leader.

What does all this mean for Christians? First, although the scope and scale of these realities are certainly daunting, Christians must rest assured that God is sovereign over his creation, none of this surprises him, and he will not allow human schemes to unfold apart from his purposes. As the tower of Babel reminds us, human ambitions to apply technology in hopes of collectively ascending to Gods level are nothing newand God can easily thwart them if he so chooses.

Christians can also respond by continuing to faithfully study and stand on the actual Word of God, remembering to apply biblical critical thinking in recognition of AIs fallibility. Along the way, were also wise to keep our research, writing, and communication skills sharp rather than dull our God-given mental capacities by increasingly outsourcing such tasks to AI. Pastors, especially, must not fall into the trap of letting AI take over their biblical responsibilities. Finally, Christians can approach these times as opportunities to share the gospel, pointing others to the true hope for humanity that digital gods can never offer.

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Will AI Become Our New Gods? - Answers In Genesis

The Woodlands is home to a growing number of critically-acclaimed restaurants. But what's growing on the side of its roadways can often be just as delicious.

Spring resident Mark Vonderbuggen as been teaching Texans how to forage through his blog, Foraging Texas, since 2008, although he's been foraging since he was a child in Minnesota. He's trained several competitors for survival show "Alone" but isn't allowed to compete himself because he may be too knowledgeable, Vonderbuggen said.

Within a two-hour walk, Vonderbuggen can identify dozens of edible herbs, vines, trees and fungi during his foraging classes at the Spring Creek Nature Center.

Foraging helps residents learn about vital foods and medicinal plants in the event of a catastrophe. It also keeps residents in touch with their environment and aligns with Houston's culture of food exploration.

"Back (in 2008) it was equal amounts of hippies and survivalists because both have their concerns about the situation, and then it branched out into adventure eaters, foodies, bartenders, home schoolers, bush crafters," Vonderbuggen said. "Now it's basically like everyone has become a survivalist together just with the way the world is going."

ON YOURCONROENEWS: Hispanic-owned businesses continue to grow, build community ties in The Woodlands

More easily recognizable native plants include muscodine grapes, rabbiteye blueberries, blackberries, persimmons, and nuts such as pecans. Texas is the state with the second-highest plant diversity in the nation, Vonderbuggen said, and many less popular plants are just as tasty.

When cooked, a common vine called greenbriar tastes similar to asparagus, Vonderbuggen said, while edible turks cap flowers have leaves that can be eaten like spinach. Some plants, like the Texas mallow, are good for maintaining glucose levels for any diabetics stuck in the woods.

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, calorie-dense foods include various seeds and nuts, like pine nuts, and the "heart" of dwarf palmettos, which grow throughout the swamps of southeast Texas.

Common edible mushrooms include bright yellow chantarelles and oyster mushrooms. To learn more about edible mushrooms, The Woodlands residents can attend a class from Texas Master Naturalist and township resident Teri MacArthur, who is Vonderbuggen's mentor and one of the top mushroom experts in Texas.

Vonderbuggen holds a doctoratein physical organic chemistry and sells natural supplements through his brand, Medicine Man. Some popular natural medicinal plants include Japanese honeysuckle, which can treat respiratory issues; spiderwort, which was used by Native Americans to treat insect bites treat anxiety and aid with stomachaches; and reishi mushrooms, which was dubbed the "elixir of immortality" in ancient East Asia.

Some nonedible plants can mimic edible ones, so it's important to know for sure before eating any wild plant, Vonderbuggen said. Common mistakes include eating dog fennel, which looks similar to fennel, and Chinese privet, which resembles yaupon holly, an edible plant that contains caffeine.

Vonderbuggen recommends recognizing 5 to 6 structural features on a plant and 8 to 10 on any fungi before eating.

In The Woodlands and the rest of Texas, foragers are also limited to roadsides or private property. Vonderbuggen said some law enforcement or landowners may not be aware of the roadside law, however, and that private property with permission is best. Vonderbuggen has a list of private property that allows foraging on his site.

ONYOURCONROENEWS: YMCA of Greater Houston to build new aquatics center for around $3.5M in Montgomery County

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With foraging space often risky and limited, Joshua Reynolds helps residents bring foraging techniques to their own backyard.

Reynolds began permaculture business Texas Edible Landscapes by accident after his daughter experienced what seemed to be a mysterious allregic reaction to food. When buying all organic became too expensive and traditional gardening too hard, Reynolds came across permaculture, or the development of more sustainable and self-sufficient agricultural methods.

Reynolds studied under renowned permaculturist Geoff Lawton in Australia; now, he helps clients from The Woodlands and Magnolia to Nicaragua grow food within walking distance of their kitchen. Some plants that work best with Houston's subtropical climate include peach, plum and avocado trees, blueberries and herbs, Reynolds said.

For his first project in The Woodlands, Reynolds was worried that township restrictions and heavy shade would affect the final product. But by combining traditional landscaping with gardening, he was able to create what looked like a naturally wooded front yard.

"We were actually able to utilize the front yard using plants that were both edible and ornamental, so that it looked pretty and fit the theme of The Woodlands being a wooded property," Reynolds said. "We were able to use shrubs and small trees and herbs that were beautiful, but also edible at the same time. The project turned out awesome."

Part of Reynolds' services includes creating a food forest, an ancient method which involves creating different edible canopy layers to mimic a forest's edge. Food forests and other permaculture techniques require more work up front, but are eventually simpler and more beneficial to the environment than maintaining a garden.

It's also better for the environment, attracting pollinators and other wildlife while maintaining a low carbon footprint, Reynolds said.

"This is an oil industry, it's an oil town, and when I first got started in 2016, permaculture design was a tough sell because everybody was like, 'I'll just go to the store and buy it,'" Reynolds said. "But we have a lot of sustainably-minded people now in the area who don't want to contribute to the issues of artificial fertilizers or organic fertilizers. They want to grow more eco-friendly with native species."

claire.partain@houstonchronicle.com

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There's food growing in The Woodlands. Here's how to forage for it ... - Houston Chronicle

Tulisha srivastava

Published: 2023-06-19T15:42:49

Updated : 2023-06-19T15:45:25

One Pieces recent chapter hints Imu is immortal and has been around since the Void Century. However, there is only one source of immortality in the entirety of One Piece: Trafalgar Laws Op-Op Fruit.

Since the Final Saga of One Piece began, fans have been learning more about the mysterious ruler of the world, Imu. One Piece chapter 1084, reveals that Imu has some sort of connection with Queen Lili of Arabasta.

Even now, the series has yet to reveal the true identity of the person sitting on the Empty Throne. However, their powers are unlike anything in the world.

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Considering the long-standing history of the World Government as well as Imus role in it, the possibility of Imu being immortal is almost certain at this point. Furthermore, Shonen anime have a reputation for introducing final villains as immortals.

Op-Op Fruit is a powerful Paramecia-type devil fruit that allows the user to perform miraculous surgeries, cure untreatable diseases, and even circumvent physical disabilities.

The previous users of this devil fruit have always been doctors. Even Trafalgar Law can use this power efficiently because of studying medicine since childhood.

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However, Op-Op Fruit is also called the Ultimate Devil Fruit for granting the power of immortality to at least one individual. This is why this devil fruit is costly and highly sought after among marines and pirates alike.

Op-Op Fruit is the only source of immortality in the entire series, and the user can decide to either make themselves immortal or another person at the cost of their lives.

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Eiichiro Oda introduced the concept of immortality through the Op-Op Fruit. However, the revelation itself was too random that it seemed odd. Oda never adds anything redundant in One Piece.

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The fact that he decided to reveal the true powers of Laws devil fruit in the Dressrosa Arc means he has something major planned for the Final Saga. Theres no way for Imu to be the user of Op-Op Fruit because it wouldnt have reappeared if the user made themselves immortal.

Therefore, it is highly likely that someone from the Void Century with the power of the Op-Op Fruit used it to make Imu immortal at the cost of their own life.

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Furthermore, in One Piece chapter 1086, Ivankov speculates that Imus full name isSaint Imu of House Nerona, one of the rulers of the twenty allied nations. Ivankov also shows a book to Sabo and mentions an ability that can grant eternal youth. Its most likely the Op-Op Fruit since its the ability with such power.

One Piece can currently be streamed onCrunchyroll. In the meantime, check out our other anime coverage below:

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Genyas abilities in Demon Slayer|Muzan Kibutsuji abilities in Demon Slayer|Demon Slayers The Infinity Castle|Kagaya Ubuyashiki abilities in Demon Slayer|Demon Slayer Thunder Breathing 7th form|The real villain in Hells Paradise|Hells Paradises Elixir of Life|One Pieces Empty Throne|One Piece creator|One Piece manga hiatuses|One Piece Red Hair Pirates|One Piece Shanks twin theory|Bleach vs Naruto|Narutos Talk no Jutsu problem

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One Piece: Op-Op Fruit is the source of Imus immortality - Dexerto

In the aftermath of the coronation of King Charles, Professor Louis Ren Beres argues that a quid pro quo for subject loyalty is an irrevocable declaration that the states sovereignty represents the optimal path to power over death...

Its an uncommon association, but certain connections have been suggested between sovereignty (the highest form of earthly authority) and offerings of immortality. For the most part, at the level of philosophical investigation, such connections have not always been subtle. Observes G F Hegel (1820) in The Philosophy of Right: The state is the march of God in the world. And from Heinrich von Treitschkes 1897 Lecture on Politics: Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.

There is some nuance here. Von Treitschkes statement suggests something less than the classic after-worldly meaning of immortality. He is likely suggesting, after all, that something akin to eternal fame and not life everlasting, best represents this generally invisible dynamic of world politics. Though there can exist no scientifically valid ways of rank-ordering two contending meanings of immortality over time and space, there can be little doubt that any presumptive power over death must bestow greater satisfactions than any purported power over personal reputation.

The Realpolitik Foundation

To be sure. there are variously assorted details. Though difficult to understand, Realpolitik an historical shorthand for traditional power politics draws its animating force from the microcosm, from the individual. While inconspicuous, it is this personal human search for immortality or staying alive that may ultimately drive not only domestic kingships but also comprehensive international relations.

In any final reckoning, each states competitive struggle for the death of other designable states may represent a last-ditch defense against both collective and personal annihilation. Among other things, this obscure simultaneity suggests that the most genuine rationale of Realpolitik is not really the acquisition of territory, wealth or victory. However unwitting or sub-conscious, it is the avoidance of personal death.

This is not an easy idea for scholars and policy-makers to conceptualize, but ignoring it could severely limit humankinds rapidly disappearing chances for survival. Some preliminary understandings can be drawn from King Charles III recent coronation. It is the sovereign state, blessed by Gods vicars here on earth (in this case, the Archbishop of Canterbury) that holds the key to life everlasting.

These ideas are not easily understood by a countrys mass or by career politicians. To begin, searches for collective immortality based on sovereignty may signify core yearnings to avoid personal death. Though such fervid hopes can be nurtured only by assorted convictions of faith, not science, the history of humankind reveals no evidence that Reason could ever trump anti-Reason. Even in our glittering age of advanced technology and AI, conspicuous claims of non-rational belief continue to drive states and sub-states toward an explosively violent geopolitics. Lamentably, any corollary associations of sacredness with national armed force would further ensure that war, terror or genocide serve the highest imaginable forms of human power.

Bases of Deeper Understanding

But how should these very complicated connections be better understood? Why ought anyone acknowledge that a world politics based upon sovereignty offers a plausible path to personal immortality? What are the most revealing connecting factors? About the recent coronation in London, wouldnt we all be better off just asking the usual prosaic questions about King Charles, Camilla, William, Harry, etc.?

With pride of place, history should be our starting point. In his still-illuminating classic, Man and Crisis (1958), 20th century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega yGasset comments thoughtfully and prophetically: History is an illustrious war against death. Though this comment is captivating and sets the stage for our own present queries about sovereignty and immortality, it still represents only a partial piece of a much wider truth: Ultimately, power over death always represents the greatest conceivable form of power here on earth; but acquiring such power in world politics can sometimes demand the killing of assorted others.

Inter alia, as more-or-less derivative from sovereign authority, there is war, terrorism and genocide.

Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. I believe because it is absurd. Sovereignty offers a direct link to immortality (collective and personal), but the palpable rewards of power over death are too-frequently tied to engineered violence and armed force. Often its a Faustian bargain.

There is more. To acquire a politically manageable power over death, individuals (microcosm) and states (macrocosm) must first make tangible preparations to bring irreversible fatality to purported enemies. At times, such viscerally belligerent thinking could involve seductive notions of martyrdom. Significantly, as we may learn from the evening news, especially in the Middle East, these notions may call not only for war, but also for terror and genocide. In all cases, the planned mass killing of other human beings is more-or-less comparable to religious sacrifice, a primal ritual oriented toward the intentional deflection of death to others.

There are additional details. Scholars and policy-makers should continuously re-examine vital underlying links between microcosm and macrocosm. In this regard, Elias Canetti, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote boldly of not being dead as the principal exemplar of ascertainable power. Confronted with what Canetti called terror at the fact of death, humankind both individually, and collectively always seeks one particular advantage above all others. This evident advantage is to remain standing while others prepare to lie down.

In the end, it is only those who can remain upright, however temporarily, who are victorious. It is these fortunate ones, after all, who have keenly managed to divert death to others. By definition, there can be no greater or more advantageous diversion.

A key lesson obtains here for states as well as individuals. For all players, microcosm and macrocosm, the situation of physical survival is the manifestly central expression of all human power. But as sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism makes meaningful survival more problematic, Realpolitik or power politics inevitably deprives states of their most genuine power lever. Left unmodified, the all against all Westphalian process effectively creates or merely magnifies adversarial relations, and encourages state enemies to enjoy microcosmic triumphs that will remain concealed. These triumphs are the deeply-satisfying human emotions experienced by persons when confronting powerless individuals who are preparing to lie down.

Sovereignty and Victory Over Death

In world politics, the ultimate acquisition of power is never really about land or treasure or conquest or some other reassuring evidence of primacy. It is, rather, a presumed victory over death, ultimately a personal triumph, one described by Heinrich von Treitschke and G F Hegel as closely linked to the unique prerogatives of sovereignty.

The relevant reasoning here is straightforward. When my state is powerful, goes the core argument, so too am I. At some point, when this state seems ready to prevail indefinitely, I too am granted a personal life that is gloriously unending. Stated somewhat succinctly: An immortal state creates (as its citizen or subject) the immortal person.

These abstract ideas can be bewildering. Still, to actually feel such conceptual reasoning at a palpable level, one could intentionally recall the staggering images of mid-1930s Nazi party rallies at Nuremberg. Leni Riefenstahls monumental film celebration of Der Fuhrer, The Triumph of the Will, says it all best. Reminding the German people of Hegels famous aphorism, the legendary film underscores that a nation-state can actually become the march of God in the world.

Today, in 2023, all states continue to be driven by policies that generally bring them neither personal satisfaction nor institutional safety. To the contrary, all they can continue to expect in a chaos-leaning Realpolitik world is a perpetual global landscape of war, terrorism and genocide. In the best of all possible worlds, however, humankind recalling the ancient creed of Epicurus that death fear is foolish and irrational- would consider one indispensable query:

What is death? A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with.

States seemingly fail to understand that death is normally identified by their enemies as a zero-sum event. Anything that is done to sustain ones own national survival invariably represents, for these enemy states, an intolerable threat to their own lives and a diminution of their own power over death. Reciprocally, anything that is done to effectively eliminate hated enemies must expectedly enhance their collective life and augment their collective power. Ideally, these strategies fare best whenever God is on our side.

There is still more. Because of the deeply intimate associations between collectivities/macrocosm (states) and (microcosm) individuals, the reciprocal life advantages of death and dying can be enjoyed doubly.

Normally, even if only at a subconscious level, the living person never really considers himself more powerful than at that very moment when he faces the dying person. Here, as we may learn again from Elias Canetti, the living human being comes as close as he or she can to encountering genuine feelings of personal immortality. In roughly similar fashion, the living nation-state never really regards itself as more powerful than at that moment when it confronts the apparently impending death of a despised enemy state. Only slightly less power-granting are those reassuring sentiments that arise from confrontation with a dying enemy state; that is, the same sentiments experienced by a belligerent state that seeks some tangible victory over another.

In both cases, personal and collective, convention, good taste and sometimes skilled statecraft require that zero-sum feelings about death and power be suppressed. Such polite feelings ought not to be flaunted; nonetheless, they do remain prospectively vital and determinative.

Getting Beyond Appearances in World and National Politics

Oddly, perhaps, in all world politics, power is so closely attached to the presumed conquest of death (national and personal) that core connections have been overlooked. As a result, students and practitioners of international relations continue to focus mainly on epiphenomena, on easily recognizable ideologies, identifiable territories, tangible implements of warfare (arms control and disarmament) and so on. The problem is not that these factors are unimportant to power, but that they are actually of a manifestly secondary or reflected importance.

During a war, any war, the individual soldier, a person who ordinarily cannot experience satisfyingly tangible power during peacetime, is offered an utterly unique opportunity to remedy such absence. Inter alia, the pervasive presence of dead bodies in war cannot be minimized. Actually and incontestably, it is a central fact of belligerency. To wit, the soldier who is surrounded by corpses and knows that he is not yet one of them is normally imbued with an absolute radiance of invulnerability, of immortality, of monumental and perhaps incomparable power.

The adversarial state that commands its soldiers to kill and not to die, feels similarly great power at the removal of a collective adversary. This surviving state, like the surviving individual warrior, is transformed, indisputably and correspondingly, into a potentially primal source of everlasting life. Such abstract observations are hardly fashionable among general populations or political leaders; to the half-educated, they may even appear barbarous and uncivilized. Yet, for now at least, scholars should be seeking not to prescribe more appropriate behavior for sovereign states, but to accurately describe such behavior. Among other obligations, this means looking behind the daily news.

There is more. Always, truth must be exculpatory. True observations may sometimes be indecipherable or objectionable; but they are no less true. What is most important to understand is that to die for the sake of God is actually to not die at all. For example, by dying in a divinely commanded act of killing presumed enemies the Jihadist terrorist really does seek to conquer death, which he fears with a special terror, by living forever.

Ultimately, the love of death proclaimed by Jihadist terrorists is the ironic consequent of an all-consuming wish to avoid death. Since the death that this enemy loves is temporary and temporal, leading in fact to a permanent reprieve from any real death, accepting it as a tactical expedient becomes an easy matter. If, for any reason, the normally welcome death of an individual engaged in holy war were not expected to ensure an authentic life ever-after, its immense attractions would be reversed.

The greater the number of enemy corpses, the more powerful terrorists will feel. Real power, understood as an irremediably zero-sum commodity, is always to gain in aliveness through inflicting death upon enemies.

Power and Survival

An enemy, whether state or non-state, cannot possibly kill as many foes as his primal passion for survival may demand. This means, among other intersecting considerations, that he may seek to induce or direct others to satisfy this particular passion. As a practical matter, this deflecting behavior points toward an undeniable impulse for genocide, an inclination that could be actualized, in the future, by adversarial resort to higher-order forms of terrorism (chemical/biological/nuclear), and/or to crimes against humanity.

The sovereign still has much to learn. But before leaders can fully understand the true nature of enemy intentions and capabilities, they must first acknowledge the most primary connections between power and survival. Once it can be understood that enemy definitions of the former are contingent upon loss of the latter, these leaders will be positioned intellectually to take appropriate remedial action.

The true goal of certain adversaries is as grotesque as it is unrecognized. This goal is to be left standing while assorted others are made to disappear. These relentless enemies must survive just so that their enemies do not. They cannot, by this zero-sum reasoning, survive together. So long as the enemy is allowed to exist, no matter how cooperative or congenial it has been, some states will not feel safe. They will not feel powerful. They will not feel power over death.

It is always a mistake to believe that Reason governs the world. The true source of governance on this imperiled planet is power, and power is ultimately the conquest of personal death. This conquest, which displays a zero-sum quality among enemies, is not limited to conflicts in any one region. It is always a generic matter, a more or less universal effort that is made especially manifest between enemies. On this generic matter, one should consider the revealing remark of Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco in his Journal in 1966. Describing killing as a purposeful affirmation of ones own survival, Ionesco observed:

I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemys death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society; that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving ones feelings, of warding off ones own death.

While certain enemies accept zero-sum linkages between power and survival, others do not. Though this may suggest that some states stand on an enviably higher moral plane than their enemies, it may also place the high-minded or virtuous state at a security disadvantage, one that will make it too difficult to remain standing. This consequential asymmetry between state enemies may be addressed by reducing certain adversarial emphases on power-survival connections and/or by increasing enemy emphases on power-survival connections.

Difficult questions will have to be asked. Must a state ultimately become barbarous in order to endure? Must it learn to identify true power with survival over others, a predatory posture that cannot abide the survival of certain enemies? What is required is not a replication of enemy leadership crimes, but policies that recognize personal death-avoidance as the essential starting point for national security. With such recognition, protracted hostility and existential threat could be rejected in their entirety and a new ethos one based on a firm commitment to remain standing at all costs could finally be implemented.

Life and Death as Zero-Sum Qualities

Core changes will be necessary. All sovereigns must rid themselves of the retrograde notion that killing others can confer immunity from personal mortality. In his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank affirms: The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.

What is being described here remains the greatest form of power anywhere: power over death. Americans and other residents of a deeply interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States or major world leader would meaningfully attempt to understand these complex linkages. At a minimum, this means that all of our national policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual and scientific sorts of understanding.

There is more. Our just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide programs, must be conducted as intricate contests of mind over mind. These contests are never just narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.

Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer an accessible medicine against adversaries in the global state of nature. Only by this difficult awareness can we ever relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of all against all.

More than ever before, history deserves pride of place. The United States was founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. This means something very different in 2023 than it did in 1787.

What should this particular history now signify for American foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon authentic learning, not flippantly corrosive clichs or abundantly empty witticisms. In this connection, individual human death fear has much to do with a better understanding of Americas national security options.

A Triumph of Death?

In the end, for individuals, a triumph of death in one form or another is inevitable, and attempts to avoid death by killing certain despised others are necessarily futile and inglorious. Going forward, therefore, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about national sovereignty and human immortality. Instead of simply denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labels wish fulfillment in The Future of an Illusion (1927), we must soon acknowledge the obvious. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and all sovereign states on this endangered planet could begin to think more insightfully about our immutably common destiny. In turn, this will mean using an always-overriding human commonality as the secure basis for expanding empathy and worldwide cooperation.

This is a visionary and fanciful prescription, one rather unlikely to be grasped in time. But there is still a plausible way to begin. This way would require the leaders of all major states to recognize that they are not in any meaningful way world powers (all are equally mortal, and none have any verifiable power over death) and that a coordinated retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition would now be self-interested.

There are other considerations. The primary planetary survival task is a markedly intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no good reason to ever expect the arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king; still, even some ordinary political leaders could conceivably prove themselves up to the extraordinary task at hand. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries must first cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about sovereignty-centered world politics, and (per specific insights of twentieth-century German thinker Karl Jaspers) do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and mind over blind faith and mystery.

In endowing us with memory, writes philosopher George Santayana, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; still, without really knowing it, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.

The legacy of Westphalia (1648 treaty) includes deification of the state. Although we may discover such murderous deification in the writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others, there have also always been compelling voices of a different sort. For Nietzsche, the state is the coldest of all cold monsters. It is, he says in Zarathustra, for the superfluous that the state was invented. In a similar vein, we may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega yGasset in the Revolt of the Masses. Here, the Spanish philosopher identifies the state as the greatest danger, always mustering its immense resources to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it.

Sovereignty as an Under-Explored Attribute of Life-Everlasting

In the end, sovereignty is always about life, death and immortality. For the most part, it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our words and our destinies, will lie beyond any discernible considerations of conscious decision or individual selection. Still, we can choose to recognize our shared human fate and especially our derivative interdependence. This unbreakable intellectual recognition could carry with it significant global promise.

Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with qualitative presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. Already, this incontestable sameness is manifest to capable scientists and physicians. Our single most important human similarity, however, and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument, is that we all die.

It is from the universal terror of this common fate that Westphalian law invests nation-states with the singularly sacred attributes of sovereignty. And it is from the incontestable commonality of death that humankind can finally escape from the predatory embrace of power politics or Realpolitik in world politics.

Ironically, whatever our more-or-less divergent views on what might actually happen to us after death, the basic mortality that we share could still represent the last best chance we have for viable global coexistence and governance. This is the case, however, only if we can first accomplish the astoundingly difficult leap from acknowledging a shared fate as mortal beings to operationalizing our species more expressly generalized feelings of empathy and cooperation.

Across an entire planet, we can care for one another as humans, but only after we have first accepted that the judgment of a resolutely common fate will not be waived by any harms that we may choose to inflict upon others, that is, upon the unworthy. While markedly inconspicuous, modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often just sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In the most starkly egregious instances, any corresponding violence could represent a consummate human hope of overcoming private mortality through the targeted mass killing or exclusion of certain specific outsiders.

Its a murderous calculus, and not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest Beckers ironic paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil: . each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.

There is a deeply insightful observation latent in this idea. It is the uniquely dangerous notion that killing can confer immunity from ones own mortality. Similarly, in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist Otto Rank affirms: The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed. What is being described here is plainly the greatest form of power discoverable anywhere: power over death.

A Struggle of Mind Over Mind

Americans and various other residents of our interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president of the United States should attempt to understand such vital and complex linkages. Here, Americas national policies must build upon more genuinely intellectual sorts of understanding. Our allegedly just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts, and anti-genocide programs must be fought or conducted as fully intricate contests of mind over mind, and not just as narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.

Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible medicine against North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and assorted other more-or-less foreseeable adversaries in the sovereignty-centered state of nature. This natural condition of anarchy was already well known to the Founding Fathers of the United States (most of whom had read Locke, Rousseau, Grotius, Hobbes, Vattel and Blackstone. Now, only this difficult awareness can relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending Hobbesian war of all against all.

More than ever before, history deserves a reasonable pride of place. America was expressly founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. But this means something quite different in 2023 than it did in 1787.

What more precisely should this particular history signify for Biden White House foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon some measure of authentic learning, not on flippantly corrosive clichs or abundantly empty witticisms. For the foreseeable future, this is not a plausible presupposition.

Human death fear has much to do with acquiring a better understanding of Americas current enemies, both national (state) and sub-national (terrorist). Reciprocally, only a people who can feel deeply within itself the unalterable fate and suffering of a much broader global population will ever be able to embrace compassion and reject collective violence. Any new American president should prepare to understand what this implies, with pointedly specific reference to the United States and also to this countrys various state and sub-state adversaries.

The existence of system in the world is always obvious, immutable and pertinent. Accordingly, America First actually meant America Alone and America Last. America could never be truly first so long as its president insisted upon achieving such status at the grievous expense of so many others, and while failing to understand that international law is part of the law of the United States. To again seek to secure ourselves by diminishing others would merely be a retrograde playbook for ever-recurrent instances of war, terror and genocide.

For all humankind, the triumph of death is unassailable and inevitable. Attempts to somehow avoid death by killing certain despised others are both futile and inglorious. Going forward, it is high time for new and more creative thinking about global security and human immortality. Instead of denying death, a cowardly and potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labeled wish fulfillment (see The Future of an Illusion, 1927), we must finally acknowledge the obvious, perhaps even viewing it as a long-overlooked blessing. With such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all people and all nations on this imperiled planet could begin to draw purposefully from our immutably common destiny that is, from our conspicuously shared mortality. Among other things, this means using that always-overriding commonality as the intellectual basis for expanding empathy and a closely-corresponding pattern of worldwide integration.

It is, to be sure, a visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely to be grasped in time. But there is still a practical way to begin. It would require the leaders of major states to recognize that they are not in any genuinely meaningful way world powers (in the sense that all are equally mortal; that none has power over death) and that a coordinated retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition must be self-interested and indispensable.

The Obligations of Courage

It follows from all this that the primary planetary survival task is a markedly intellectual one, a matter of mind, but unprecedented courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives, we could have no reason to expect the timely arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king, but even some ordinary political leaders could conceivably be up to the task to become extraordinary. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of all countries would first have to cast aside all historically discredited ways of thinking about global survival, and do whatever deemed possible to elevate science over blind faith and mystery.

In endowing us with memory, writes George Santayana, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation. the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.

Though few will actually understand, such a raising is necessarily antecedent to human survival in world politics, though only if it is linked purposefully and self-consciously to global integration. Is it an end that draws near, inquired Karl Jaspers, or a beginning? The correct answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war philosopher had to say about the Jungian/Freudian mass.

In Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or The They. Drawing fruitfully upon certain earlier seminal insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard as well as Jung and Freud, Heideggers The They represents the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an untruth (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can quickly suffocate indispensable intellectual growth. For Heideggers The They, the crowning untruth lies in (1) its acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal levels, and (2) its encouragement of the seductive notion that personal power over death is associated with (or actually derivative from) the sovereignty-centered sacredness of nation-states.

The arena of world politics (macrocosm) is violent because individual human beings (microcosm) compulsively fear death. Though patently ironic, the murderous connections are longstanding and difficult to dispute. Ultimately, states battle against other states on behalf of individual human salvation.

While the typical result of such redemptive battles has always been death and mega death, not long or eternal life, an overriding mythology still endures. This is the ironic belief that it is in war, not in peace, that humans are able to acquire power over death. Sometimes, this acquisition is intended to be direct that is, an immediate consequence of killing on the side of God. More generally, however, such power over death devolves indirectly to general populations that are not actually involved in the business of killing. Recalling Bob Dylan, even de facto bystanders can have God on their side.

None of this is to deny the validity of more traditional and conspicuous explanations of Realpolitik or power politics, namely that these struggles are about tangible goods, geography or national security. These conspicuous explanations are not mistaken; they are, however, trivial and epiphenomenal. Such explanations are generally correct, but merely as secondary reflections of what is most genuinely important.

In William Goldings novel Lord of the Flies, the marooned boys make grotesque war upon one another because they have suddenly been thrust into a netherworld of anarchy and chaos, but only because this dissembling exile from civilization now threatens them with personal death. It is only after they have settled upon an amorphous but ubiquitous horror (the beast) that they decide to wage a titanic struggle to survive. And in what amounts to yet another irony of upholding policies of inflicting death in order to bring freedom from death, the boys are rescued by a military ship, a naval vessel that will transport them from their literally primal state of nature on the island to the more comprehensive state of nature of world politics.

In essence, readers quickly learn, the rancorous and barbarous conditions that had obtained on the deserted island were actually just a microcosm of the wider system of international relations. But who can now rescue this wider system of Realpolitik from itself? Before we can meaningfully answer this core question, scholars and policy-makers will need to probe more closely behind visible events of the day, beyond mere reflection. Above all, this probe will have to be suitably theoretical.

Why? Theoretic generality is a trait of all serious scientific meaning. Scientific inquiry in such matters is indispensable.

In the beginning, in that primal promiscuity in which the lethal swerve toward politics first arose, forerunners of modern nation-states established a system of perpetual struggle and violent conflict, a system destined to fail. Captivated by this self-destroying system of international relations, states still allow the degrading spirit of Realpolitik to spread everywhere unchecked, like an ideological gangrene on the surface of the earth. Rejecting all pertinent standards of logic and correct reasoning, this inherently false consciousness of power politics imposes no reasonable standards upon itself. It continues to be rife, despite endless rebuffs. Somehow, Realpolitik takes its long history of defeat as victory. Somehow, its historical proponents have never learned anything.

The vast majority of human beings are unable to accept the biological truth of mortality. Understood in terms of world politics, this suggests that national sovereignty will likely continue to be viewed by many as a suitable institutional antidote to personal death. Such a view may not be explicitly apparent even to Realpolitik adherents, and it would very likely disregard certain palpable benefits other than a presumed power over death (e.g., enhanced personal status of belonging to a powerful country). Nonetheless, it is a perspective that will not simply fade away graciously on its own.

It is high time for candor. Whatever our in-principle preferences, the plain fact of having been born augurs badly for the promise of immortality. Accordingly, the primal human inclination to deny an apparently unbearable truth will continue to generate the same terrors from which we allegedly seek refuge. The irony is once again staggering, but still incontestable.

In its obvious desperation to live perpetually, humankind has embraced a cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting is exchange for unchallengeable loyalty to a sacred duty. Such loyalty is then transferred from faith to State, which battles (or prepares to battle) with other states. Though historians, political scientists and pundits routinely describe such conflicts as a tangible struggle for secular influence (power politics), it is often something different. This is a struggle between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Decency and Indecency, even the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. In this last example, apocalyptic imagery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is invoked not because any or all of a combatant states rationale is necessarily religious, but because such imagery best portrays the enormity of ideological attachments.

In the United States, ideas of prevailing apocalyptic contest obtained widely during the 1950s Eisenhower years, and later during the Reagan Administration. More recently, Donald Trumps core message of American First was not without underlying or implicit references to righteous struggles in world politics withGod on our Side. For several million Trump supporters, their leaders slogan of America First was essentially an eschatological code term used to signal impending End Times. In view of certain religion-based support for the Trump presidency, a core aspect of his appeal was an implicit linkage of American sovereignty with life everlasting.

Death, says Norbert Elias, is the absolute end of the person. So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced. Now, major states in world politics must strive more vigorously to reduce both the magnitude and likelihood of anticipated existential danger. In this connection, they must remain wary of planting new false hopes that offer only illusions of personal survival through perpetual international war or war-planning.

To survive in world politics, citizens of planet earth will first have to detach themselves from various mythical promises of power over death. In the most promising of possible worlds, the pervasively underlying human death fear could be made to disappear, but this auspicious prospect would also seem blatantly implausible. It follows that more gentle and reason-based orientations will be required for world politics than those discoverable within the narrowly self-destroying dynamics of sovereignty-centered belligerent nationalism.

In this regard, there is much to be learned from the May 6, 2023 coronation of King Charles III. This means exploring much deeper linkages between sovereignty and immortality. In the end, species survival must become a preeminently intellectual obligation, one based on comprehensive theory concerning survival, immortality and power over death.

LOUIS REN BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth and most recent book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israels Nuclear Strategy (2016). In 2003, Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel in Israel (regarding Irans nuclear weapons, prepared especially for PM Ariel Sharon). He has published in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Jerusalem Post; Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA (Israel); INSS (Israel); JURIST; Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); The Atlantic; Yale Global; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); Oxford University Press Yearbook on International Law & Jurisprudence; World Politics (Princeton); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); The Strategy Bridge; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Horasis (Zrich) and The New York Times.

Suggested citation: Louis Rene Beres, King Charles IIIs Coronation at the Convergence of Policy, Sovereignty, and Immortality, JURIST Academic Commentary, May 9, 2023, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2023/05/king-charles-coronation-immortality.

This article was prepared for publication by JURIST Commentary staff. Please direct any questions or comments to them at commentary@jurist.org

Opinions expressed in JURIST Commentary are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JURIST's editors, staff, donors or the University of Pittsburgh.

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King Charles III's Coronation at the Convergence of Policy ... - JURIST

The Greek Ministry of Culture has announced that the ancient Asclepieion in Thessaly, an important healing temple of the Greek empire, will be restored.

Greeces Minister of Culture and Sports, Lina Mendoni, stated that in the city of Trikala, in Ancient Trikki, there was one of the oldest and most famous (temples) in the entire ancient world, Asclepieion.

The earliest confirmed excavation of the city dates back to the Bronze Age and is located in the area of the present archaeological site of Trikala.

Excavations have uncovered ceramics indicating that the western slopes of the ancient acropolis had been inhabited since the Early Bronze Age (3300 BC) until the Mycenaean era.

Ancient Trikki was first referred to in the Homeric List of Ships, which states that Trikki participated with great force in the Trojan War, with 30 ships led by Asclepius sons, Mahaonas and Podalerios, who were taught medicine by their father.

Asclepius was the Greek god of healing, truth, and prophecy, and is also known as the god of medicine. In later times, he was honoured as a hero and eventually worshipped as a god. Healing temples in his honour began in Thessaly but spread to many parts of Greece.

The practice of sleeping in these healing temples became common in many parts of Greece, as it was believed that Asclepius cured illnesses in dreams.Zeus (the king of the gods), afraid that Asclepius might render all men immortal, slew him with a thunderbolt.

Read more here:
Ancient Greek healing temple in Trikala to be restored - The Greek Herald