Leave Your Body Behind

Buddhists would probably never substitute the words 'worldly desires' for 'your body' when explaining the roots of unhappiness... as it would imply some kind of dualistic separation of body and mind. But, if you think about it, it's kind of true isn't it?

If you were released from your body, you would have no need to feed or clothe yourself. In fact, most of Maslow's Hierarchy Of Needs would probably become irrelevant. This would mean that you wouldn't have to earn money to buy food, clothes etc. or depend on physical modes of transport to get you from A to B. Take this to its logical conclusion and you realise that there would not actually be an A or a B as such relative concepts would also become irrelevant when disassociated from the physical 'you'.

Marshall Brain puts it like this:

Let me make this more personal. Take a moment to think about your own human body. Look down at your hands, for example. Look at your legs. Look at your face in a mirror. You inhabit a human body right now, just like we all do. We take our bodies completely for granted. We consider our bodies to be essential -- so essential that, even in our most imaginative and far-reaching science fiction stories, we cannot envision our lives without human bodies.

But that is a primitive way of thinking. In the near future you will discard your body -- you will literally throw it in the trash -- because you will neither want it nor need it. You will discard your biological body gladly, like you would discard an old pair of shoes today. You will be quite grateful to be rid of it.

And David Pearce takes it even further in The Hedonistic Imperative:

We will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend.

No doubt the body model we currently inhabit is an amazing thing and nature has done some pretty mind-blowing work in making the constant evolutionary adjustments that allow us to live our present-day lives. Yeah great, but there's still a lot of potential for pain and misery isn't there?

Maybe it's about time we accepted that we can truly be free... of not only body, but all the egotistic and survival of the fittest bullshit that comes with having bodies. Maybe it's about time we took control of the next phase and learnt how to upload.