It's when we cease to be willing to learn from each other that we get into trouble.

-Josh Mitteldorf

"This was my opportunity to celebrate the ephemeral, rather than struggle against it." - Fr Gregory Boyle, on being diagnosed with leukemia at age 48.

"I was fortunate in that my own death was never in the top ten list of things I fear most. Not making payroll each week can create far more anxiety for me." (from a radio interview)

Fr Boyle is a missionary to gang members and convicts, in and out of Los Angeles prisons. Rather than preach the gospel to them, Fr Boyle finds his calling in running a program that offers them employment and the chance for a new start. "I like to think that God wants us to emulate Jesus’s example, rather than to talk about theology."

Aubrey de Grey is the most vocal of a group of biochemists who believe that biomedical research is close to producing therapies that will extend the human life span indefinitely:

"...big advances often occur much sooner than most experts expect."

"This will bring about the greatest economic change of all in society: the elimination of retirement benefits. Retirement benefits are for frail people, and there won't be any frail people"

Report from the first SENS conference: Engineering Negligible Senescence

8 September 2004

Man wrongly believes that he possesses a separate self, an individual ego. This false idea causes fear, loneliness, neurosis. It throws him into conflict with other people who are also under the illusion of having separate selves. 

No man is apart from the whole, from the all. Man is one with the universe. Human beings are like dozens of ponds, each reflecting the light from the same moon. This is not philosophy, this is fact.

—The Esoteric Path to a New Life, by Vernon Howard

(from the opera  Gloriana by Benjamin Britten)