"Life is Long if You Know How to Use It"

I was reading The Tao of Pooh the other day, looking for an alibi with street cred for what had heretofore been my habit of ignoring the effects of climate change, when I came across the story of Li Ching-Yun (or Yuen). Li, from China, was reputed to have lived to be either 197 or 256 years old, depending on which set of records one consults. Pooh author Benjamin Hoff took Li’s advanced age as an incontrovertible fact, basing his judgment, in so many words, on the anal retentive nature of Chinese record keeping. In addition to Hoff’s endorsement, Li also received write-ups on his longevity in The New York Times in 1928, 1930, and again by way of an obituary upon his death in May of 1933, in addition to being featured in Time magazine just one week after his passing. The Time article, which quotes Li’s four secrets to long life (“tranquil mind, sit like a tortoise, walk sprightly like a pigeon, and sleep like a dog,” as quoted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen ), doesn’t sound even the slightest bit incredulous.

Not surprisingly, internet skeptics have stepped forward to play the role of doubting Thomas. Snopes.com renders its verdict on the veracity of Li’s longevity thusly: “Probably false.” Fair enough. Or so it seems until one reads Snopes’ reasoning, in which they use Jeanne Clement, the French woman whose 122 years is the world’s reigning “longest confirmed lifespan,” as a point of baseline comparison. Snopes’ argument in support of “Probably false” is as follows: “It’s highly improbable that he (Li) managed to exceed that milestone (122 years) by as much as 61% to 110% as claimed in the 20th Century accounts of his passing.” (http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/trivia/ching-yuen.asp) Before closing the case, Snopes proffers one possibility as to how Li could have had everyone fooled: it was “most likely attributable to his having assumed the identity of a much older ancestor or someone else of a similar name.” This is the classic two-step debunking maneuver of 1) naming a plausible alternative scenario, which scenario is then 2) ipso facto regarded as proof that the non-ordinary event did not occur, a maneuver used all the time in regards to e.g. UFOs: Because the sighted UFO could conceivably have been a flare dropped by weather research craft, then it necessarily was a flare dropped by weather research craft, end of story. (The fact that 95% of the time it was indeed a flare does nothing, of course, to explain the 5% of the time when it most certainly wasn’t.)

So, if we ignore the bait-and-switch “it could have been, so it must have been” maneuver, we are left with Snopes’ initial argument that Li’s uber-longevity was “probably false” because it was “highly improbable.” Snopes’ judgment, at the last, is but the tautological assertion that it (i.e. Li’s long life) is improbable because it is improbable. It is also begging the question in the technical sense of the term: “when a proposition which requires proof is assumed without proof.” (insert link here) Given this context, Snopes’ decree that a man could not possibly live to be 256 years old because surely he would die sounds an awful lot like the assertion that a man could not possibly run a mile in under four minutes because surely he would die. Li Ching-Yun, I give you Roger Bannister.

The real reason, of course, that Snopes decreed it “highly improbable” that Li lived to be 256 is that no one bloody lives to be 256 years old. This may be true, as far as it goes. But it may turn out that it doesn’t go very far at all. To understand why, we must turn to the writings of the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca. But to bring Seneca’s thought into proper focus, it is important to first note that when at long last Li prepared to die he is reported to have explained that “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home,” which is pretty much a paraphrase of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life.

Writing in the 1st century CE, Seneca’s Shortness was a letter to his friend Paulinus in which he bemoans the degree to which so many fritter away their lives, and impugns his friend not to fall into the same trap. Seneca cuts straight to the chase; within the letter’s first two pages he has distilled wisdom so potently concentrated that it leaps off the page two millennia later, as if written expressly for this overscheduled age:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested…. Why do we complain about nature? She has acted kindly: life is long if you know how to use it.”

(This, we should note, could never have been written in an email, much less a text message; there are no emoticons that express depth. The loss of letter writing may be history’s single greatest unmourned tragedy. Love, friendship, intimacy- each has grown slightly less transcendent during letter writing’s “twenty-year death”, to borrow a term from Baltimore’s best writer of crime fiction, Ariel S. Winter. (http://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Year-Death-Hard-Case-Crime/dp/0857685813)

By page eleven of the letter, Seneca is zeroing in on the different strands that run through space-time, strands which, when unraveled, will aid in the understanding of Li Ching-Yun:

“So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long.”

Here, Seneca makes two things very clear: 1) Space-time allows for both living and existing, and 2) the two states couldn’t be more different. They are so different, in fact, that in just a bit I will be making the argument that they each lead to entirely different respective four-dimensional shapes of space-time. And I never studied physics! (I did manage to pass my high school physics class, in which I learned the following facts: 1) Velocity is not just limited to speed, but also includes direction. 2)…. As Tony Kornheiser would say, That’s the list!)

By page 25 in the 32 page letter, Seneca is describing the four-dimensional shape of lived space-time:

“He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god. Some time has passed: he grasps it in his recollection. Time is present: he uses it. Time is to come: he anticipates it. This combination of all times into one gives him a long life.”

Things shape up very differently in the realm of mere existing:

“But life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future. When they come to the end of it, the poor wretches realize too late that for all this time they have been preoccupied in doing nothing.”

Who is the figure who can escape “the laws that limit the human race?” For Seneca, this is only the philosopher, for philosophers “not only keep a good watch over their own lifetimes, but they annex every age to theirs.” I would note that in pronouncing that “only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy, only those are really alive,” nowhere does Seneca limit things to western philosophy. He does recommend some specific ancient Greek philosophers and philosophies, but it is likely that these were all that were ready to hand in 1st Century Rome, and unlikely that he had copies of the I Ching and Tao Te Ching lying around. That he (Seneca) didn’t in no way disqualifies Li, who is described as “a Taoist immortal” who taught “that the fundamental Taoist practice is to learn to keep the ‘Emptiness,’” as a philosopher. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen)

Building on Seneca’s insight, and using Li’s extreme case as my exemplar, I am suggesting that those who achieve “the combination of all times into one,” or those who know how “to keep the emptiness,” literally bend space-time to their lives. And, further, that the space-time inhabited by the living is as distinct from the space-time inhabited by the merely existing as waking life is from dreaming. All of which makes elapsed time as recorded amongst the merely existing irrelevant to the truly long lived.

Before diving into particulars about the scientific theory with which I am taking liberties I should note that I am, of course, participating in the grand tradition of New Age interpretations of science’s relativistic and quantum turns, a tradition that reached its apex with the film What the Bleep Do We Know? It is a tradition that mainstream Science loathes even more than it loathes mainstream Religions, which Religions tend to defend their own turf, unlike New Age interpretations of quantum mechanics, which Science views as an encroachment into its territory. But even in the middle of my own wild speculations about quantum mechanics and relativity (more about which in a moment), what needs to be made clear is that Science wishes to have it both ways: 1) Science loves to point out that if general and special relativity and quantum mechanics have taught us anything it is that the world is nothing like what we take it to be; and yet 2) Science would have us believe that although this strange quantum world we inhabit is nothing like what we take it to be, it is, nevertheless, exactly like what Science tells us it is. When the truth is that we are at the very beginning of the quantum age, and, as President Obama is wont to say about Iran and its nuclear capabilities, all options are on the table. At this point, like Socrates, all we know is that we know nothing, and wild New Age speculations just may give us our best shot at some quantum wisdom. Not, I hasten to add, quantum knowledge, since quantum mechanics’ own uncertainty principle tells us that knowledge here is always bought at the price of ignorance there. We likely already have as much quantum knowledge as we are going to get, or need. (See the failure of that next would-be “quantum leap” in quantum mechanics, string theory, to coalesce.)

So, the concept in play, time dilation, comes from the theory of relativity:

“Time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from gravitational masses. An accurate clock at rest with respect to one observer may be measured to tick at a different rate when compared to a second observer’s own equally accurate clocks. This effect arises neither from technical aspects of the clocks nor from the fact that signals need time to propagate, but from the nature of spacetime itself…. The laws of nature are such that time itself (i.e. spacetime) will bend due to differences in either gravity or velocity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation)

It is the latter cause, velocity, which just may help us understand what is really going on with Li. Because “the faster the relative velocity, the greater the magnitude of time dilation,” (ibid) i.e. the slower the faster moving body’s clock moves. To get a sense of just how flexible spacetime is when warped by time dilation, note that “a constant 1 g acceleration would permit humans to travel through the entire known Universe in one human lifetime.” (ibid)

To connect the dots, I am saying that the contrast Seneca makes between those who truly live, and for whom time, therefore, is abundant, and those who by merely existing have made life short, is the same contrast that exists between humans going about their business here on earth and any travelers (real or imagined) touring the universe at a constant 1 g acceleration. It is a contrast in velocity. To explain, I must return to the one thing I learned in high school physics: While the contrast in velocity between the planet-bound and the star trekkers is one of speed, the contrast in velocity between the living and the merely existing is one of direction. Seneca’s “philosophers” are always moving in the direction of the light, whilst everyone else is sitting on a log staring at shadows. (Please note that 1- the term “philosopher” as Seneca uses it has nothing to do with contemporary academic philosophers, many of whom may be gifted scholars and perfectly nice people to boot, but whom are also too busy moving in the direction of tenure and academic prestige, which pursuits are perfectly rational given that tenure and prestige are the common coin of academia, to bother with moving in the direction of the light, and 2- the last sentence is obviously borrowed from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, which allegory is the Platonic form, if you will, of fiction as news that stays news. “Real” news media are, of course, the most entrancing shadows cast on the wall of modernity’s cave.)

In short, Li’s movement towards the light, his keeping of the emptiness, was so unswerving that the passage of time slowed to a crawl. Just as meaningful time dilation depends on speed (“It is only when an object approaches speeds on the order of 30,000 km/s – 1/10th the speed of light- that time dilation becomes important”- ibid), Li’s longevity vouches for his emptiness, his movement towards the light.

One of the interesting things about time dilation is that all parties, whether at rest or moving 1/10th the speed of light or faster, perceive their own clocks as progressing at a normal pace:

“The local experience of time passing never actually changes for anyone. In other words, the astronauts on the ship as well as the mission control crew on Earth each feel normal, despite the effects of time dilation (i.e. to the travelling party, those stationary are living ‘faster,’ whilst to those who stood still, their counterparts in motion live ‘slower’ at any given moment).” (ibid)

Just so, to the living party, those merely existing are living ‘faster,’ whilst to those who merely exist, their counterparts in motion live ‘slower’ at any given moment. Recall that Li found nothing extraordinary about the length of his life, echoing Seneca’s “a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements,” with his own “I have done all I have to do in this world. I will now go home.” To Li, life was just long enough to make use of it; recall Seneca’s “life is long if you know how to use it.” It is only to the rest of us merely existing folk, as exemplified by Snopes.com, that Li’s lifespan seems so distended. Staring at the shadows, our clocks spin faster than the altimeters of an airliner in freefall.

Spok, who toured the universe at speeds up to warp factor eight and kept the emptiness, frequently invoked the Vulcan farewell, “Live long and prosper.” To extract its wisdom I suggest holding it up to a mirror; when we understand long life as the product of a prosperity that has nothing to do with status and material wealth, only then will we move toward the light and exit the cave.

May we all prosper, and live long.