Self-delusion

As creatures with the most developed brain, we humans have become very good at deluding ourselves: if I become a Christian, I will gain eternal life; if I follow a certain guru and repeat certain mantra, I'll gain miraculous powers; if I go through some rituals, my body will become purified and spiritualized and hopefully will survive death; if we place our trust in doctors and scientists, one day they will produce 'elixir of life' from their laboratory or find a way to reconfigure our DNA so that we can maintain or regain youth and never grow old....
Why do man, who has no respect for the life of follow beings (otherwise there won't be so much violence and killing going on) or for any other life forms on this planet, get so obsessed with preserving their own life? Why have we been nurturing the dream of 'living forwever' in the same body for thousands of years? The brutal fact if, whatever lives in physical form must one day die, even the sun and the Earth will perish, even the galaxies and the Universe will fall into permanent darkness as all the stars die out. That which has a beginning will inevitably come to an end.

When Jesus talks about gaining eternal life, he wasn't on about life in the human body. He means the spirit of man. The spirit can go to Heaven and dwell there forever, but not the human flesh. Even the Taoist immortalists are only immortals in energy form, not in flesh and blood. That doesn't mean they can't take on a temporary physical form if they want to. Buddha himself had to shed his body in flesh when he gained nirvana. He dwells in higher dimensions free from the wheel of birth and death. It is said that some Taoist alchemists and some advanced Yogis can take their body with them when they pass on to higher realms. But that doesn't mean their physical body continue to exist in the same form in the higher realms. They can dissolve their body at will at the time of death. The Buddhists, on the other hand, are not bothered about their body. They call the body 'the stinky bag of skin' or 'pile of stinky bones'. All they are concerned is annihilating the mind and the psyche so that there's no attachment to the body and the world. The Taoists, on the other hand, value the body as a vehicle for the human spirit to gain liberation and immportality (freedom from birth and death). To them, the body is like the glass holding the water (as symbol for human spirit). Though the glass is not water itself, it needs to be kept firm and clean to serve as a suitable vessel for holding water. Once the human spirit re-unites with its source, there will be no need for holding on to the vessel any more.