I went to a cryogenics facility today, evidently, one of only three in the world. I got a tour and was told about the whole process, from decision, to submergence into nitroglycerin.
Okay, kinda cool, kinda creepy. But not really, it’s just a new way of thinking about and looking at bodies, after death that I have not really focused on.
For those of you who don’t know, cryogenics is the process of “freezing” the body after death, in the hopes that someday, when science has advanced to the point of being able to cure any disease or prolong life, that one can be defrosted and brought back to life.
I learned that the process involved replacing all the vital fluids in the body with an “anti-freeze” solution, and a few other things. It is a process that takes about a week, and then the body is submerged in a doer, a thermos type cylinder, and frozen at 196 degrees below zero. Fun…
Okay, I would love to talk intelligently about this, but for the time being, I am choosing to just look at the whole thing as odd and new and cool at the same time.
One of the things that struck me the most was how I was made to look at my body, and bodies of humans, or animals, for that matter, as a machine, almost. The talk was of like, preparing the body for storage and then putting it away, so that it could be thawed out and reused in years from now. Almost like boat owners especially on the East Coast take their boats out of the water and store them away for the winter and then bring them back in the Summer. As if our body was a machine.
The analogy is almost perfect because this is where I went with it. There is more to me than just this body. I wondered, that part of me that is not my body, would it come back, just because my body is back? Like the boats. If an owner pulls a boat out of the water in the winter and then someone puts the boat back in the water, in the summer, it doesn’t mean that the boat owner will come back into the boat and sail it, or whatever.
So, what happens to that part of me and what does that part of me do while my body, (the boat) is stored? It’s an interesting question. And that’s only one of the questions I had. But that wasn’t the question for the cryogenics foundation, because they only deal in “boats,” not souls, spirit, energy.