The yaksha asked: “What is the greatest surprise?” Yudhisthira replied: “People die every day, making us aware that men are mortal. Yet we live, work, play, plan, etc., as if assuming we are immortal. What is more surprising than that?”
— The Mahabharata
Every few days or weeks, Rob Mielcarski posts to his Un-Denial blog some or another nuance to the Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory of Varki and Brower (2013). If you are not aware of MORT, the idea in a nutshell is that somewhere in the evolution of human neurobiology there came a moment when we were so freaked out by recognition of our own mortality (after ritualistically consuming a paranoia-inducing mushroom like Amanita muscaria perhaps), that we hard-wired a capacity to deny our own mortality and take on blind faith that every-day-reality is too unreliable to put complete trust in.
In the original, unfinished paper, the late Danny Brower explained MORT this way:
“We are polluting the earth and changing the climate in ways that we can’t predict, and likely at some point, can’t easily reverse. If we’re so smart, why do we continue to sow the seeds for our eventual destruction? Because we are saddled with a brain that is designed by selection to cope with the ultimate disaster (death) by denying that it will occur, and so we treat other impending disasters by denying that they will ever…