Avatar and immortality

Seeing the film 'Avatar" has helped me break through the writer's block which overcame me when my mother died last July. Grieving for someone who had so inspired me, I was not sure why I should continue writing the Behind the Sun series. What do I want to say? Watching Avatar, I wondered too what exactly Cameron was trying to tell us. The visuals are so fantastic that it's hard to concentrate on deeper meaning while being whirled around another planet. The ecological themes and the parallels to 'Dances with Wolves' are pretty obvious. Avatar raises the question of why we would abandon our own kind and 'turn native'. As one character asks Sully - 'What does it feel like to betray your species?
But Avatar provides no clear view on that and completely ignores a question which is deeply connected to avataras, a question which has always preoccupied humanity - immortality. The Sully character gets the chance to overcome his injuries and as you watch his first exuberant steps in the alien body, it's pretty clear he isn't going to give that up without a fight. In the movie the technology exists to allow anyone to do that, for any purpose, but this idea is never explored.
The idea of avataras used to mean the manifestation of a higher entity into a lower one, usually when the earth was in trouble, to set things right. Now it is used so much in computer games and reality shows that its original meaning is lost. The avatar may not be a force for good, only a way to expand and perhaps prolong our own lives, as it does for Sully in Avatar. In the last chapters of Behind the Sun, the characters have to confront the possibility of their own immortality - what it would mean for their sense of humanity and personal identity to be able to live indefinitely, in their own or other bodies. Gilgamesh (pic) gave up the search for eternal life, but medical science is leading us on. Organ transplants, artificial aids and the possibility of repairing the telomeres of our cells - in the end, what do we become? What do we want to become? The sequel to Behind the Sun is back on track.