IT WAS LATE EVENING. The station was closed, so I had to buy my ticket on the train. I had just turned sixty. When the conductor came by I said, “I’d like a senior ticket.” I felt like I had when I was eighteen in New York and had gone to a bar with friends. With trepidation, because I was under the drinking age, I said to the bartender, “I’ll have a beer.” Now the conductor immediately made out a ticket for a senior citizen. I said, “Don’t you want to see my ID?” He said, “No, it’s OK.” I was shocked.
Until I was about fifty, I thought of myself as a teenager. Around that time, I began to consider the possibility that I was an adult. I was busy being spiritual, and I thought age was rather uninteresting. After all, spiritual people are ageless, right?
Once I turned sixty, I decided I better see if there was any work I needed to do around aging. In past years, I was usually traveling on my birthday, so people couldn’t give parties for me. This year I let friends know I wanted a birthday party because sixty is a big year. I had several parties. I kept busy becoming sixty for about six months.
One day I looked down at my hand, and I saw my father’s hand. “That’s a sixty-year-old hand,” I thought. “With bones and blood vessels, wrinkles, and spots.” I remembered this ad for Porcelana hand cream, which said, “They call these aging spots. I call them ugly.” Now, isn’t that an extraordinary way to create suffering? Another way to look at it is just, “They call these aging spots.” And here we are.
I began to feel like maybe it was time to close things out rather than start new projects. Maybe I should write my last book or take off for six months a year. As I traveled, I found the airport corridors leading to the gates seemed to be getting longer. I was steeping myself in what it was like to be getting older, to slow down and honor the process.
At the same time I was savoring the feeling of aging, I began behaving in a somewhat bizarre manner. I realized I was trying to act younger, trying to accomplish things for which I was no longer in physical shape. I went bodysurfing in the South Pacific with a thirty-three-year-old friend. There I was, paddling in the waves of Tahiti, surrounded by fifteen- to twenty-year-olds, out there having fun. But I was struggling. I took a wrong turn and ended up getting pounded by a wave against a coral reef and cutting my legs. The young surfers looked at me with pity. I thought, “What the heck am I doing?”
My father used to recite a verse that came back to me in that moment:
It’s not the crow’s feet under your eyes that make you old,
Or the gray in your hair, I’m told.
But when your mind makes a contract your body can’t fill,
You’re over the hill, brother, you’re over the hill.
Much of the suffering of aging comes from holding onto those memories of who we used to be. When I was sixty-three and writing a book on aging, I saw that I needed to be able to dance through this part of my life’s curriculum without denial, without closing down to the suffering, but just watching the way my energies become less reliable, the way my patterns of life change. For instance, I now have to live more economically. I watch how society takes away my power as it makes me into a senior citizen. But instead of struggling with every change of circumstance, it’s just, “Ah, another new moment!”
In the United States you might retire at fifty-five or sixty-five or maybe later. Medicare for health care begins at sixty-five, but other than starting to qualify for senior discounts, there’s no clear rite of passage for becoming an elder or a senior, and you don’t quite know what the cutoff is for being considered old.
Economic productivity and social roles cause so much stress in our society—this modern hunting tribe. In traditional hunting societies, the tribe has to keep moving, and when old people can’t keep up, they tend to just be left behind. In terms of having a function, they’re treated as irrelevant.
I am reminded of the story of an old Chinese man who retires. He is too old even to help the family work in the garden. One day the family is sitting on the porch, talking, and the old man’s son thinks, “You know, he’s so old. He just eats food. What good is he? Now it’s time for him to be done.” So he makes a wooden box, puts the box on the wheelbarrow, and rolls the wheelbarrow up to the porch and says, “Father, get in.” The father gets into the box. The son puts the cover on the box and starts to wheel it toward the cliff. As he gets to the edge of the cliff, there’s a knocking from inside the box. The father says, “Son, I understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, but may I suggest you just throw me over the cliff and save the box. Your children will need it later.”
One thing that helped me avoid getting trapped in our Western, youth-biased model was that I traveled a lot. I was always surprised how different the feelings around aging were in other cultures. While I was in India, I saw a dear old friend in a village in the mountains. He said to me, “Ram Dass, you’re looking so old. You’re so gray!” My first reaction to that was my Western conditioning, “What an insult! God, that’s terrible!” But when I quieted down, I heard the tone in which he spoke. He was saying it with great respect and affection. I had become a respected elder in that society. He was saying, “You’ve earned the respect due an elder. You’re someone whose wisdom we can rely on and to whom we will listen.”
The Vedic philosophy of India has four principle stages of life, or ashramas:
To age 20, you are a student.
From 20 to 40, you’re a householder, raising children and earning money.
From 40 to 60, when your children are grown, they take over your business, and you study philosophy, make pilgrimages, and do spiritual practice.
From 60 on, you give up your responsibilities. You are free. Society supports you because it needs the wisdom you have to offer.
In cultures with extended-family structures, everybody has natural roles, and old people are honored and respected. They remain part of the family, and the old and young become wise fools together. It’s all built into the system. But in our Western culture, we have an aging problem.
Western technology moves so fast that we quickly become outdated. The usefulness of our elders’ wisdom becomes questionable. I tried to learn new computer programs, and I told myself old dogs can learn new tricks. But I don’t know how many new tricks I want to learn. Maybe I will just choose to be outdated.
Let’s at least recognize that we are living in a system that has gotten out of balance. You and I are paying the price for having grown up in a materially oriented society that values people in terms of their products, their achievements, and their ability to consume, instead of cultivating the quality of their being. The zeal for independence and individuality has alienated us not only from our deeper being, from family and community, but also from nature.
Being out of touch with nature, as many of us are, we overlook the cycles of cold and warm, of autumn leaves falling—the natural cycles of birth, fruition, harvest, winter’s death, and the rebirth of spring. The cycles of nature give an intuitive, innate meaning to aging. And they give you a feeling of the appropriateness of time and place. If our old people feel empty of purpose, perhaps it is because our culture’s vision for the end of life is lacking too.
An older man is walking down the street, and he hears a voice saying, “Psst, could you help me out?”
He looks around, but he doesn’t see anybody.
Again he hears, “Psst, could you help me out?”
He looks down, and there is a big frog. He’s embarrassed—I mean, you don’t talk to frogs. But he says, “Did you speak to me?”
And the frog says, “Yeah, could you help me out?”
“Well, what’s the problem?”
“I’m under a curse. If you pick me up and kiss me, I will turn back into a beautiful maiden, and I will serve you and cook for you and warm your bed, and I will be everything you ever wanted.”
The man stood there for a little while. Then he picked up the frog, and he put it in his pocket and walked on.
After a while the frog said, “Hey, you forgot to kiss me.”
The man said, “You know, at my age I think it is more interesting to have a talking frog.”
The nature of aging has to do with change. Old age trains you for change—change in your body, change in memory, change in your relationships, change in energy, change in your family and social role—all leading to death, which is the big change in our lives. You can see this last part of your life, the age stage, as a diminution. On the other hand, from a spiritual standpoint, many of these aspects are sensationally great. The clamor of the ego calms, your motivations become clear, and wisdom begins to come forth.
Wisdom is one thing in life that does not diminish with age. Wisdom is learning how to live in harmony with the world as it is in any given moment. One aspect of that wisdom is the deep understanding that we are all in the same boat. Out of that comes compassion—compassion for yourself, compassion for others, compassion for the world. Can you allow the changes and delight in them and look for the wisdom inherent in each change rather than resisting them?
Changing phenomena are endlessly wonderful and fascinating. But when who we think we are begins to change, the fascination turns into fear. Aging brings personal changes that are both physical and psychological. It’s painful and confusing when the body doesn’t do what it used to do, and starts to do a lot of things it didn’t used to do.
Physical changes are endless, and if you’re identified with your body, they can completely grab your consciousness. Whole Sunbelt colonies in places like St. Petersburg, Florida, or Phoenix, Arizona, are full of people sitting on benches reciting these changes to each other. They call them “organ recitals.” You don’t ask, “How are you?” unless you have the time to listen.
While you can hear how real that is for some people, just imagine sitting on those same benches with people like Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, Bob Hope, Grandma Moses, or Margaret Mead. Can you imagine them having the same responses?
Part of how we deal with change depends on our perception. Perceptually, each of us is two beings, an ego and a soul, that function on different planes of consciousness. If we live predominantly in our soul, then the changes in the body are interesting, like changes in the weather.
Here’s a way to think of perception. Suppose you have a little television receiver next to your eyes. Let’s pretend the various planes of consciousness are channels on this television set. Most of us, most of the time in this culture, act as if we have a one- or two-channel set. We don’t have cable or satellite TV with hundreds of channels. But maybe we’ve heard about cable, and we can at least acknowledge the existence of these other channels floating around in the room, even though we’re not picking them up. We can’t receive them because we don’t know how to tune our receiver. That’s basically what perception is about.
On channel one, when you look at another human being, you see the physical body: old, young, dark, light, fat, thin, and so on. Especially if you’re obsessed with your own physical body, that’s what you see when you look at the world: other people’s physical bodies. That’s the channel you’re seeing. Youth, sex, fitness, fashion, beauty, sports—you know the programming.
Flip to channel two, and you’re in the psychosocial realm. You see power, and you see happiness and sadness and neurosis. This is the therapy channel and the social role channel. Here, we are mothers and truck drivers and lawyers—all the different roles and identities, intricacies of character and interaction, all the social stuff. It’s As the World Turns, a fascinating, never-ending soap opera that just goes on and on, episode after episode. Most people are happy with channel two. Maybe 98 percent of the people you meet are busy with these two channels all the time.
Now suppose you turn to yet another channel. This is the astral channel. Here you’re seeing archetypes, the Jungian archetypes. You’re dealing with what are called astral or mythic roles and mythic identities. It’s the sort of place where you see people in their mythos rather than in their personality structures. You’d look at me, and you’d say, “He’s an Aries. I just knew it,” in the same way you’d know someone’s a Sagittarius or a Leo. On this channel there are only twelve of us in various permutations.
But if you flip to the next channel, you go behind all those individual differences, and all you see is another soul, just like you. All the packaging is different, but inside the wrapping each one is another being just like you. That’s when you say, “Are you in there? I’m in here. How’d you get in that one?” All of the personality stuff and the astral and mythic archetypes and the physical form—all of it is packaging. Inside, you see the individual spiritual entity.
Now, just for fun turn the channel once more. Here, you’re looking at yourself looking at yourself—pure awareness looking at itself. And there’s only one of it.
You try to live life in a way that is harmonious with what you know on these other planes of consciousness. That harmony is part of the wisdom that comes with age. Learning how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
One of the subtle traps of the ego, of the mind getting caught on channel one or two, is your concept of time, because aging has to do with time. But there is a part of you that is not in time, and finding that place and resting in it is a key part of the mystical journey. What you begin to see is that the spiritual journey is one of going deeper and deeper into your being, going behind the part of you that changes, to seek the part that does not change.
All the universe is but a sign to be read rightly…. War and peace, love and separation are hidden gateways to other worlds…. Let us not grow old still believing that truth is what most people see around them.
FROM THE RAMAYANA, WILLIAM BUCK
Here’s the predicament: things change—my car gets old, my body gets old. The external changes are obvious. The harder and subtler task is to recognize that thoughts and feelings are also part of what changes.
As you age, some of those thoughts and feelings in your life will be traumatic because they counter the core model of who you think you are. As long as you identify with your thoughts and feelings, as long as you think those thoughts and feelings are you, they will be a source of suffering.
As you face the changes associated with aging, you can get trapped in a whole list of grim psychological possibilities: despair, depression, feelings of worthlessness, frustration, doubt, vulnerability, forgetfulness, irritability, loss of self-confidence, fear of the future, obsession with possessions, lack of meaning, loss of friends, fear of not having enough money, no one to touch, loss of power or influence, lack of focus and goals, to name just a few. Part of the psychological trap is your social support system, which also changes as you retire from your life’s work. You may have to leave your home. You have less responsibility. Reward systems you worked so hard for don’t reward you anymore. You may try to maintain psychological security by holding onto things as they are. But you never know.
There is a story of a farmer who had a horse that ran away. His neighbor came by and said, “Oh, that’s terrible.”
The farmer said, “You never know.”
The next day the horse came back, and it was leading two other wild horses. The neighbor said, “That’s wonderful.”
And the farmer said, “You never know.”
Later, his son was training one of the wild horses, and while riding the wild horse, he fell off and broke his leg. The neighbor came by and said, “That’s terrible.”
The farmer said, “You never know.”
The Cossack army came through recruiting everybody, taking away all the able young men. They didn’t take the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. The neighbor came by and said, “That’s wonderful.”
And the farmer said, “You never know.”
And so it goes.
There is a spiritual model that will allow us to age gracefully instead of the old psychological model that is fearful and frightened. Martin Buber says, “To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned what it means to begin.”
Use the new uncertainty and negative feelings about aging as a wake-up call. Have compassion for yourself and allow yourself to open to the changes, and all the rest will follow.
In a Hallmark card, I found a poem about losing our mind. Forgetting is great because it’s such fun to remember. But the greatest psychological fear we have is of losing our mind. This poem says:
Just a line to say I’m living, I’m not among the dead,
though I’m getting more forgetful and more mixed up in the head.
Sometimes I can’t remember when I stand at the foot of the stair
if I must go up for something or if I’ve just come down from there.
And before the fridge so often my poor mind is full of doubt
have I just put food away or have I come to take some out. And there
are times when it is dark out with my night cap on my head
I don’t know if I am retiring or just getting out of bed.
So if it is my turn to write you there is no need for getting sore.
I may think that I’ve written and don’t want to be a bore.
Remember I do love you I wish you were here.
It’s nearly mail time so I’ll say goodbye dear.
There I stood beside the mailbox with my face so very red.
Instead of mailing you my letter I have opened it instead.
I love my new bifocals, my dentures fit me fine,
my hearing aid is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind.
It is easier to extricate oneself from the changes of aging when the changes don’t involve one’s own personality. While you may be able to see the body as object, it is very hard to see the personality as object because you’ve identified with it for so long. You think that’s who you are. Even though they keep changing, you keep identifying with those thoughts and feelings.
Now we are getting more into the heart of the matter: can you find a place to stand in relation to change where you are not frightened by it? Can you live in the presence of change, even enjoy the changes—work with the changes, become an elder, do all the things that involve changing—and at the same moment cultivate equanimity, clarity, loving awareness, compassion, and joy? Balancing those qualities is really what the deep spiritual work is about.
One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is that their roles change, and with those changes they experience a loss of purpose; a diminished sense of value, identity, and self-worth; confusion about how to behave; a feeling of no longer being needed. People are uncertain how to restructure their lives, how to manifest as a being whose role is now totally unfamiliar to them. Retirement and having children leave the parental nest are two role changes that come to mind.
Recognize in yourself the conflicting forces; part of you wants to stay effective in the world, and part of you wants to be contemplative. Really give that contemplative part some space. Water it a bit and give it some sunlight to grow instead of treating it as an error. Give yourself the opportunity to grieve—for the end of dreams, for the end of childhood, for all the people that go away, for the sorrow of parting.
When you experience fear or are unsure about your situation, there’s a beautiful and very powerful mantra you can say: “The power of God is within me. The grace of God surrounds me.” Repeat it to yourself or to a loved one in need. It will protect you. Experience the power of it. It’s like a solid steel shaft that goes through the top of your head right down to the base of your being. Grace will surround you like a force field.
One of the gifts of old age is no longer caring so much about what others think of us. Aging allows us to be more eccentric. When we were younger, we were expected to behave in a certain way. As we age, we can let it all fall apart a little more. We are free to be ourselves—to follow our hunches, to experiment, or to do nothing at all—as age liberates us from our old roles and offers a different kind of freedom and an authentic way of being. Nadine Strain was eighty-five when she wrote the poem “If I Had My Life to Live Over”:
I’d like to make more mistakes next time. I’d relax. I would limber up.
I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take more chances.
I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers.
I would eat more ice cream and less beans.
I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer
imaginary ones.
You see, I’m one of those people who live sensibly and sanely
hour after hour, day after day.
Oh, I’ve had my moments, and if I had it to do over again,
I’d have more of them. In fact, I’d try to have nothing else.
Just moments, one after another, instead of living so many years ahead
of each day.
I’ve been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a
thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute.
If I had to do it again,
I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring
and stay that way later in the fall.
I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds.
I would pick more daisies.
Don’t get caught in your old roles. If you cultivate the ways you exist behind personality, the pure awareness of the witness, the “I am loving awareness” place in your heart, you will begin to live more in your soul. If you see the Beloved when you look at another being, then everyone you see is a soul, as well as a mirror for your own soul.
Relationships become so beautiful. Each person’s struggle, each person’s journey, is so exquisite. Let yourself stop for a moment and appreciate that beauty. It is so precious. Most people have no idea they are beautiful. They’re busy being not beautiful, because they think, “If only I had this or that, then I’d be beautiful.” But who they are—their pain and their beauty—is all so beautiful.
The Beloved keeps appearing to you in one guise or another. You can cultivate this view and practice your ability to see the soul. Seeing the subtlety inside another person also depends on your ability to acknowledge it in yourself. It takes One to know One.
Conscious aging has to do with letting go, which allows you to come into the present moment—into spirit. Hold on tightly, let go lightly.
Making believe you are done with something you are not truly finished with will slow you down on your journey to God. Equally, trying to hold onto something you are done with will slow your journey.
How do you get on with it? You give up the things that don’t get you to God. What do you give up? It’s not just material stuff. It’s also the ways you identify yourself, how you feel about yourself. For instance, give up your unworthiness. Don’t analyze it—just give it up. Keep giving up your guilt, your anger, and your preoccupation with your own melodrama. It’s just a melodrama, a soap opera. Don’t you already know how it comes out?
You took this birth because you have work to do that involves suffering and the kinds of situations you find yourself in. This is your curriculum for this birth. Where you are now with all your neuroses and problems is just the right place. This is it, and it’s perfect. Live life fully and richly as a partner with God and accept what comes with openness and love.
Expand your perception of the world to include the horrible beauty of decay. Look at decay and see how beautiful it is in its own way. My dear friend Laura Huxley had a collection of beautiful pharmaceutical jars in her kitchen over the sink. She’d take old beet greens and orange peels and things and put them in water in the jars and let them slowly mold and decay into beautiful formations catching the light. It was decay as art. There is true beauty in that.
There’s horror and beauty in everything. I look at my hand, and it’s decaying. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same moment, and I just live with it. See the beauty and perfection of decay in the world around you and in yourself, and just allow it to be.
There are some unappreciated advantages to aging. The very frailty of age guards its secrets. To many people you become irrelevant, which gives you more time to do inner work. Francis, a resident in a nursing home, wrote to me, “Lack of physical strength keeps me inactive and often silent. They call me senile. Senility is a convenient peg on which to hang nonconformity. A new set of faculties seems to be coming into operation. I seem to be waking to a larger world of wonderment—to catch little glimpses of the immensity and diversity of creation. More than at any other time of my life, I seem to be aware of the beauties of our spinning planet and the sky above. Old age is sharpening my awareness.”
It is interesting to see how aging can work to one’s advantage spiritually. I used to go to Burma to sit in meditation. I’d go into a cell. I’d sit down—no books, no television, no computers, no one to talk to. I’d just sit and go inward. I’d go into as quiet a place as I could find. Just look at what happens when you get old. You lose your hearing, you lose your sight, you can’t move around so well, you slow down. What an ideal time to meditate. If any message is clear, that’s it. Yet we treat aging as an error or a failing.
That distortion comes from defining ourselves in terms of doing instead of being. But behind all the doing, all the roles, you just are—pure awareness, pure consciousness, pure energy. When you reside fully in the present moment, you are outside of time and space.
Trungpa Rinpoche notes, “Our lives awaken through ordinary magic.” It’s in everyday things that the miraculous happens. If we practice being here now, we develop the sensitivity to perceive and appreciate the daily miracles of our lives.
For a while I lived in an old school bus and spent a lot of time in campgrounds with elderly neighbors. Earlier in their lives these people had focused on planning for the future. Now that the future was here, their consciousness was occupied with the past. I heard heavy doses of sentimental reverie. As I was thinking about this, I wondered, “Whatever happened to the present moment? What happened to just making tea? What happened to this consciousness of just being together in this beautiful place under the stars?”
Their minds were holding onto an identity that they were constantly reinforcing by reliving the past. Any memory of a high moment you’ve held on to keeps you from this present moment. And right here is the living spirit. If not here, then nowhere.
Now isn’t preparation for later. Here and now is it. There is a spaciousness, an acceptance of what is in the moment, that says, “Yes, ah so!” to everything, whether it’s ugly, beautiful, boring, confused, dead, angry, the dark night of the soul, or the brilliant light of the spirit. This is just the way it is. And in just the way it is, is the spirit.
This moment is just enough. To come more and more fully into the moment is to fully appreciate the infusion of the spirit. Once you’ve tasted what it’s like to be in the spirit, to be with the Beloved, you can’t stand to be away. Coming fully into the moment is like coming through a doorway to another dimension of consciousness—into being here now.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote:
Sometimes … I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in the undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.
In a letter, he also wrote, “To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.”