Some Truths About Aging
Growing old. Let’s talk about it. There is a false concept that stops people from living the long, full life described in the Vedas. Old age is as much a state of mind as of body. Today young people are taught that when you become old and gray, you are in the way. Not a nice thought! It is the older folk, the wiser folk, the experienced elders, who have lived longer and therefore can see further, to whom youth should be listening. But in our present times, young people have become the spokesmen, and they are allowed to learn by their own mistakes. What a perverted way to learn! They should be learning, if they ever become open to it, from the mistakes of their elders, that is if elders are willing to admit them. There is no excuse for ignorance. Yet, looking around, we find it to be all pervasive, like the Hindu God, equally distributed all over the world.
We are not getting old. True, the physical body does change. It has done so from birth, but it has a future. It really does. We live in it like we walk in our shoes. My satguru said, “Live in your body as loosely as your wear your sandals.” It is not wise to accept the forebodings that we are headed toward a doomsday, end of the world, end of the physical body, absolute, total oblivion, and that is that. Think no more about it.
Aging is an interesting process. Even though we are told that all the cells in the body change and renew themselves every three or four years, aging can be really scary, especially for those who identify themselves as their body. But not for those of us who know that we are not the body, we only live in it. It is our Earth suit in which to function on this planet. In fact, we don’t live in it twenty-four hours a day. At least eight hours, while we are sleeping, we are living in our astral suit, traveling here and there in the Devaloka.
When we correctly look at aged people, we look at minds that have been developed year after year after year. We look at souls that have matured because of their sojourn on Earth. We see them having gone through many birth karmas, prārabdha karmas—those we bring with us to live through—and prevailed. We look upon their situation as wonderful and enlightening, their wisdom as useful and worthy to make part of our lives. After all, if we hear from them, it is in our prārabdha karmas to have had that knowledge passed on to us. Only the ignorant would object. And they usually do.
The mind never gets old, though the brain may. The mind never deteriorates. Consciousness was never born and never dies. The mental body, which works through the astral body and the Earth suit, does not age, does not get weak, as modern people think of aging, as weakness, disability. It becomes stronger and stronger, more mature and more expansive, as do the emotions if they are understood and controlled from stage to stage. Age is not an obstacle; it is a legacy. The most senior among us should have faith in the future, not be led to think that turning fifty or sixty or eighty is some morbid milestone. It’s not. Take heart. When I met Satguru Yogaswami, spiritual king of Jaffna, he was seventy-seven, still walking twenty miles a day, still meditating hours a day, and he would go on dynamically for another fifteen years. Some die young, of course. Sankara was just thirty-two and Vivekananda thirty-nine. Others die old. Sri Chandrasekharendra passed on in his hundredth year, and we recently read of the passing of a 116-year-old yogī. The US Census Bureau reported that from 1900 to 2000, the number of people in the United States 85 and over grew tenfold, to four million, while the overall population grew less than fourfold. The bureau projects that the 85-and-over population will exceed 13 million by 2040. The number of centenarians is expected to grow to more than 834,000, from just 63,000 in 1900. And many live surprisingly active and healthy lives, even remaining in their careers after age 100.
NANDINATHA SŪTRA 232: NOT DEMEANING OTHER SECTS OR RELIGIONS
Śiva’s devotees do not speak disrespectfully about other Hindu lineages, their beliefs, Gods, sacred sites, scriptures, or holy men and women. Nor do they disparage other religions. They refuse to listen to such talk. Aum.