Ageing Part 3

Immortality

Dear Friends,

Was it George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde who wittily quipped, “Youth is wasted on the young?” It does seem like something Wilde would say, but at least we can be sure that it was said by an Irishman, and probably in a pub. Who can dispute that when we are young we do not have the knowledge to make the best use of our sensual ripeness, but instead abuse it with folly or neglect it from fear of where it might lead us?

I would add that age is wasted on the old. By this I mean that if, as you age (which all of us are constantly doing) you think of yourself as “old,” like stale bread at the supermarket, you will miss the opportunity for a renewal of the child mind that made you immortal when you were young. It was the possibility of this personal reincarnation that lay behind the poetry of William Blake as he wrote his famous “Songs of Innocence and of Experience.” For Blake, as for Carl Jung, the purpose of a human life, its ultimate goal, is individuation, the complete fulfillment of the self we are born with. Such a fulfillment can only be accomplished by passing through the state of innocence into which we are born, into the experience given us by our life, then onto a higher innocence that completes us. Only by ageing can we make this passage. One can read the story told in Genesis as a version of this life truth, Adam and Eve falling from the innocence of Eden into the realm of experience, temporarily exiled from paradise.

This means that ageing should not be viewed as a period of decay, although physical decay is certainly occurring, but as a period of rebirth into a state of immortality in which we know who we are and have no further need of time to obtain this knowledge. This may be why elders in indigenous societies are revered for their wisdom and treated with the greatest respect. Whereas in our more “civilized” Western culture time is our enemy, ageing is a process to be delayed and denied via plastic surgery, and the aged are to be “retired,” unless they are serving in Congress.

Immortality, heaven, paradise—terms found in all religious doctrines—are actually only words that refer to a psychological state, the state of being in a moment that is devoid of suffering and fully open to joy. Age puts such moments more readily within reach by giving us the perspective to see that all our striving has been an illusion, because what we have been striving for—happiness—we already have, if only we can grasp it.

Sartre has a character in his play No Exit say, “Hell is other people.” But no, hell is living merely in the time bound world of dualisms where the contest between hope and despair keeps us in a perpetual state of suffering. It’s far easier to imagine a timeless state and to write about it than it is to actually experience it. Even the monk Thomas Merton admitted that despite his daily hours of prayer and meditation he had never been able to achieve the empty mind that would suspend him from time.

Thoughts keep us in time. Fully to be is to be without thought. This is why many novitiates who enter a religious order take a vow of silence and use sign language instead of speech to communicate. To be continually speaking is to be in the grip of thought, the mind endlessly associating, removing us from the silent moment that awaits us. Even when we think silently, we are speaking to ourselves. Complete silence allows the inner and the outer to merge in a mystical union.

What is our fascination with the portraits of men and women no longer living that we hang in museums and stand silently before? The paintings have made their subjects immortal, locating them in an eternal moment that we share as we gaze at them. So look at yourself, whatever your age, as a great painter would look at you, seeing in your mind’s eye the inner self that is timeless.

Walt Whitman, author of “Song of Myself.” (Thomas Eakins, 1888)

Arthur

www.arthurhoyle.com