Ram Dass

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Aging and the Awakening of Potential Change - Ram Dass Last year i was on a late evening train and the station was closed so i had to buy the ticket on the train and i had just become 60. so when the conductor came i said to him i'd like a senior citizen ticket and what i felt when i did that

Was just what i had felt when i was 18 years old and i had been from boston where the drinking age was 21 but i went to new york with some friends and the drinking age was 18 and i went into a bar and i said i'd like a beer with trepidation that they wouldn't serve me because i was too young i had the same feeling with the

Conductor and but he immediately made out the ticket for the senior citizen i said to him don't you want to see my id and he said no and i was shocked because until i was 50 i think i saw myself as somewhere between 12 and 14. and then around 50 i started to grow up

And i began to consider the fact that i was possibly an adult so that uh in the earlier years when i had been in my 30s and a student would come in and say sir may i see you i would take it as a joke but when i became 60 up until then i had really treated age as uh rather uninteresting and um i was busy being spiritual and spiritual people don't focus on age of

The body so but i decided when i was 60 to milk it to see what i could get out of it to see if there was any work i should do so instead of usually i'm traveling during my birthday so people can't have birthday parties but this time i told everybody i wanted birthday parties and i had many birthday parties and because 60 was a key year i uh have studied in the east a great deal and at

60 you become a sannyas which in the stages of life from 0 to 20 the ashramas or stages of life from 0 to 20 you're a student from 20 to 40 you're a householder raising your children earning money from 40 to 60 you start to do spiritual studies and pilgrimages and practices and at 60 you throw over everything and you are a total you're totally free and

60 is such a key point uh in this country it's a little less more confusing because you don't know whether you retire at 55 or 60 in medicare's until 65 and so you don't quite know when the mark is there's no clear right of passage as to when you're old but i really wanted to uh milk it and um i realized that i got caught in it and for about six months i was really busy being 60.

Um i looked at my hand and i saw my father's hand and i thought there's a 60 year old hand you know bone and blood vessels and wrinkles and spots wow spots yeah you know the poor solana ad says says they call these spots aging spots i call them ugly is that an extraordinary ad i mean to

Create suffering i mean the other way of looking is they call these ugly i call them aging spots but what i had done was i had internalized at some level more or less consciously um the social clock of aging of our society because we are basically a hunting tribe and what happens to old people in hunting tribes since hunting tribes have to keep moving is old people are left

Behind and they're treated as somewhat irrelevant and since economic productivity and social roles of achievement are so stressed in this society in this youth society i began to feel like it was time for closings rather than openings i should look at the projects i had left to do maybe i should consider retiring from

Save a foundation maybe i should do my last book i mean i was really climbing into it i maybe i should take six months a year now off and i started to notice i travel and i use carry-on baggage because i don't like baggage claim waiting so i noticed that the the corridors to the plane seemed to be getting longer and i thought ah-ha it's happening um

And i reacted to it uh in interesting ways part of me was sort of steeping myself in okay what's it going to be like to be older i'll slow down i'll honor this and the other part was doing this bizarre behavior where last summer i spent some time helping my colleague build his house with adobe bricks and uh i would be in this long line of people all of

Whom were about 20 to 30 year old mexican laborers and me and my friend and the bricks weighed about 30 to 40 pounds and we would toss them up the hill from one to another and we would work from 7 30 in the morning till 5 at night at which point they'd go out to dinner and to play and i would stagger to bed but i wouldn't give up i did it

And um then i thought well my body's out of shape so i went to gold's gym and um i got a trainer and now gold's gym is wonderful because it's where everybody comes with all those kind of really must muscle bound huge the forms you know these things that you know and uh they have mirrors all around the sides for these people who admire

Themselves but because i'm nearsighted without my glasses i couldn't see in the mirrors all i saw were these huge forms going by and so pretty soon i was starting to walk like this because since i couldn't see myself i just assumed i was one of them and uh but the trainer as we went through the uh regimen at one point i was sitting there deciding whether i would live or die and she said

You are right and i knew she wouldn't be asking that to one of them so i remembered my father's little poem 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 but i wasn't ready to give up so in

November i went with a 33 year old friend of mine to the south pacific to do two months of boogie boarding and for those of you that don't know that it might have passed you by a boogie board is a plastic board and you go out in the waves and you ride on the wave so i found myself in tahiti and in the marquesa islands and my friend would leap into the surf

And rush out to get the waves and these waves are coming in and um i would be struggling to get through the wave and i get out there and there were all these uh not only weren't they 60 years old they weren't 50 and they weren't 40 and they weren't even 30 i mean they were about 15 and only one person gets away if it turns out if you really want to ride the right

Place so i was fighting these 15 20 year olds and at one point i took a wrong turn and i ended up on this coral reef with the waves pounding down on me and the coral cutting into my legs and you know how long it takes to put carl to heal and i i everybody was screaming at me to do something which i couldn't hear over the waves and i thought what am i doing

Is it possible that i could say enough already i've saved my father's cane for whenever there's a lovely chinese story about that about the um old chinese man who's retired he's too old to work in the garden and he's sitting on the porch and his son is tilling the garden with his son as a wife and family and the son looks up at the old man and he thinks

You know he's so old he just eats food what good is he he says um no it's time for him to be done so he went out and he made a a wooden box and he put the box on the wheelbarrow and he rolled the wheelbarrow up to the porch and he said father get in the father got into the box

And the son put a cover on the box and started to wheel the box towards the cliff and as he got to the edge of the cliff there was a knocking from inside the box and he said yes father and the father said well i understand what you're doing and why you're doing it son but might i suggest that you just throw me over and save the

Box because your children will probably need it later [Applause] but one of the things that's helped me from not getting too trapped in our cultural models is that i do travel a great deal in other cultures and in other cultures i'm always surprised at how different the feelings are that are generated around variables

Like in india when i went there last time two years ago one of my lovely old friends up in the village in the mountains said to me ramdas you're looking so old he said you're so gray now at first my reaction to that was my western cultural reaction of oh god no that's terrible but then when i quieted down i heard the

Tone with which he was saying it he was saying it with great respect and delight like i had now become one of the elders of the society and he was saying wow you've done it you've grown old how great um and what i've found is that after i live in places like guatemala or malaysia or thailand or burma or italy or france or spain or polynesia

Where there are extended families where everybody has natural roles within the structure and where old people are part of the families and the old and the young are wise fools together and the whole thing is quite built in then you come back to where this culture where we have quote an aging problem and i realize that the we are gathered here because of our cultural pathology

That were it not for that we wouldn't need this so much because in many cultures this was all built in in a natural way and in our zeal to be independent we have thrown away the baby with the bath a little bit and we've ended up where we have alienated ourselves across generations instead of embracing ourselves across generations and creating these kinds of supportive communities where the roles

Of elders are obvious and clear in our society of course where technology moves so fast we get outdated so that the question of what wisdom elders have that is useful i mean i'm only at wordperfect5o and i realize now that i are i already can't tell the language of my friend's

12 year old son and i'm i you know i moved from a typewriter to a computer and i kept saying to myself old dogs can learn new tricks old dogs can learn new tricks all dogs can learn new tricks and i put it over my computer but i don't know how many more old tricks i'm going to learn and i may just decide to be outdated but i think that we have to recognize that we are living in a system that has

Gotten out of balance in which the the zeal for independence and individuality has left us um alienated from the structures not only of family and community but from nature you know in ways that salman was talking about from recognizing our identity as part of biotic communities and part of other things that all of which

Give a an intuitive innate meaning to aging and they give you a feeling of the appropriateness of the place most of us live in urban areas where we are living almost totally surrounded by the projections of the human mind and very rarely are we living so close to nature and earth that we are experiencing in our blood and our being the cycles of cold and warm of leaves falling of the feelings

Of nature of death of birth of aging and it's a it's a harsh reality at one level and it's what's the it's the horrible beauty of the wisdom of nature that we often have shielded ourselves from and in that shielding we have lost something because we've been afraid to look at the nature of aging and death robert castenbaum says

The limitations and distortions of our core vision of what it means to be a person in our culture becomes starkly evident in old age if to be an old person is to suffer abandonment disappointment and humiliation this is not a geriatric problem it is the disproof of our whole shaky pudding technology science and all if our old people are empty

Our vision of life is empty the nature of aging has to do with change obviously and the nature of changing phenomena is that they are endlessly fascinating we get fascinated with that which changes when it starts to happen to who we think we are the fascination turns into fear the first level of change that we have to

Attend to is the physical nature of change with aging as i read this list it'll be very familiar to many of you arthritis neuritis insomnia constipation poor circulation high blood pressure i went to the doctor the other day and

He said you have high blood he said your blood pressure's high he said would you do whatever you do to lower it i said what i do to lower does not visit doctors offices that's what i do it's called the the white coat blood pressure nervous tension atrophying muscles bones breaking easily motor nerves signals slower

Lungs less oxygen loss of mobility can't hear as well can't see as well run out of steam sooner days when you feel sick and nauseous questions about continence now those changes themselves are so fascinating that i can take you to whole societies in the sun in saint petersburg for example

Where there are hundreds of thousands of people who are endlessly reciting the lists of these changes to each other mostly their own fascinate them the most however they do listen to each other so that they can give fair hearing so that they can have time for their own but you don't say how are you and that's real and it's very real and it's very painful and very confusing

Because the body just doesn't do what it used to do and it does a lot of things it didn't used to do and while you can see how real that is for those people when you put in the places of those people who are the same age now just put on those benches einstein otto rubenstein pablo picasso rembrandt george bernard shaw monet chagall bob hope grandma moses and margaret mead

And you can't imagine them sitting around doing that same thing can you so it's clearly not age is it it's where the mind grabs hold and which changes it focuses on right i mean just that's a now around that one is so endlessly fascinating we've developed a great deal of humor around it johnny carson soon to be former

Johnny carson says i know a man who gave up smoking drinking sex and rich food he was healthy right up to the time he committed suicide groucho marx said in middle age you go to bed knowing you're hoping you'll feel better in the morning in old age you go to bed hoping you'll have a morning robert benchley said i feel fine at 50 except for an occasional heart attack these identifications are so intense

It's extremely hard to break them but as you heard you could feel that it was possible to lift out of them and to see the body as a vehicle in the east you see the body as something you have incarnated into and it's a vehicle that it's like a spacesuit for working on this planet on this plane of reality and your spacesuit i have an old i have a two cars one is 19 years old and one's 18 years old now to me they're new cars

Because i remember them but one of them just failed the smog test in california and it's and i realize now that um it's just a car but to be able to say it's just a body in the same way because most of us have identified so with the it's like identifying with your car and somebody says uh how do you do who you and you say i'm a ford

You know like i'm an arthritic you know like i have gout how do you do i have gout yeah it's the same thing you're identifying with the vehicle i mean it's it's a charming old vehicle it's just falling apart but i can with a little tender care i can keep it together for a little while longer

However when you get to the psychological things that change it's a whole other ball game when you work with the psychological changes because there are a lot of new ones you face that are psychological changes some of them just increase and some of them appear that have never appeared before let me give you a little list to play with you got that you handled

The physical list well try this one despair depression feeling abandoned lonely worthless frustrated worrying doubting vulnerable forgetful

Losing self-confidence petty irritable fear of the future obsessed with possessions meaninglessness friendlessness fear of being penniless no one to touch loss of psychological power worship and fear of doctors suspicion

Paranoia those all sound pretty real and they are coming and going and appearing more and more frequently and changing as your social support system changes as you may have to leave the home as you may have to lose friends as you may have to find that you have less responsibility

As the reward systems you worked for don't work anymore you try to maintain psychological security by going holding on to things as they are and if you can hear the predicament that everything is cha things change things change my car gets old my body gets old that's obvious the hard one to hear is that thoughts and feelings are things and things change

And that your identification with your thoughts and feelings is another source of the cause of the suffering what we usually do under those conditions is we work in a therapeutic sense psychologically to try to find some psychological model that will allow us to age and we try to substitute that for the one that is depressed and fearful and

Frightened it's a horizontal shift and there are certain qualities that we look for we try to cultivate martin buber says to be old is a glorious thing when one has not when one has not unlearned what it means to begin he's talking about somebody who knew how to begin he said he was not at all young but he was old in a young way knowing how to begin

And most of the social programs that are not for the physical body are for psychological well-being and there's in supporting education the elder hostile travel if you read the aarp magazine maturity you just see lots of stuff around keeping your psychological mental health good and your physical health good to continue to do things to be active etc

To see aging as a challenge as a psychological challenge a challenge that is sufficient to motivate you to grow but not so extreme so as to induce depression regression in other words not beyond our adaptive capacity to psychologically study the way in which we are responding to change in a habitual way that is similar to the way we responded to change at puberty the

Way we responded to change in childhood and realize we're just reliving psychological patterns over and over again and to break ours break our habits and get out of those things part of the psychological mental health of elders and aging has to do now with political power with the great panthers with the aarp with power

With as uh zalman said the baby boom and the power now every bus will be a kneeling bus because we have the votes now that's a good example of something that is extremely useful and important and relevant when older people say look we are not going to be disempowered by a youth culture we're going to redefine the game of what this culture respects and we're not going to wait for somebody else to give it to us we're going to take it

And we're going to take it with our political power that is great but i want to represent another voice here and say do that and do it effectively don't get trapped in it don't get trapped in worldly power because the business of aging has some other agenda to it as well one of the things that eldering allows us to do are aging rather has allows us to do is become more eccentric

That's a psychological shift in role before where you had to be a certain way now you can sort of let it all fall apart a little bit more there's a wonderful poem that many of you know i'm sure by jenny joseph it's a warning she said when i am an old woman i shall wear purple with a red hat which doesn't go and it doesn't suit me and i shall spend my pension on brandy

And summer gloves and satin sandals and say we've no money for butter i shall sit down on the pavement when i'm tired and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells and run my stick along the public railings and make up for the sobriety of my youth i shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick the flowers in other people's gardens and learn to spit you can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat and eat three pounds of sausage at a go or only bread and pickles for a week and hoard pens and pencils and beer mats and things in boxes ah but now we must have clothes to keep us dry and pay the rent and not swear in the street and set a good example for

The children we must have friends to dinner and read the papers but maybe i ought to practice a little now so people who know me are not too shocked and surprised when suddenly i am old and start to wear purple that's of course t.s eliot's proofrock i grow old i grow old i shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled shall i put my here apart my hair behind

Do i dare to eat a peach i shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach i have heard the mermaids singing each to each i do not think that they will sing to me and one more poem that i found in a hallmark card because the of course the psychological fear that we have the most is of losing our mind and um

This says just a line to say i'm living that i'm not among the dead though i'm getting more forgetful and for more mixed up in the head but 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's dark out with my night cap on my head i don't know if i'm retiring or just getting out of bed so if it's my turn to write you there's no need in getting sore i may think that i have written and don't want to be a boar remember i do love you i wish you were here and 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 i love my new bifocals my dentures fit me fine my hearing aid is perfect but lord i miss my mind [Applause] now it's much harder to hear the possibility that one can extricate oneself from that which changes when the changes involves one's own personality because while you may be able to see the

Body as object it's very hard to see the personality as object because you've identified with it for so long you think that's who you are and now we're getting more into the depth of the matter because the question one asks is is there a place to stand in relation to change where one is not frightened by it is there a place to stand in the

Presence of change where one can be with the changes even enjoy the changes work with the changes become an elder do all the things that changing involves and at the same moment cultivate equanimity spaciousness emptiness awareness clarity

That's really what the issue of spiritual of the the deep spiritual work is about now there are stages of that work and the first stage i think is the recognition of what is most comfortable for people in spiritual dimension is something called soul which which says you are still a separate entity

But you aren't the incarnation you aren't what was born so you aren't your personality and you aren't your body here are just a few images to work with and thinking about this one is by yates an aged man is but a paltry thing tattered coat upon a stick unless soul claps its hands and sing and louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress oh sages standing in god's holy fire be the singing masters of my soul

Consume my heart away sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it is and gather me into the artifice of eternity pull my soul out of the identification with the body and in eliot t.s eliot's poem east coker as we grow older the world becomes stranger the pattern more complicated of dead of living old men and women ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter we must be still and still moving into another eternal intensity for further union a deeper communion through the dark cold and empty desolation the wave cry the wind cry the vast waters of the petrol and the porpoise in my end is my beginning you and i are paying the price of having grown up in such a materially oriented

Society such an externalized society such a society that measures people in terms of their products their achievements their possessions their knowledge instead of cultivating the quality of being in the east one spends one's life it's in the in from a spiritual sense in preparing for aging and death

We have spent most of our lives in denying aging and death and the predicament we face now is that once we become older when we suddenly realize there is another agenda it's harder to do it now because it's harder to not be distracted by all of the changes that are happening in our bodies and our minds and that is why you are encouraged spiritually

It says die in the morning so you need not die at night and that has to do with go through the spiritual transformations when you are young so that when you get old you will have built up the resonance within yourself to be able to transform the changes without getting caught in them mahatma gandhi had spent so many years in inner spiritual practice and with the mantra he did ram ram ram ram ram ram

With his with his beads ram ram ram ram that when he walked out into the garden that day and a man came up and shot him four times at blank range range right in the chest as gandhi was falling over he didn't say uf or save india

Or you are forgiven he said ram he was so ready to move forward that at the moment the unexpected moment he was ready to utter that mantra which would take him into the next space the depth of the understanding of that particular image

Of the preparation not just for the moment of death but for the process of aging it is a lifetime's work to know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living and one best done early on t.s eliot has one other quote he says we cannot stick to the moving finger of time on the surface of the sphere but

Must descend into the still point of the turning world that is one of the traps that our mind is in is the trap of time and aging has to do with time and the i must ask you is there a part of you that is not in time and if so find it and rest in it

That's the whole mystical now the predicament is the part of you that is not in time you can't see it you can't smell it you can't hear it you can't even think about it and yet it is you can only be it you can't know it because the thinking mind knows objects

And objects are in time what a frustrating thing it's like having a a flashlight that you shine on this and that on a memory on a plan on a sensation on a feeling but when does the flashlight shine on itself and the flashlight itself is that part of you which you could call whatever you call it is just going to be a word which isn't going to be it but let's call it awareness awareness has no time

It has no space it doesn't die it wasn't born it's not going anywhere everybody is having continuous experience or continuous understanding or resting in awareness but you are so fascinated with what you are being aware of you never notice the awareness itself isn't that strange what you begin to see is the way in which the

Journey the spiritual journey is one of going deeper and deeper into your being to go in behind that which changes to find that which does not change and it's not a that but fine not change and in that process you start to use the things of your life as your vehicles of doing it and all of the things i've talked about the physical breakdown the psychological breakdown all can become the stuff you use in order to go behind it by saying

Not this not this not and when you know how to use aging to go behind time then you begin to see that all of that stuff that's happening to you not only might not be bad it might even be grace there's the story of the man who had a horse and the horse ran away and his neighbor came up and said oh that's terrible the man said you never know and the next day the horse came back and

It was leading two other wild horses and the neighbors said that's wonderful and the farmer said you never know and then his son was training one of the wild horses and while he was riding the wild horse he fell off and broke his leg and the neighbor came up and said that's terrible and the farmer said you know and then the cossack army came through

Recruiting everybody taking all the young men that were able but they didn't take the sun because he had a broken leg and the neighbor came up and said that's wonderful and the farmer said and on it goes you see you begin to experience that the very stuff of aging becomes stuff to work with for your spiritual journey