By looking back at our lives trying to see cycles and identify crises that we have lived through, perhaps decisions that we’ve made that have been life changing, we begin to see a pattern and a flow and a purpose to our lives.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes. So, stay with us, and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is aging on the pathway of the soul-part 2. I’d like to set forth this thought taken from World Goodwill Commentaries, Aging on the Pathway of the Soul. And I quote, “Many older persons still see themselves as vigorous individuals. Stopping work entirely would be boring for them. Their inner consciousness seeks more growth. For them, a mind that shuts down at sixty-five or seventy is an invitation to a premature death.” Well, maybe retirement is not all it’s cracked up to be. Let’s find out more about that and explore that more with Dale and Sarah. There seems to be quite a lot of attention given to the needs of the elderly today. But this hasn’t always been the case, has it?
Sarah: No, there have been large periods of time when the elderly have been seen, in some societies at least, as a burden. I think it’s the Asian societies that particularly value the older person in society. Perhaps it’s related to the Confucian ethic that they follow, but they do traditionally have a place of really high esteem for the older person in their society. I’ve read that women who have passed through the fiftieth year or so of life, past the menopause, enter into a phase of real power and enjoyment in their lives. And yet in Western society, most women feel like they vanish into invisibility at about that time, and the extremely old are often viewed as an annoyance. But it shouldn’t be so.
Dale: No. In some societies—I think particularly in Africa—the elderly are looked upon with great reverence. They are respected because they are actually the history of the tribe, they have the history of the tribe in their memory. If you want to know the past history of your tribe, you go to the elders of the village, and they are the ones that have it. Nothing is ever written down.
Sarah: That’s true, like in the American Indian society too their oral tradition.
Dale: So, it depends on the society you’re talking about, whether they respect the elderly. The early Greek societies in Greece two thousand years ago, didn’t have this great respect for the elderly because generally so much of their emphasis was on the youth and the promotion of youth and physical beauty. Old age and the decrepit, decaying body was looked upon as a curse in some of the ancient Greek societies. So, it varies from time to time, down through history, and there hasn’t always been this great respect for the elderly, but I think that’s changing. The attitudes for the elderly have changed more in recent times, particularly as more and more of the elderly people are growing even older. They’re a bigger force to contend with, so they have to be recognised.
Sarah: Yes, I’ve read that in the coming years, the population of the elderly is actually going to double from ten percent to about twenty percent, just between now at the turn of the century, and about 2050. That’s something that the United Nations estimates, so that has tremendous consequences for societies—not only from the social standpoint, but economically, because somebody has to support those people. And the UN is paying a lot of attention to—well, we call it a problem but I would say the challenge—of the aging population. In fact, they’re having a follow up conference in Madrid in April to follow up on a conference they held in 1999, which was why World Goodwill issued this Commentary, Aging on the Pathway of the Soul, as a means of supporting the United Nations year of the older person, which was 1999.
Robert: I remember when Ronald Reagan said, “those are just numbers that don’t mean anything to me.” I think that your point is well taken that we shouldn’t look upon ourselves as a number, but just keep on evolving and growing. Life seems to be a process with many stages between birth and death. Is this true?
Sarah: I think so. Many religions recognize that there are stages in life. I know that Hinduism does and we talked about that in our last program. According to the Ageless Wisdom, as given in the books of Alice Bailey, the soul appropriates or gains control of its instrument, its personality, and the bodies of the personality, physical, emotional and mental, at certain stages in life. I think the earliest stage from birth to around the age of seven is when the soul takes possession of the physical body, right?
Dale: Yes, that’s what I understand.
Sarah: So, I suppose that means that someone raising a very young child should not ask too much of that child, emotionally or mentally, when really the focus is on gaining physical control, physical coordination. And then from that period of around the age of seven to about fourteen, the soul gains control and discipline of the emotional body, and certainly you can see this in your own life and maybe in the lives of your children.
Dale: I think that’s why around the ages of five to seven is when the individuality begins to show up, because the soul has at that point really begun to appropriate and take over that person.
Sarah: The uniqueness of that incarnating soul comes forward.
Dale: Yes. So, that’s when the soul impulses come through, and that’s often when you find children really coming awake to what they want to do, what they want to be in life.
Sarah: And then after that in the early twenties, the mental body gains control during the high school and college years that so many of us go through. Another important stage, as we’ve mentioned before, is around the age of thirty-five. That’s often a real crisis point in spiritual development. If you think back to your own life, those of our audience who have passed the thirty-fifth year might see a turning point. Another one slightly before that is at around the age of twenty-eight. Many people find that extremely significant—that late twenties point. Then around the fifty-sixth year it’s said to be a time when the soul makes a decision to either rest on its oars, or to strive for further growth. There’s a decision that’s made by the soul around the fifty-sixth year which is really interesting to ponder on; whether it thinks it can get any more mileage out of this carcass or whether it will just kind of coast from that point on.
Dale: Yes, for so many that’s a very crucial year because they are just beginning to think about retirement and what they’re going to do in their later years. Maybe a whole new life begins for a lot of people, especially if they’re very creative types of people.
Sarah: A new phase of life, not really a retirement at all, but just a new phase, and sometimes a really productive one.
Dale: That’s happening more and more because fewer people are retiring actually. They’re continuing to work in some capacity, and that’s an indication that they’re not ready to pack it in, so to speak.
Sarah: The sixty-third year of the life is also a critical point spiritually. It’s a time according to the writings of Alice Bailey of “supreme opportunity” around the sixty-third year. So, if we know these points we can kind of prepare for them, help those we are close to prepare for them, and take the most advantage of them through self examination, reflection and pondering. So, then coming back to our question, yes, life has many stages. It’s not just one endless rolling downhill toward death. It’s full of crisis points and new challenges and thresholds reached and decisions to press on or not are made.
Dale: I think you mentioned before how there are smaller cycles contained within the whole cycle of life. Some people are on a seven-year cycle and others may be on a ten-year cycle, but those stages that we just talked about usually come around in cycles of seven years.
Sarah: And sometimes these cycles work out their crises in a very subtle, subjective way; you might not necessarily be able to point to some significant event on the outer planes of life. Maybe everything on the surface seemed to go on as normal, and yet internally there might have been a horrendous period of crisis that caused all kinds of upheaval and led to a new attitude toward life as a result, that nobody else might have even perceived but all the time underneath the surface it was going on. So, when you examine your life for these periods of crisis, don’t necessarily look at the outer levels. Look at the subjective levels and particularly how your attitudes and your intentions might have changed.
Robert: Yes, that just reminded me of Shakespeare’s play King Lear, about how he’s well into his eighties and yet he goes through the greatest changes in attitude at that particular age. I think Shakespeare was making a statement about how we continue to evolve, and we should never say that we’re at a particular age, and therefore we must be thinking a certain way; we’re not done yet, you’re right. The later years of life, why are they a good time for spiritual study and meditation?
Sarah: Well, I think to begin with, there’s no time in life that isn’t good for spiritual study and meditation. Increasingly today we notice in our work that very young people are often thoroughly committed and disciplined in their spiritual development at a very young age. So, I think this is a very hopeful sign that the younger generation does feel this spiritual pull at an early age, but traditionally and generalizing wildly, the earlier years of life are the appropriate time for focusing on the development of career, being the householder, which is one who looks after family and career and home, and your focus and your responsibilities tend to be outward on the physical plane, caring for the well-being of yourself and your family. As you get older some of those demands lessen; your children are grown, your career, whatever it was, has probably reached its high watermark, although, as we said, some people move into a second career but the idea of ambition and training and goals probably isn’t such a strong focus as you get older. So, you don’t have those compulsions and those drives and you’re freer emotionally and mentally, I think, to commit to spiritual development. Most older people would probably say that they have reached a point where they can accept themselves such as they are, more than they were able to when they were younger. There’s an acceptance of oneself and life that, again, frees the resources to develop spiritually. When you’re agonizing over yourself, worried, anxious, driven, you’re not really sparing too much energy for spiritual pursuits.
Dale: It’s a time for simplicity. I was just struck by the idea that, in effect, we’re returning to a state of simplicity. It’s very similar to when our children are very young—four or five, maybe six years old; they see the world in very simple terms. Perhaps they’re not too far from being born and so they’re still close to the soul. Later on in life, all the complexities of life get in the way and start to clutter up your thinking and block out all those soul impulses. But it’s at the end of your age when you can again return to that simplicity of outlook and leave the clutter and the complexities of life behind and return to that childlike simplicity. I don’t mean to become like children again, but in attitude and outlook on life perhaps see things a little more synthetically.
Sarah: There’s also the fact, I think, that the soul begins to abstract itself from the outer form and the outer world as one ages. I don’t mean that it’s preparing for death, but in a sense I suppose it is. It’s not that it’s going to happen immediately, not at all, but it lessens its grip on the physical plane with all that that connotes of ambition and desire, the urge to hold and possess. All of that, I think, eases off a bit and the soul as it abstracts, frees up the consciousness. Oddly enough, this can have a range of effects—if you think of that hilarious comedian Tim Conway as the little old man struggling across the stage; I don’t mean that kind of abstraction, or the dithery, dottering old lady—but it can produce sometimes quite a beautiful person who is free.
Dale: It’s a time when, as you say, the soul is abstracting, and so it’s a good time for spiritual study and meditation because that’s a time when you can begin to link up again with that higher self, with that soul self. You have the time to do that and to reflect on your life and the purpose of what your life has been, what you’ve accomplished and all of that, a life review. All of this is helping to establish that continuity with the soul that might have been deflected during your life.
Robert: So, it’s not preparing for death; maybe it’s preparing for the next adventure. (laughter)
Dale: Well, it is in a sense. You can prepare for the next life too that way.
Sarah: We’ve talked about the technique of the Evening Review in past programs, and I suppose there’s a kind of a life review that the soul does. We could each of us initiate that at any stage by looking back at our lives—and some people are in the habit of doing that— trying to see cycles and identify crises that we have lived through, perhaps decisions that we’ve made that have been life changing, and we begin to see a pattern and a flow and a purpose to our lives. That can be really liberating. You might see quite a lot of progress and growth if you look for it. I was thinking of the movie, “Marvin’s Room”, that came out a couple of years ago and that starred Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep as two sisters, and Diane Keaton had spent years looking after her father and her aunt, who were very old and a great responsibility to her. Then she developed cancer and was preparing for her own death, and Meryl Streep was with her, and I remember Diane Keaton saying, “I’ve had such love in my life,” and Meryl Streep said, “Yes, they really loved you,” meaning the father and aunt, and Diane said, “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, I loved them,” and that was what brought joy into her life. “I loved them. That was what made my life meaningful.” It wasn’t a life of sacrifice or burden at all to her, and she was able to identify that as she prepared for her own death. So, if we look back in our life, we might see that we’ve had a lot of love in our life, a lot of joy and a lot of help.
Robert: As you look back at your life, too, I think the most important thing is to say, “How much love have I brought into the world?” That could be part of the life review as well.
Sarah: Yes. But it’s important not to be too caught up in the past when you do that review. You know the biblical story of Lot’s wife who was warned not to look back, but she did, and she turned into a pillar of salt. That’s, I suppose, a danger of old age: that you get kind of crystallized in the past.
Dale: It’s not to live back then, but you just look back to see where mistakes were made and what could be done about it.
Sarah: And then look ahead.
Dale: Yes.
Robert: In the commentary on Aging on the Pathway of the Soul published by World Goodwill, there are comments from elderly people on their spiritual lives. Could you give us a few examples of what they learned?
Dale: Well, we have invited some elderly people to give their comments about what they have experienced in life and their old age and some of them have very thoughtful comments. One lady is ninety-one years old and she said, “I begin each day in meditation and dedicate myself anew to the service of the Coming One, and to me the correct use of the mind is the Will of God in action. These are the goals I set for myself. Old Age is a good time to learn self-discipline.” That’s just one of the comments that were made; let’s see, there’s another one here. This is from a lady at age eighty who said, “The onset of old age can be greeted with confidence, even with joy, if it is recognized as a soul-given opportunity to prepare for the next incarnation.” That’s what we’ve just been talking about. It’s one of the things to look forward to.
Sarah: I just wanted to mention in addition to those comments, there’s another resource that people might be interested in. It’s a new book by Ram Dass. Some of our audience might be familiar with him. He has been a spiritual teacher for many years now and he wrote the book, Be Here Now, which affirms that at any point in your life you should be in the present moment fully yourself, which I think is such a beautiful concept and very Buddhist in its emphasis on living in the present moment. He’s recently written another book—he had a stroke and has had a very difficult recovery—but he wrote a book about what it’s like to get old and struggle with illness. The book is called Still Here: Embracing Aging. I like that idea, that at any moment in your life, wherever you find yourself, embrace it, embrace your life because it has something to teach you, and there’s something you can give. And that’s the point, isn’t it? To make the most of whatever your circumstances are, not wish for anything to be other than what it is but make the most of it.
Robert: That’s about all the time we have for our discussion today. You have been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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