AGING WITH SPIRIT

I belong to a group of friends that has been called "Modern Mystics," for many years before I joined. We meet every six weeks or so, and discuss a book with a religious theme, in the broadest sense of that word. I didn't name the group; I never refer to myself as a mystic. The term seems a bit wooly to me; I am also very much interested in science and physics.(I am a physican.) But as a poet and musician, I live a good deal in a transverbal world, (poets must use words not just as conveyors of meaning but also as musicians use notes), and thus very much have a spiritual side. I certainly do not object to be called religious, an adjective that very much applies to me; the way I use it is, however, completely non-dogmatic and can only be hinted at with words.
After a rough start, I am now older and wiser, and would like to share with you two poems of mine as illustrations of a type of spiritual wisdom that comes with age.
First a little background about the relationship of age to wisdom. According to Jaques's famous speech in Shakespeare's As You Like It, there are seven stages of life, the last one characterized by "Second childishness and mere (complete) oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." This is a powerfully expressed yet rather gloomy view of life, appropriate for the Jaques of the play who is very pessimistic. (Shakespeare, the greatest and most subtle creator of fictional characters who ever lived, wrote what the character thinks, and not necessarily what Shakespeare believed.) There is no mention of increasing wisdom as the stages progress; Jaques may have a dark view of life, but my knees constantly remind me that he has a point: the body wears down. Some of us are still quite vigorous at 80, but if we're lucky to live to 100, well, running a marathon, to say the least, is no longer possible. Even worse, the mind can break down too. Body and mind, of course, can be assailed at an earlier age from all those troubles flesh is heir to. This article assumes a healthy mind in an aging body, examples of which are increasingly numerous. (I, for one, intend to belong to this group for as long as possible.)

For a more positive view of aging, one which emphasizes an increase of spiritual development, we turn to classical Hinduism and a twentieth century Irish poet.
In Hinduism--at least for the Brahmin caste--there are five stages of life. The first is the child, followed by the student, the householder, the retired person and the ascetic. The first three stages need no explanation. Let us now discuss the last two which apply to the old. In retirement, one passes on household responsibilities to younger members of the family. Work to financially support others ends; spiritual work, for which the householder lacks time to devote himself, begins. The retired person contemplates the spiritual side of life, and often performs bhakti, devotional rituals. There is an abrupt change when one enters the final stage, that of the ascetic. The ascetic is now wisdom personified and doesn't need any religious trappings anymore--there is a ceremony during which the ascetic burns the sacred texts. This stage is beautifully expressed by one of my favorite Hindu sayings:
It is sad when a young man doesn't go to temple; it is even sadder when an old man does.

Perhaps, if you are a Westerner, you might think that this applies only to Eastern religions--mentioning sanyassins, the Hindu word for ascetics, might turn off those with a more practical bent. (There is no requirement to give up doing good deeds!) Recently I came across a striking statement form a Catholic monk that says the exact same thing, though expressed somewhat differently.
During our last meeting of "Modern Mystics" we watched a CD. In this CD the monk was asked what the stages of the religious life are. This is what he said:
"At the first stage, you believe in The Other. In the second stage, you imitate the Other and try to come as close to It as you can. At the final stage, you realize that there is no Other, or in other words, that you are the Other." So even in the West, wise, religious people realize that dogma and worship do not belong to the highest final spiritual stage.

We thus have an alternative view to Jaques's pessimism, the realization that increasing strength in the "soul" can--and should-- more than compensate for increasing weakness in the knees. Yeats summed up this dichotomy best with the following lines from his great poem, Sailing to Byzantium;

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
a tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and louder sing
for every tatter in its mortal dress

Well said, Mr. Yeats!


ll.

Inchworms are curious little animals. After hatching, often on the dark forest floor, they must climb a tree trunk to find the leaves that are their food. This works well, unless they happen to be born near a tree stump. They are programmed to climb it; at the top, of course, they will find no leaves; in desperation, they writhe and writhe. They do not have the intelligence to climb down and start over again and find a trunk of a live tree. So they starve. I often think that many human beings get stuck on a tree stump, as it were, and starve psychologically. Erik Erikson's theory of the stages of life illustrates this beautifully. If an infant doesn't learn trust in the first year of life, he or she is stuck at this level for life and will also most likely fail at later stages. This is a sad truth, but true nevertheless.
I want to illustrate this with the case of an acquaintance of mine, also a member of the "Modern Mystics" group. Although older than I by over a decade, he has not reached the third stage that the Catholic contemplative outlined; the Hindu proverb about the cessation of the need to go the temple in old age probably will never apply to him. He is still searching for God as if he were an "I" here searching for an "Other" outside himself. He only reads spiritual books, which I find incredible. (A Buddhist sage once said that American intellectuals who are trying to become Buddhists should read a lot less and practice a lot more.) Other factors are contributing to his emotional state; his unfruitful spiritual quest has left him bitter. He reminds me of one of those inchworms; writhing in a barren place is not the way to find peace. This frustration has made him even more obsessive in his search; just like an adult who had never mastered, through no fault of her one, the first task of life, trust, will have an obsessive lack of trust for the rest of her life.
I wrote a poem about this frustrated search and the obsession to continue on a path bound to lead nowhere. It is called "Hamstring's Profession", indicating that the person is hamstrung by his search. I have immense sympathy for such people; their difficulty is palpable. And, as Buddha said, sad people are sometimes closer to the truth than happy ones, since they haven't escaped from the fact that life is so difficult for so many of us. Jaques would probably have appreciated this poem which follows:

HAMSTRING’S PROFESSION

My pride is a stamp
on a desperate letter;
it has been canceled;
still no reply.

What is the lost’s definition of Sky?
The dead letter office above broken eyes.
Aldebaran. Betelgeuse.
A lonely man dying

many light-years away--
You can be at all these places at once?
That is amazing and I am amazed.
But the greater mystery is that You aren’t here.

How to approach God's invisible Hand?
Step one: admit it,
rationality and need
are a teardown combination.

Step two: give up. No!
Though I've been scarred like a failed son
in a burned story by Kafka,
I’ll serve, I’ll wait. The Emperor of Jelly Beans

is likelier to save you--
Why still seek light
behind clouds of semantics?
That’s what I do.


111,

We will leave Jaques's view and consider Yeats's now. (Yeats's lines contain a crucial "unless"--unless the Soul clap and sing, etc.--This section deals with actual clapping and singing done by one who has aged successfully.) The protagonist of this poem--he doesn't even mention his own existence in the poem, having largely gone beyond it--no longer seeks to solve the problem of life by imagining he is a "I" here searching for an answer "there." He has simply joined the river of life, which is a source of great delight which more than compensates for bodily decline. His is neither an intellectual answer nor an emotional one; it transcends both. Notice that this poem doesn't mention any dogma; there is absolutely no conflict with science. The protagonist of the poem still lives in the practical sense as a separate individual, but on the inside he realizes that ultimately there is no separation--a very joyous realization. The only thing odd about the poem for me is that I wrote this, the wisdom poem, over thirty years ago--and wrote the bitter poem last week. I suppose it's not that odd; the wisdom poem was more of an indication of the direction I wanted to take, while the bitter poem is a character study of someone stuck in the tar pit of his own obsessions. If you are very happy and old, you will understand the meaning of this poem without any difficulty:

STONE AND RIVER

Metaphors that help us live here
are chiefly two: stone and river.
Aware of change, afraid to be alone,
most opt for the permanence of stone.

"A boulder at the center reigns;
however fast the current, it remains;
countless unique pebbles at each side
retain their shapes, even if dislodged."

I, I, this is the language of rock.
But everything is swirl and flux:
despite appearance all is sea;
no Me. Fluid all reality.

Nothing to transcend our going?
Everything is water flowing?
Nothing but fate, nothing but chance,
nothing but change? And ecstasy: dance!



1V.

This article can be summarized with one word: dance! You have always been dancing that dance, of course, but you haven't always been aware of this, having been distracted by all the tasks of life's earlier stages. Now you are able to join the dance wholeheartedly. This is called wisdom, which can and should increase with age. No dancing shoes required.