That Old Man Thing

Gaga:
I seem to have reached that stage in life when I must face my age square in the eye and admit it. My body does not respond too happily to tough trekking which was always one of the joys in my life. I might go for a small amount of rough travelling yet but my preference is for hot running water and eggs for breakfast, and being neither too hot nor cold nor suffering from pesky mosquitoes etc. I no longer wish to change the world by my personal interventions, but must simply let the evolutionary process evolve and mutate the way it will over the millions and billions of years.
~~~~~

Gaga Sez:
Yeah, there are lots of things about getting older that make one realize the truth of what the Buddha taught. Life is rife with unsatisfactoriness (dukkha), impermanence (anicca), and the hardest one of all: non-self (anatta). It is great to cultivate the mind to see clearly these things, which might make the inevitable less of a powerfully negative experience. What is most difficult is getting the mind and body together on this, particularly when the body doesn't seem to respond the way we assume is should, or the way it used to. Like I have said before, these words are easy to write or say, easy to read or listen to, most difficult to put into practice!

Then again, when I reflect on past stages of life and note the inevitable changes and transitions from one phase to another, I don't fret their passing. Hmm...more accurately, I do notice some with a sense of sadness-of-passing, but others don't have much impact at all, and others I'm glad to have gotten over! For example, I don't long for the same things I did when I was twelve years old anymore (thank God!), but there are some aspects of reaching, say, sexual maturity that were pleasant enough which occasionally I wish I would engage in more, but don't. But the mind can be trained to accept the present, because, well, when contemplated correctly, that's all there is.

It's when the body doesn't respond like we remember it used to, or note little creaks in the joints, pains in the legs and arms and so on and so forth, or the inability to do the things we previously loved to do, we meet the reality of dukkha and anicca full on. The missing piece which causes excessive suffering is the inability to realize the non-self (anatta).

If that is too esoteric or requires too much background in the teachings of Buddha, perhaps some real-life comparisons will assuage your personal, fleeting angst.

Imagine being young, attractive, athletic, on top of your career, rich and wealthy, and then you get on a horse, fall off, break your back and were paralyzed for the rest of your life. That happened to Chris Reeves, the movie actor.

Imagine you love music, your whole life and career are dedicated to it, and then as you get older you eventually go completely deaf, unable to actually hear the sounds you create and love. That happened to Ludwig van Beethoven.

Imagine all the millions of (seeming) injustices meted out to all those people and creatures you know about through the ages, be it through their physical, mental, economic, political, and social conditions. Imagine all the injustices done willfully to make those people and creatures suffer... it is quite clear, looked at carefully, there is no winning anywhere, and if there is a sense of vanquish, it is a mere fleeting phenomenon. Whether through volition or not, no one wins, we all eventually lose.

But who or what actually wins briefly, then loses? Show me the I, the permanent I that is part of this. Conditions come together, then dissipate. There isn't any I! We use I as a convention to represent the aggregate of this life phenomenon, but it is an aggregate that comes together based on conditions, after all. There is no homunculus, no little man, dangling down from inside your head that we imagine to be I. The phenomenon of I comes about in truly a mysterious aggregation of conditions. If you ask the individual cells of the body to say where the I is, they might respond by saying they are the I--what else could they say?! They have no knowledge they form a larger aggregate, and if they did, where would they point to show you the I? The brain cells? The heart? The skin? Certainly they wouldn't know where to point, so why do we think we KNOW where to point!

How to hold this reality correctly in the mind, front and centre, at all times--this then is the only truth we need to realize. It makes this ride less of a jolt when it eventually stops.

Gaga