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Fear of Old Age
SWAMI ADISWARANANDA
Continued from February 2002
The Guidelines of Vedanta
Vedanta maintains that sorrowing over old age does not make it any better. To deny it is artificial, and attempts to escape it are futile. Vedanta asks us to wake up to this reality and face it, and gives the following guidelines:
(1) Make Old Age a Part of Life. Old age is one of the natural phases of life. Yet many elderly people continue to imitate the ways of younger people. As Carl Jung so rightly said: 'For the most part our old people try to compete with the young. In the United States it is almost an ideal for the father to be the brother of his sons, and for the mother it is possible to be the younger sister of her daughter.'8 Those who want to avoid old age must be ready to die young. Those who try to forget it will be taken by surprise when it comes. Acceptance of the fact and preparing for it beforehand is the wisest counsel. The realities of life are not tailored to our wishful thinking and imaginations. We may aspire after boundless promise and glory yet must accept life with all its hazard and horror.
Anxiety is an essential ingredient of existence. It cannot be eliminated from life, but can be made to serve the purpose of life. Human existence has two characteristics: finitude and freedom. The sense of finitude creates existential anxiety, while freedom produces fear and anxiety because of the sense of responsibility it generates. When we try to escape from freedom, we turn away from our authentic potentiality and possibility. And when we avoid the anxiety of freedom, we are forced to lose ourselves in the crowd and become part of the mass life. Morbid preoccupation with past youth in order to avoid the anxiety of old age is a great hindrance to the growth of personality.
Youth and old age, like pleasure and pain, birth and death, light and darkness, are inseparable companions. To have one without the other is infantile and absurd. Yet people have wanted the one without the other. The journal The Economist, in an article in the December 23, 2000 issue, writes:
Are you hoping for a long life? Thought so. Are you looking forward to growing old? Thought not. Man has wanted one without the other for thousands of years, and has invariably been disappointed. Cleopatra is said to have bathed in asses' milk to stay young and beautiful, but did not live long enough to find out if it worked in old age. The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon was more famous for his search for the Fountain of Youth than for discovering Florida in 1513. He never found the rejuvenating spring that the natives had told him of, and died from a poisoned Indian arrow a few years later.
The legend of the Fountain of Youth may have originated in northern India. It had reached Europe by the 7th century, and was widely known there in the Middle Ages. When Lucas Cranach the Elder was 74, he painted a famous picture of the miraculous spring, with wrinkled old women going in at one end and young beauties coming out at the other. Writers have constantly imagined worlds where people lived to prodigious ages while holding on to their youthful looks and vigour by various means, mostly foul. Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray kept a picture of himself in the attic, on which his excesses were visited while he himself remained ever young and handsome--though the arrangement, and Mr. Gray, came to a sticky end. In the real world too, people are prepared to try all kinds of disgusting things, from mud baths to injections of monkey glands, in the hope of staying younger longer.9
Yet nothing has worked against the process of aging. The end result of all efforts has been utter disappointment.
The article in The Economist continues:
Even in the depths of history a few people have lived to a great age. Researchers reckon that Rameses II, who ruled ancient Egypt some 3,250 years ago, may have survived into his 90s. So did the Greek dramatist Sophocles 800 years later (and, so to judge from some of his late writings, felt it quite long enough) ...
But although on average people in affluent countries now will live far longer than their equivalents even a century or two ago, individual lifespans will not be huge by historical standards. Granted, there are regular reports of healthy 130- or 150-year olds being discovered in some remote mountain region in Eastern Europe, living on yogurt and garlic, herding goats and fathering children at an age when most people would have been dead long ago. But invariably the evidence to support their claim turns out to be less than solid...
These rules [of healthy lifestyle to live longer] are often flouted, sometimes without apparent ill effect. In a speech at his 70th birthday celebration, Mark Twain outlined his own survival strategy: 'I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn't anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. In the matter of diet, I have been persistently strict to sticking to the things which didn't agree with me, until one or the other of us got the best of it. I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. As for drinking, when the others drink I like to help. I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome.'10
But, as The Economist points out, adding extra decades to life does not necessarily make life great: 'That, in Greek myth, was the fate of Tithonus, lover of Aurora, the dawn: he asked for immortal life, and got it--but he'd forgotten to ask for youth as well.'11
(2) Know that Old Age is No Less Meaningful than Youth. Youth is gener- ally admired for its beauty, optimism, enthusiasm, spirit of adventure, and forward-looking imagination, but it often suffers from indiscretion, impatience, inexperience and instability. Old age may bring many physical problems and limitations to a person but it endows him with the wisdom of maturity. The voice of this wisdom tells us: Optimism without realism brings disappointment. Indiscretion and inexperience can land us in endless difficulties. The impatient and the unstable are prone to make blunders. Mere external beauty is skin-deep and short-lived without the internal beauty of wisdom. In old age a person becomes a truth-teller. Such a person is liberated from the haunting desire and dream of being a superman or superwoman. He becomes more whole and more himself. All the earlier stages of life find their fulfilment in this wisdom of old age.
Those who think that they can have this wisdom ready-made by reading books or literature, or that they can find someone to give it to them, are greatly mistaken, because wisdom comes from living life through all its stages and there is no such thing as vicarious living. We are unable to recognize the wisdom of old age because we are feverishly trying to remain young without ever becoming old. As a result, our life has lost its meaning and direction. So long as we lock ourselves into an obsession with youth culture, we can only develop fear, anger, and frustration. There are two ways to face the reality of old age: to deny old age by creating fantasy and make-believe and yet be forced to grow old unhappily; or to accept old age as the fitting transformation of youth and grow more wise, serene, and authentic as age advances following its own law.
It is an illusion that makes a person believe that by arresting old age he can remain ever young. Prolonging life by medical technology poses a dilemma for the goals of medicine. Should medicine strive to prevent death or eliminate suffering? What if achieving the first frustrates the second, and vice-versa? The genetic potential for attaining maximum life span is no guarantee against meeting with an accident along the way. We may postpone fate only to succumb to the law of chance.
(3) Practise Nonattachment. Attachment is a form of mental fixation. When a person dwells on anything repeatedly, he develops a liking for that thing, and with the growth of liking he desires to possess the thing. Any obstacle in his way brings anger. From anger comes delusion, and from delusion loss of discrimination and right judgement. Failure of discrimination and right judgement brings moral death. Thus the Bhagavad Gita asks us not to get attached to things that are fleeting and changeable, and will not accompany us after death. Attachment prevents us from seeing things as they really are. With every attachment there arises a corresponding fear, the fear of losing what we cling to. This fear in turn intensifies the anxiety of the ego, which then seeks to sustain itself by another attachment, and thus our entanglement never ends.
Vedanta tells us that all miseries stem from five causes: loss of contact with Reality, ego and its possessiveness, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. Reality has two faces: the Absolute and the relative. Absolute Reality is that which is real for all time, while relative reality is that which is real for a limited period of time. When we ignore the Absolute, the world of relative reality becomes delusive and destructive. By re-establishing our contact with the Absolute we eventually overcome all fear, anxiety, despair, and disappointment, all of which result from attachment. Non-attachment is not being cold, insensitive, and indifferent toward others. It is transferring our attachment to some higher ideal or cause. Practice of nonattachment becomes easy for a person who is a seeker of God. He makes God the centre of his life, diverts all his love and attachment to Him and showers his love on all equally, seeing the reflection of his God in them. Those who are not able to do this are advised to practise love and compassion for all beings as the moral duty of a humanist.
To be concluded
Notes
8. From Modern Man in Search of a Soul, by Carl Jung, p.126, as quoted in Mental Health and Hindu Psychology, by Swami Akhilananda, Branden Press, Publishers, Boston (no year given in book), p.104.
9. The Economist, December 23, 2000, London, p.23.
10. Ibid., pp.23-24.
11. Ibid., p.24.
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