Growth is inherently painful. To grow is to fall
apart. New forms arise from the debris of the old. What
was must die, so that what is can be. And we are always growing, even when we are
growing old. This is why in the First Noble Truth Buddha taught that life is
suffering. To be alive means to grow, and growth means change, and change
hurts.
Unless you accept change, embrace it even. Then your pain
is transformed into awareness. The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism lays bare
this process – that our suffering and dissatisfaction are principally caused by
our resistance to what is. We suffer because we refuse to accept that life is
not controlled by our arbitrary and self-serving demands. We don’t get what we
want. We don’t get to stay young. We don’t get to not die. Once we accept the
fundamental impermanence of all forms, including our own, a peaceful serenity
illuminates the path ahead. The Buddhists call this nirvana.
Nirvana is a compound Sanskrit word: nir a negating prefix, and
vana meaning air that is moving, like wind or breath. Nirvana, often
translated as “to blow out,” as in extinguishing a candle flame, is really just
a way of saying stillness. It is a state of consciousness free from the
agitation of self-centeredness, craving, and fear. In nirvana we are awash in
gratitude, wonder, loving-kindness, and acceptance. Because we want nothing, we
receive everything.
To age consciously means to understand the full cosmic
process that coming into being and going out of being entails, not from the
perspective of a single organism, but from the God-perspective. Being born is a
death sentence. No matter your afterlife belief system of choice, these forms –
these awkward, aging bodies – are not long for this world. If you have anything
pressing to do, I would get to it now. You don’t know how much longer you have.
In the Phaedo,
Plato’s dialogue about the final hours of Socrates’s life, we see Socrates’s friends
gathered around him as he calmly faces execution by means of a long, cool drink
of hemlock. As his friends fret, wail, and moan, Socrates remains the model of
serenity and acceptance, like the hub of a wheel around which everything spins
madly. They ask him how he can be so cool and composed in the face of death. He
explains that the philosophic life is “training for dying,” and that in many
ways he has been practicing for this his whole life. The lover of wisdom,
Socrates argues, works hard to root their existence into something deeper,
something truer, something more abiding than these fleeting forms. We don’t
really know what happens when we die, he says, and it might be better than this
mortal life. How do we know? We don’t. So it’s irrational, he argues, to fear
death.
500
years later Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius further amplified the burgeoning
Stoic doctrine of acceptance. “Frightened of change?” he asked. “But what can
exist without it? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat
food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without
something being changed? Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of
semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. So this is how a thoughtful person should
await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but
simply viewing it as one of the things that can happen to us. How you
anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should
await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.”
I
never really liked that Dylan Thomas poem, the one that says “Do not go gentle
into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light.” I prefer the
stance of Buddha, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius – to welcome aging and death
like any other change – an opportunity to practice slipping the noose of
attachment and sliding into the vast and boundless space of sacred realization.
[This piece was originally appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the September/October edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]
