Stumbling Toward the Light

The Truth about Spiritual Aging

Upcoming Event:

BROKEN HEART OR HEART GROWING WHOLE? (February 4, 11 am to 12:30 pm, EST) Zoom webinar on Transforming setbacks, losses and disappointments into spiritual growth. with Carol Orsborn, author of Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life Sponsored by Sage-ing International: https://conta.cc/4gehvHw

This month’s all-community post follows:
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When we who are growing old are faced with any of the losses associated with aging, we wish upon ourselves taking a graceful leap of faith—arms wide open, hair flying free in the gentle breeze. But that’s not how it is. Instead, more often than not, we stumble, we crawl or we fall rather than soar. The good news is that it doesn’t matter how we get there as long as in the words of author Richard Rohr we just keep falling forward. For Ram Dass, the fall was simultaneously from and into grace—and it was literal.

In his book, Still Here, Ram Dass tells a story about the time when, at the age of 63— not long before his debilitating stroke--,he’d been invited to speak before an audience of thousands in Denver. Rather than walk up the steps to the podium, he decided to show off his youthful vitality by leaping straight onto the stage. He miscalculated and took a painful fall. Even then he didn’t want to lose face, so he gave his speech with blood dripping down his leg. In retrospect, he wishes he had had the humility to “act his age,” accepting his limitations, and excuse himself for the brief time it would have taken to tend to his wound properly.

Ram Dass learned valuable life lessons from this embarrassing episode—adding to the bank of his spiritual resources he would have to draw upon when three years later, he suffered his stroke. He writes that, before his paralysis, he thought the losses associated with age were his to change—to overcome with an act of will in service of his ego. But he came to realize that he had been prone to overestimating his powers. “Or perhaps, I was simply more arrogant. In any case, it is fascinating now to discover that the embarrassment I felt over getting older has nearly disappeared with my physical disability. Back then, I was worried about not looking fit. Since the stroke I have been wheelchair-bound. …This was much harder to take at the beginning. It gets easier as the Ego lets go of its concerns.” While Ram Dass hoped that when he accepted the reality of his aging after his humiliating fall, he was done fooling himself, he reports that it was to be three more years before he stopped trying to change things and accept reality as it is.

Shaking one’s addiction to the will to control inner and external reality is a tricky business, and questions that come in service of sincere spiritual aspiration can still seduce and mislead you. In this case, Ram Dass’s leap, meant to be inspirational, was just a fancier mask for arrogance offering the illusion of life mastery. If that were all of it, however, he would have been enlightened on the spot. But for those of us involved in self-realization over the long period of time it takes, faux spirituality of a higher order is destined to arise again, this time feigning the mask of humility. If only I humble myself enough; if only I stop trying to fix others good enough; if only I can make sufficient amends; if only I surrender enough, I can make things right for me, you, and the world. This is not freedom. This is just another spiritual mask, hiding the truth of what accepting not only the real you reality, itself, truly requires of us.

The irony is that this last grasp at power can come dressed up as everything that psycho-spiritual maturity seems to ask of us: humility, surrender, acceptance. But in the early stages of spiritual aging, the appearance of these very attributes turns against you. You’ll know that you are still holding on to this last remnant of the illusion of control when you secretly harbor the sense that something is off and that, despite having made amends, rectifying what you can and accepting the rest, you believe you should be completely serene: done with second-guessing, self-doubt and the belief that spiritual growth is an act of will. This urge to be spiritual enough is the hardest to crack—perfectionism, martyrdom, altruism, and their particularly insidious unintended consequence: the belief in your eternal need for self-improvement.

If you are not sure whether you qualify, ask yourself if you can apologize sincerely one time, make appropriate amends, and know you’ve done enough? Or are you walking the earth wearing a hair shirt, still begging forgiveness for the affair you had 40 years ago or parenting errors you made when your children were young? It may look good to you and to others to aim to become a penitent, a martyr, or even the personification of your best possible self, but as long as you hold the belief that your efforts to improve yourself will consequently fix everything, you are not spiritually awakened. You are grandiose.

This last grasp at power will be only the latest in a long progression of the strategies you’ve attempted thus far—victimhood, rebellion, and now the incipient attempt to take personal responsibility—that are doomed to disappoint. This is because none addresses the true nature of the water you swim in: a secret, deeply held fear that your essential wrongness is the cause of every unwanted thing that has ever happened to you.

If we tell the whole truth, the things we don’t like about ourselves are not all of who we are, nor are the things we like least about the world all there is. On the last page of Carl Jung’s autobiography, the great psychologist writes: “I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about…” Jung is as rapturous as he is deflated. And, too, when it comes to me and to all of us, it is, indeed, complicated.

Down the road, you will have the opportunity to revisit the attributes that comprise the heart of spiritual awakening, and the next time you meet up with them, they will deliver on their promise because you will be in a new place, and you will be ready. Meanwhile, the only thing you can do is tell the truth—as much as you can bear, and then a bit more—and keep doing so relentlessly. When acceptance finally comes, this is not something you are doing for God. Rather, it is something God offers to you, but only when you have already surrendered. Writes Richard Rohr in Breathing Under Water: “God has trapped us all inside of certain grace and enclosed all things human in a constant need for mercy. …All we can do is keep out of the way, note, and weep over our defensive behaviors…, and the presence that is surely the highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing and immediately effective.”

In discerning the difference between what he could change versus what he had to accept, it finally took Ram Dass’s stroke to complete the journey that started with his fall. This was not so much a leap of faith as it was coming to a dead stop where he was forced to face his worst fears and beg for mercy. But for him—and for all of us who choose to live aging as a spiritual experience-- while there are painful losses, there are also unexpected gifts.

For Ram Dass, the greatest blessing was the wearing away of the effects of his ego: the attachment to how others perceived him, to expectations about what kind of life he deserved, even to what he had thought was the meaning of life itself. As Ram Dass describes it: “Behind the machinations of our brilliant, undependable minds is an essence that is not conditional, a being that aging does not alter, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing is taken away.…”

Spiritual Aging is the developmental stage that allows you to come to understand that letting yourself be cracked to the core represents not only an abject state of giving up, but the beginning of retrieval, rectification, and healing. There is plenty of room in all this for forgiveness and compassion—not only for others and the world, but for ourselves. We do what we can to rectify the past, try to do better in the present ,and hope that, in the wisdom of time, some greater good will come from whatever wreckage we have inadvertently left behind.

By answering the questions posed to us by fate, we discover that things are not always what they seem—often not as bright and shiny as we’d hoped for but sometimes bearing the most unexpected and precious gifts, more than we’d ever imagined for ourselves: recognition of the dependable heart that had been beating beneath it all from the first. This is the light that is summoning to you—the urge drawing you forward.. And whether advancing through a grand leap of faith or stumbling forward on bent knees, this is the life’s promise to you.

Excerpted from The Making of an Old Soul: Aging as the Fulfillment