Aging as a Mystical Path

The Mystical Path

Once we hit midlife and beyond, mainstream society presents us with three visions of the future. We can fade away peacefully. We can become angry and crotchety. Or we can deny aging entirely, thinking of it as merely an extension of midlife, barely skipping a beat as we prolong our busy, productive lives for as long as possible.

There is a fourth vision. For a growing number of us transiting the new and challenging territory of midlife and beyond, aging is coming to represent the culmination of what many of our generation have been seeking for much of our adult lives: mystical attainment.

In place of the stereotypes of aging, this prophetic vision of aging beckons us to take into account both the light and the shadow side of growing old, neither romanticizing nor reviling the years beyond midlife. This is no small order. In fact, waking up to ultimate concerns, such as loss and mortality, while maintaining both a hopeful and realistic vision of the aging process requires a level of spiritual maturity that is a challenge to the best of us. But it is also the stripping away of illusion and a thinning of the veil between our ordinary lives and the divine. This is the essence of the mystical path: the promise of aging as the fulfillment of our true human potential.

Following are 10 quotes representative of this fourth way: aging as a mystical path.

Carol Orsborn, Ph.D. is Founder of FierceWithAge, the Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality. Dr. Orsborn, who earned her doctorate in religion from Vanderbilt University, is the best-selling author of 21 books including her newest book: Fierce with Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn. (Spring 2013) Dr. Orsborn is a sought after speaker/retreat leader and spiritual director.

The Mystical Nature of Aging

“What if people began to experience age-related changes in consciousness as essentially mystical in nature?...As we move into old age, our familiar identity loses its importance. It is fading or long gone. We also begin to lose interest in thought itself—our thoughts no longer seen so important and seem to disappear more quickly, along with all the underlying ideas that structure our conventional understanding of identity, time, reality, and story. As these contents of consciousness empty, we can become aware of consciousness itself, pure and omnipresent. Exploring this experience, we discover, as the mystics before us, that consciousness is not ‘mine’, but rather part of the vast and all-inclusive consciousness we call Divinity pervading the cosmos. When we experience consciousness directly, free of thought, we are literally experiencing Divinity, and a door to eternity opens in the human psyche…Aging is enlightenment in slow motion.”

John C. Robinson The Three Secrets of Aging: Seeking Enlightenment in the New Aging,

Aging as the Way of Unknowing

“Conscious Aging means going beyond patterns of ego strength acquired during youth and mid-life. This message of struggle is precisely the one that world wisdom traditions have always conveyed. It is a message at odds with today's culture, in its modern and ‘post-modern’ varieties. Rationality, assertiveness, moral certitude, mastery of the environment, and similar qualities are very different from the stance recommended by spiritual paths such as Zen Buddhism, Sufism, or mystics in the Jewish and Christian traditions. On the contrary, mystical traditions celebrate ‘the way of unknowing’ (overcoming rationality), ‘emptiness’ (giving up self assertiveness), even entering what Buddhists call ‘the Great Doubt’ in the face of cosmic mystery. Post-conventional spiritual traditions typically entail a ‘dark night of the soul,’ which might be described as ‘regression in the service of the ego.’ In the most profound mystical tradition, the way of transcendence entails at its highest point the ‘loss of the self’ …Conscious Aging, as an emerging cultural ideal, represents a genuinely new stage and level of psychological functioning.”

Harry R. Moody, “Conscious Aging: A New Level of Growth in Later Life”, Institute for Human Values in Aging Newsletter, 2000

Joan Chittister on Regret

“Regret, one of the ghosts of aging, comes upon us one day dressed up like wisdom, looking profound and serious, sensible and responsible…Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new energy to our chaging present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions—one of the gifts—of aging is to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not. When we devalue it, we bring everything we are and were into question, into doubt. We doubt the God who made us and walks with us all the way to the end…The blessing of regret is clear—it brings us, if we are willing to face it head on, to the point of being present to this new time of life in an entirely new way. It urges us on to continue becoming.”

Sister Joan Chittister’s The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully

Aging As An Unexpected Visitor

Aging is, in many ways, unexpected and unwelcome. It fills us with anxiety and concerns about the unknown. When we begin to hear it knocking on the doors of our lives, we try to bar the door and secure the lock, using whatever means possible to do so. If, instead, we were to follow the counsel of the Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, in his poem, “The Guest House,” we would begin to see aging as another “unexpected visitor,” a “guest [to be treated] honorably.” We would invite aging into the “guest house” of our humanity, get to know it, even in its darkness, and discover that aging may, in fact, be “clearing [us] out for some new delight.”

“The Question(s) of Age: Calling for a New Vision of Spiritual Aging” By Robert L. Weber, Ph.D. and Carol Orsborn, Ph.D. Aging Today , May, 2013