My Noble Truths on Aging
Being infinitely old must be a pretty depressing phase in the life cycle
of a cliché, whose mind consists of a single, unchanging thought form.
Especially since this single thought form fearfully cringes from age and seeks
to diminish the horror of oldness through the viral propagation of an old
mental trick, an arthritic sleight-of-hand, pulling the old switcheroo gimmick
of substituting one word for another, in this case "feel" for
"old." Winston Smith, of George Orwell's 1984 , was very familiar
with the old word-swap trick because every time he showed up for work at the
monolithic, windowless Ministry of Truth building he saw, "War is Peace,
Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength." Only now, the Ministry of
Truth would have to add, "Old is Feel."
For the age phobic, this is a very convenient little switcheroo because,
unlike age, feelings are famously variable and infinitely subjective. So once
you can reduce a feared quality into the quivering jello mold of that which is
famously variable and infinitely subjective you can then claim the quality to
be anything you like. Unlike the one to three digits of your age, if age equals
feel, well, who's to say what you are feeling? You can claim you feel like
anything. With a bit of word-swap legerdemain, the mortality-denying,
self-tricking ego can pretend it has gained variable control, through cliché
technology, of the annoying and relentlessly increasing variable known as age.
So now that it is politically incorrect for my age to be a number, now
that it is a feeling, what my age is gets a lot more confusing. Apparently my
age is based on how I feel, but how I feel is always changing. It has been said
that the average adult has a major mood change every ninety minutes, and for
the average adolescent it's about every twenty minutes.
Like most people, my feelings are extremely variable. Feed me a triple
espresso and a shiny, new digital gadget and for the first fifteen minutes I
might feel like a fourteen year old on an ultra sour candy sugar rush. But
check back a couple hours later when the espresso has worn off and I have to
call tech support in India, and you'll find that my feeling-based age is about
91. Or as I should say, "ninety-one years young." But if I hang up on
Tech Support and drink a big Starbucks coffee, then, for the next five to ten
minutes, I'll be a highly caffeinated fourteen year old again. However, when the
coffee starts to fizzle out and my feeling-based age increases by about a
decade a minute for the next ten minutes. I could temporarily reverse that
trend by smoking more crack, and so forth. The point is that during a typical
day like that I have to constantly keep recalculating my age. This means that
with every vicissitude of my feelings I have new math homework just to know how
old I am, and rather than face an eternity of new math homework, I'd rather
just accept my age, an easy to remember two digit number that remains constant
for an entire year.
So let's take off the beer goggles of the “you-create-your-own-reality,”
New Age wish-fulfillment thinking. You are as old as you are, and if you are
reading this, if you know how to read, then you are almost certainly old. Based
on my calculations, people are already old, or at least middle-aged, by the
time they are eighteen. Eighteen is the age when people go to college and add
"the freshman fifteen." And what people really mean by aging is
something far more serious and tragic than age, what they really mean is:
The diminishment of hotness.
Let's face it, by eighteen you are already over the hill in many
important areas. By the age of eighteen your chances of becoming the cute but
bratty child star of a TV sitcom start to diminish by about forty-five percent
a year. But even if you can accept never being the child star of a sitcom, and
are willing to settle for being, say, a world-class gymnast, then you are still
forced to realize that unless you already have at least six years of gymnast
training under your belt, you are totally past it.
The truth is, we are all old. Even if you are a fourteen year old
gymnast, you are still a mortal/corporeal Version 1.0, and I think for most of
us the whole gravity-bound, aging, illness and accident-prone corporeal
lifestyle is getting pretty old. And that's why people are lying to themselves
when they say they want to be young, because they actually want something much
more than that.
Let's say, for example, a man is lamenting, "Oh, I wish I was young
again," when a genie happens to be walking by. The genie immediately
grants his wish and puts him into the body of a random fifteen-year-old. The
problem is that around 70% of the fifteen-year-olds in our society are morbidly
obese, and only when the wisher finds that he is locked into the body of an
obese and pimply fifteen-year-old does he realize the deeper truth: what he
really wanted was not merely youth; what he really wanted was hotness.
Case in point, consider Galadriel, the elf queen of Lothlorien in the Lord
of the Rings trilogy. Those of us who have read the books, particularly the
Simarillion, know that Galadriel is thousands of years old. But you
don't catch Galadriel saying defensive things like, "I'm six thousand
years young." The reason should be obvious: Her hotness is not in
question, therefore her age doesn't matter.
Does anybody say, "If only I were a fruit fly?" Fruit flies
are usually only a few hours old, they are younger than almost any of us, but
no one cares, because of a simple reason: Fruit flies don't look hot; therefore
their youth doesn't matter.
This is the point of plastic surgery; it is not merely to look young,
but to look hot. That's why you hear about people paying thousands of dollars
for liposuction but you never hear about people paying thousands for
lipoinjection. (Actually, one easy fix for a wrinkly face would be inject it
with fat, causing it to fill out and look more youthful. But that wouldn't be
hot, and so nobody will get rich from lipoinjection.)
So now we are starting to get a more authentic sense of one of the
pillars of the age issue. It is not about feelings; it is not about youth
versus old; it is about hot versus not hot. So now, I can formulate the First
Noble Truth of my philosophy of aging.
The First Noble Truth: For many, aging is not about feelings, not about
youth, it is about hotness.
Most people are not yearning to be young in the sense of naïve and
inexperience. They want to continue to have all the inner resources of age, but
they would like to have the smooth skin and radiance of youth. They do not want
to be a sickly or unattractive youth; most people want to be a perfect
specimen. And do they want that perfect specimen to go through the aging
process? Hell no ... that was the whole point, to escape aging. An immortal
perfect body comes close to satisfying what they want, but if you think about
it, immortality goes on for only so long. Being in any one body, however
perfect, has got to become boring after a while. But if one were an immortal
changeling, able to match the body to the occasion, now that starts to
look like an interesting prospect.
That's the kind of prospect I'm willing to settle for. I'm not really
interested in being young only to have to go through all the ages all over
again - enough already. I'm ready for what I feel is my right as a citizen of
this rich and abundant universe, which blossomed out of a single point ten
orders of magnitude smaller than a gnat's toenail, into four times more stars
than there are grains of sand on this earth. Is it so unreasonable for me to
expect, as someone who has endured all the gross and petty humiliations of
corporeality, to become an immortal changeling? In the seminal computer game World
of Warcraft, people can switch their embodied forms with mouse clicks. Does
World of Reality have less processing power than World of Warcraft? Why should I expect less out of life than I do
out of a mere computer game? Isn't it only appropriate for me to want to have a
warrior body avatar with rippling muscles to handle conflict situations, while
still being able to slip into a variety of more comfortable bodies for sensual
encounters?
I'm not joking here. If you think I am it might be because you have been
successfully conditioned by the Babylon Matrix to take the whole corporeality
scam completely for granted. If you put aside the fatalistic conditioning of a
mortal slave, ordinary common sense tells you that being able to choose the
right body for the occasion is as basic an evolutionary progression as being
able to choose the right words, facial expressions or clothing for an occasion.
It is only what is appropriate. What would be grossly inappropriate for an
evolving being would be to get scammed into endlessly repeated corporeal
incarnations in which you become stuck in one leaky, aging body after another.
Corporeal incarnation was probably a deal you made. Drunk on nectar and
ambrosia, a giddy moment between incarnations, and with the foolish
overconfidence of the disincarnate, you signed on for a mortal incarnation, At
the time it seemed like the intense thing to do, kind of like a Nineteenth Century
adolescent who thought going to war would be an exciting adventure.
But now you know better and might like to renegotiate the deal.
"Can't I just be any age I feel like?" and,
"Can't I just create my own reality?" The answers were all the
same.
“Yes, you can create your own reality, BUT . . .”
(You knew there was a huge BUT coming.)
Personally, I came to realize that to really be able to create your own
reality you need to be a fully, fully empowered New Age person who has
completely internalized the you-create-your-own-reality principle and does not
harbor a doubt any greater than the size of a mustard seed. To get to that kind
of state of personal empowerment, it's going to take God only knows how many
workshops, past-life regressions, and other costly New Age products and
services.
But once you've paid for all that, and gotten rid of all doubt, then you
really can create your own reality. This may finally explain the unsolved
mystery of why there are no middle-aged New Age people. They have learned that
they can create their own reality, and so they've recreated their ages and
become the Indigo children who have such a precocious knowledge of New Age
principles.
But if you can't afford all those New Age products and services, or even
if you can, but still harbor doubts, where does that leave us in 2012? I found
that if you think mortality is inconvenient, try mortality plus the
inconvenient truth of climate warming, plus apocalypse, plus no ability to
create your own reality! If you are not the maître de of your own private
reality by 2012, better prepare yourself for being left behind in a world
composed of failed New Agers and other clueless mortals unable to self-rapture
themselves into new realities.
That sounds harsh, but there is a kind of cosmic justice to it. No one
wants to live in a world of immortal changeling losers and doubters. The loser
with a thousand faces. And it is so easy to imagine how being an immortal
changeling could be abused by the unworthy -- the devil that hath the power to
assume a pleasing form, and all that. Ideally, being an immortal changeling
should be reserved for only the high New Age elect like myself.
Without such selectivity the New Age would be a disaster. Can you
imagine the problems that would be created if you allowed people who don't
respect diversity to live in a world of immortal changelings? Can you imagine
the burka that an Islamic Fundamentalist would want you to wear if you were an
immortal changeling?
So the losers and the doubters will get filtered out automatically. But
you know just as well as I do that with the whole light and dark way that
things work out, there are going to be immortal changelings who are evil and
have a diabolical array of fell powers. Any immortal changeling knows that an
epic struggle of light and dark comes with the territory; same as on the
Babylon Matrix, only the light and dark will be differently distributed. In the
epic world of immortal changelings, dark and light are concentrated into a much
smaller number of entities, and this makes things considerably more dramatic
and mythological.
I guess at some point it may have become unclear, even to myself, if I
was dissing other people's attitudes toward aging, spoofing my own, or pulling
back the veil of a mortality obsessed matrix. I've been losing control of my
rants recently, and they seem to reveal more of myself and my shadow than I
intended. So let me clarify, what I am basically saying is my Second Noble
Truth.
Noble Truth #2: Get over it. You are in an aging corporeal body. Take
the damn two-digit number (which is not something you can feel your way out of)
and get on with it.
But by "on with it" I don't mean to a depressed acceptance of
mortality. What I mean by "on with it" is (the Third Noble Truth),
Noble Truth #3: Recognize that you are already a shape-shifting
interdimensional traveler.
Your aging mortal body is not your true identity, and although the
present phase of congealing into one corporeal body is such a convincing
matrix, and no doubt a huge inconvenience and hardship, remember that it is
only a phase. Your age is probably a two-digit number, and chances are, based
on present medical technology, you will probably never have to endure more than
two digits worth of age. And if you have any sort of background in math or
science, you know that two digit numbers are really small numbers. The whole
mortal number you pulled on yourself may stretch out into the scratchy last cut
of a black vinyl golden oldie, but even that will probably still be only a two
digit number, or at best in the very low one hundreds. Thankfully the mortality
number is never a very big one, and once the reset button gets pushed you've
got a chance to renegotiate.
Of course, if you are a fundamentalist, materialist and a technological
futurist, like Ray Kurzweil, then you may have some expectation of having your
consciousness downloaded into a quantum computer housed in a titanium alloy
exoskeleton with Zeiss Ikon optics and a shape-shifting dermal layer consisting
of nanobots able to reconfigure themselves in any way that is consistent with
the underlying titanium alloy exoskeleton. In other words, your expectation is
the nerdy gadget version of being an immortal changeling. But no matter how
many off-planet backups of yourself you have downloaded into quantum computers
kept in super-cooled, fully hardened underground bunkers, there is always the
possibility of a super wave or galaxy devouring black hole destroying all those
backups. This is what Tolkien called “premature immortality: the naïve
confusion of immortality in a single, age-resistant body.”
In addition to your aging, mortal/corporeal Version 1.0 body, with its
two-digit age, and all its obnoxious limitations and vulnerabilities, you have
other bodies, and those other bodies are not as stuck in one matrix as is the
flesh and blood body. If death seems too long to wait for a new body then just
wait a few hours until you are ready to go to sleep. Once a day most people
enter another matrix called the dreamtime, and while there they are in an
age-variable, shape-shifting dreambody that can defy gravity and rebound from
life-threatening situations with the resilience of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon
character. There are also the energy bodies that people experience during
near-death experiences (I have had one) and out-of-body experiences. These
energy bodies may have such enhancements as panoramic vision, orgasmic
aliveness and spiritual enlightenment.
Fundamentalist materialists would have us believe that unless we have
the luck to live long enough until technology gives us an ability to download
ourselves into quantum computers, then we are just eternal losers, a bunch of
rapidly deteriorating furless monkeys with a couple of hemispheres of tangled
wetware ready to crash into the velvet darkness of eternal unrecoverable data
loss the moment our monkey form flatlines. And oh, so many things can make a
Version 1.0 monkey form flatline: a banana peel on a staircase, another monkey
driven car on the freeway...
And even if it hasn't flatlined yet, Version 1.0 is always buggy, and
there is no warranty, no tech-support. The best you can hope for (if you can
afford about $700 a month) is the privilege of turning your fate over to some
caring, giant HMO, and maybe the mortality mechanics that work for the HMO can
patch you up for a bit, or maybe they will kill you themselves if you are one
of the unlucky hundreds of thousands that each year succumb to an adverse
reaction to a combo of pharmaceuticals.
So before I lose control over this rant again, let's boil things down to
a few simple truths about aging. Stop trying to pretend that aging is sexy or
that it is about personal empowerment, high performance, plus sentimental good
feeling, like the fifty-five-year-old model woman with perfect bone structure
playing volleyball on the beach with her grandchildren in the Celebrex ad.
Say after me the following affirmations,
"Every day in every way I'm getting older and older."
"Today is the first day of the rest of my ever-diminishing
life."
"Mortality sucks, and then you die."
Here now are my Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Noble Truths about aging:
Noble Truth #4. Mortality is developmental, and you probably signed on
for it because it puts fire under your ass. Most immortal changelings are too
stuck in the immortal changeling rut to do anything with their endless lives.
Noble Truth #5. Fear of death is about fear of unlived life.
My near death experience in November 2011, shook me by my “snarklies”
and taught me to evaluate everything from the point of view of living every day
like it could be your last and stop the countdown to apocalypse dates like
2012. The count-down-to-apocalypse game was old when Revelations was written
(in the expectation that the freaky events described were going to happen to
the Christians of the First-Century AD). Your personal event horizon of death
could come at any time and is guaranteed, so stop projecting it toward a
collective eschaton (aka end of the present world); it just binds you deeper
into linear time.
Nobile Truth #6. Stop falling for the fundamentalist materialist longing
for anti-aging medicine and its vain efforts to forever patch up a pro-aging
mortal body.
You already have glorified bodies. Death, the mortal emergency, can
actually be a liberating emergence of your other bodies, and a chance to more
fully recover your real identity as an inter-dimensional traveler. So stop
cringing from the amazing intensity and vulnerability of your corporeal
incarnation. Mortality is a once in a lifetime experience. Disembodied entities
are always talking about how envious they are of “the Force” emanating from
mortal incarnation. Try to remember that however ambivalent you might be about
being in a body, it is for a limited time only, and then you may discover that
there are other worlds than these...
At this
point, I am moving towards more personal thoughts on what I means to be in my
big head and little head.
