Young and Old

We are used to feeling like we have a center in ourselves. We depend on what we think of ourselves and the world in order to operate. If someone ever came to you and somehow stole all of your self-identity away, you would be alone and frightened like a motherless child. I remember losing my mother in the supermarket when I was little, and it was sheer terror. When you are a little kid you do not have an identity yet, but you do identify your mother as safety from the unknown. You have not really shaped a personal identity psychologically, which will take over as your protection from the unknown. Part of why you undergo so much stress when you are a teenager, is that suddenly you realize you must operate in this world in some coherent manner, and that means you have to define yourself for everyone else. Up until adolescence, you were free from any need to do this, mostly because you did not yet have any responsibilities. But as you get older you realize you become more aware of how society works and what it demands of you. This is why so many teenagers are rebellious and refuse to conform, because they see how identity limits people and closes their minds. Older people are frequently considered "stuck in their ways" or traditional. Just look at the '60s generation, what happened to them? Many of them are probably even conservative now.

The more you conform and limit your mind to a specific pattern that makes you comfortable, the more you die and the older you get. In that sense, you have been dying since the day you were born. In the womb you were physically limited by the small space of your mother's belly but not mentally, but as soon as you were born your mind started to limit itself to what it saw was safety in the wide world. Your mind will continue to age the more you limit yourself. The state of no mind, letting go of fear and self, is limitless and all-encompassing. So you can grow younger, by concentrating on spiritual life. By letting go of your mind's categories, your mind will let more life in and you will see things in a new way, the way you saw it as a child. Jesus said, you must see the world through the eyes of a child, to enter the kingdom of heaven.