As Time Goes By

Things that at one time brought me great joy and satisfaction now seem devoid of interest, while things I never used to notice are now the most important experiences at this stage of my journey. I’m finding that when I have a really pleasurable experience, it tends to be very intense, kind of all consuming, a moments of what we call ecstasy. Ecstatic experiences are often part of a kind of dream state, and as those things become more intense and more pleasurable, I realize that, for much of our lives, ecstasy is a rare occurrence. I think it’s deliberately planned to be so. As you begin to experience more of these moments, you realize that most of our journey is mundane, tedious, and repetitious. It’s all about cycles, and so you’re forever coming back to the same point and starting over again, whether it’s the seasons or the 24 hours of the day. Those things happen over and over again, and when we have ecstatic experiences, they tend to frighten us. In my 20s, in the 1960s, when we were first started to experiment with pot and LSD and other drugs, these experiences were terrifying for many people and they never did them again. For others, the state of ecstasy was so addictive that they would do anything to stay out of this world and in that special world where everything seemed to go well and to just feel great. For most of out journey, since we’re still in the process of maturing, we haven’t yet developed the spiritual or psychic sense to be able to deal with paradise. The pleasure and the joy are so intense and so unfamiliar during those early stages of our journey that we run from them. I look around me everyday and see people running from peace, contentment, and joy. After all, those things tend to get in the way of all those tasks and commitments that we must complete. In addition, most people really cannot stand leisure. They go on a retreat, and pay a lot of money, and most of the time they’re just nervous wrecks. They don’t know what to do with all of this time where you’re not able to talk, because talk is such a wonderful means of diverting attention from other things that can be very pleasurable. I think this is one of the reasons why so many of us, as we get older, withdraw more and more from the world, because we’re really tired of the conflict and the stress, and because nobody every seems to wants to just stop, take a break, and enjoy what the Gods have put all around us. We spend more and more time in gardens, or libraries, anyplace where the rule is “Quiet, please,” because this is an incredibly noisy world. I’m sure that most older people have the same problem. Noise can drive you insane, especially if you’ve lived a long time, and you grew up in a world that was much quieter. At the time of your life when you need quiet more than ever, just as you did when you were an infant, the world has never been noisier. There have never been more people on the planet, and all of them have tons of toys – pagers, cell phones, computers, and cars -- and they all make noise.

Noise is one of those things that I steals from us an inner peace, because peace within requires a good deal of silence, or at least quiet. I’m in a situation where I have a lot of that, and that really concerns a lot of people: “Oh, John has too much time on his hands. He needs to get a job, and DO something.” Oh, God, I’m so glad I don’t have to work. I HATE work. I don’t mind activity, but the thought of having to go back to somebody else’s schedule, and again to have to deal with noise, and on the job is one of the noisiest places for most of us, is horrifying to me.

So we spend most of our lives in noisy, busy places, frightened by true joy and peace, but as we get older, we begin to reverse and go back to the ways of childhood, which I think of as being wonderfully quiet. There was always music playing at our place, but it was soft and joyful. My parents’ old dance records, which I listened to all through school when I was depressed, would just pick me right back up again.

If you get right back to the beginning, you find great joy in very simple things, and you find that you’ve got lots of time like you did as kid, hours sometimes, in your bedroom or backyard. You have time not only to look but to see, and then to reflect upon, the way in which things began to get tied together with the rest of existence, instead of being isolated incidents, and you begin again to see the great harmony and unity in all things, despite appearances. You remember, again, that this is after all apparently just a play.

I was watching “Bandwagon” the other night, and a wonderful song which was written for that movie, and the last line just blew me away, as many times as I’ve sung it and heard it sung: “The world is a stage/the stage is a world of entertainment.” To know that that gets us off the hook for so much.

So as in childhood, we go back to exploring our own little world, and it’s just fascinating to me how that world changes as we move away from childhood and become more and more connected to the world and all that’s going on there. Now I find, as I go back to the beginning, that I am detaching from the world and going back into my own smaller one, which includes my garden, the swimming pool, the inside of my wonderful home with my player piano and my old records. It’s a very comfortable little cocoon, and that’s my world, and I hear other older people say that, too. “I’m just building a little cocoon,” they say. We’re conscious of the fact that we’re going into that transition between this world and the next, and when we emerge on the other side, it will be so wonderful to be home again, but in the meantime, dear older people, do not let the world steal your joy from what is happening to you. Do not let them tell you that you need to be medicated, or that you need to keep busy and develop new interests. Just tell them to go to hell, and sit there and enjoy yourself, and take the time to look back over your journey and see how glorious it really has been, despite the incredible boredom. See the marvelous organization of it, the fact that without being aware of it we were all going in exactly the right direction at exactly the right speed all the time, and now we can look forward to the fruits of all this. How exciting. So folks, don’t let people take away your old age. You’ve earned it. It’s a wonderful time. And it’s all we have at this point. This is as good as it gets. So, for heaven’s sake, make use of all the good’s that’s there. And if you take the time to walk away from all the distractions of the world, you’ll find that we have been given everything we need at this stage, which happens to be very little. If you’ve got the beauty of nature around you, immerse yourself in that, because it’s very restful and healing, and it gives you strength for the rest of the journey.