Being With What Is

Expand your perception of the world to include the horrible beauty of decay. Look at decay and see how beautiful it is in its own way. My dear friend Laura Huxley had a collection of beautiful pharmaceutical jars in her kitchen over the sink. She’d taken old beet greens and orange peels and things and put them in water in the jars and let them slowly mold and decay into beautiful formations catching the light. It was decay as art. There is true beauty in that.

There’s horror and beauty in everything. I look at my hand, and it’s decaying. It’s beautiful and horrible at the same moment, and I just live with it. See the beauty and perfection of decay in the world around you and in yourself, and just allow it to be.

There are some unappreciated advantages to aging. The very frailty of age guards its secrets. To many people, you become irrelevant, which gives you more time to do inner work. Francis, a resident in a nursing home, wrote to me, “Lack of physical strength keeps me inactive and often silent. They call me senile. Senility is a convenient peg on which to hang nonconformity. A new set of faculties seems to be coming into operation. I seem to be waking to a larger world of wonderment – to catch little glimpses of the immensity and diversity of creation. More than at any other time of my life, I seem to be aware of the beauties of our spinning planet and the sky above. Old age is sharpening my awareness.”

It is interesting to see how aging can work to one’s advantage spiritually. I used to go to Burma to sit in meditation. I’d go into a cell. I’d just sit down – no books, no television, no computers, no one to talk to. I’d just sit and go inward. I’d go into as quiet a place as I could find. Just look at what happens when you get old. You lose your hearing, you lose your sight, you can’t move around so well, you slow down. What an ideal time to meditate. If any message is clear, that’s it. Yet we treat aging as an error or a failing.

That distortion comes from defining ourselves in terms of doing instead of being. But behind all the doings, all the roles, you just are – pure awareness, pure consciousness, pure energy. When you reside fully in the present moment, you are outside of time and space.

Trungpa Rinpoche notes, “Our lives awaken through ordinary magic.” It’s in everyday things that the miraculous happens. If we practice being here now, we develop the sensitivity to perceive and appreciate the daily miracles of our lives.

Excerpt from Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart

5 thoughts on “Being With What Is”

  1. Love your considerations about old age! Am 76, and feel as much as you do, that being quiet takes me to where I never could go when young. I enjoy solitude and am lucky to live close to Nature, where I can feel God more then in anyother circumstances. And I love you, Ram Dass!

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  2. i cannot wait to be enlightened by the remaining wisdom within this publication; thank you VERY much for ALL that you continue to do, as well as the assistance in bringing us all in the here and now – many mahalos…!

    aloha,
    ~repus

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  3. “Old age is sharpening my awareness.” I found this lately as well, this need to find and connect with the single-minded place.A pinpoint of the light within getting brighter and aurically making us emaniate bright our outer coccoon (like the movie Coccoon)..until we not so much vacate here, but find that habitual place within is now all of us; all of us being us…took a lot of digging to dig up these old shimmery bones…

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  4. Old age is the equivalency of infancy, the beginning and accumulation of life on a single continuum. What is time really? To devalue, to see irrelevant, you miss out on the wisdom and the magic our elders can bring, who knows, you may even be doing harm to your psyche. Thank you, Ram Dass, for continuing to inspire the world with relevant and necessary teaching and example.oooo

    Reply

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