Confronting the Actualities of Aging

Aging calls up various topics -- and all are subject to the same process: recognition of egoicies ("egoic idiocies") in their various forms -- involuntary stress-patterns appearing as our self-condition, triggered, apparently, by the emerging issues of life -- and finding a way to release those stress-patterns -- not by opposing them, but by recognizing that we are bringing and adding them to life unconsciously, reflexively, and habitually -- and relaxing from them, desisting.


This is not, I think, something that many people are able to do -- though I think that most all could learn how to do it because it is an inherent potential of born existence as a human. But, like walking, it is something learned -- and it is a learning opposite to most learning, the relinquishing of what is known, rather than the accumulation of more to know. It is not "forgetting by denial", but "forgetting by dissolution" -- dissolving the grip we have on experience that feels like the grip it has on us.


It is a radical action, an action at-the-root, that relaxes from a stress pattern without anything else in life having changed. That's radical.


The unknown unknown of life continues as we get older, only in different forms than when we were younger. The requirement is the same: to become conscious of and then to relinquish the residual effects of experience, as we move, like a phonograph needle-in-groove, through the changes of life. The accumulated residual impressions of our reactions, in and from living, are what we suffer and what make passages of change grueling.


If a phonograph needle behaved that way, the music would be garbled.


A close "second" might be the sound when a clump of dust accumulates between the needle and the phonograph record. In "third place" might be the repetitive skipping of a scratched CD, and in "fourth" might be buggy software with unpredictable behavior that sometimes makes the operating system crash.


You get the point. Accumulated, residual effects gum up the works.


We may clean up our life on an ongoing basis. There is no escape from circumstance because every circumstance happens before we know it. We can only live it, take care of things, and de-bug ourselves (of our lingering stress-patterns). Conscious clean-up.


The worse things get, the more important it is to release, and thereby stay present to, the Unknown unknown AS the Unknown unknown, the phonograph needle not knowing what is coming next.


#TetraSeedAwakening