Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying

Aging, Changing & Dying & The Soul Consciousness 2005-06-01 Here is a book continuing the path of help and service to others, except this time Ram Dass, from a stroke, has more personal experience in the receiving end of helpful service, which makes his book that much more meaningful.

I'm jumping around, but here are some of the ideas raised in this book.

Here is information to help cope and understand the habits of thinking that occur as the body gets older and death is approaching. In this he touches on how society values information over wisdom; the wisdom found in aged persons, how many ancient cultures and spiritual teachings value elderly and wisdom, the spiritual over the material society, the eternal soul or jivaman and reincarnation, the ability to go outside the subjective self seeing three areas, the ego, the soul and the awareness level, the leap from self to awareness difficult for the ego as it signifies going home to what we are in union with God or the Universe.

In growing old we can shift from our loneliness to aloneness, objectively accepting what is without suffering or pushing away, anotherwards ways of developing a new frame of mind as the mind becomes older, we become newer; Zen mind Beginners minds. The wisdom in aging, "being" over role playing, the ego mind and the witness soul, how what we do is only a part of what we are, how others perceptions are their problems not ours, how to face the silence without rushing back into activity, how are dharma is our karma in the world, how to face ourselves in the present moment and drop our personal histories and future obligations as the problem is not thinking of the past, but getting locked in the subjective waves of attachment - or race, culture, self-pity, etc. "The key to freedom is understanding that in the present moment, there is no time." p.135 By viewing all time or taking a time as the Sabbath or daily meditation times we consider as sacred and free from past and future, we can find the soul view, God, Awareness.

We learn to take on the soul view of life with acceptance which equals wisdom. The soul can rest in silence, it needs no meanings, we let the ego cease to tyrannize us, we embrace our fears over denial, escape the ego prison. If we take things slow in mindfulness, we cease the cruel rush of "time is money" or "time is efficiency," then we can taste the freedom of experiencing life and communicating with others - soul to soul communication - as he took his father to a childhood farm in two trips; one rushed, the other slow with the communication and connection.

And as our bodies age we need to accept them. It is the ego which rejects as the king rejects the messenger or prophet with his news. We help ourselves by sitting in soul quietness over speaking. bringing listening calm over conveying our models of reality. In this as we can cope with pains by watching verses experiencing, letting it pass as the clouds pass by.

There is advise on learning how to die, knowing the Soul consciousness at the time of death in mindfulness to stabilized us through the tumult of dying. The dissolution of the ego structure, of the conceptual map by which we have chartered reality.

- Riverhead Books