עברית Growing Young: On the Resurrection of Youth in Older Age
When there were no strings to play
You played to me
Most people never lived through their teens in awakened state of consciousness, and therefore never experienced what it really means to be 16, 17, or 18, in the present age. But if we can awaken in us the forces of youth in later age, we can confront a central question of human life in our present age: How to support, nourish and develop our youthful forces later in life so that they can fire in the right way the rejuvenation and resurrection process of our aging soul? How to remember what was lost when we forgot our youthful self, and how to awaken this self from its deep unconscious slumber in our soul?
For me this youthful self has always been my trustful companion, serving as an inner “spirit of my youth", my individualized share in the life of a wholly unique stream of becoming. I know it’s being and becoming in me as an old- paradoxically speaking- young friend, who let my rebirth process happen not only every seven years, but more importantly, every day. He is a stream of growing ever younger with age, the fountain head of my youth’s forces, and is transforming me as I transform it from year to year, decade to decade, as I grow younger and he becomes more mature. Without this most powerful "delete" and "refresh" of my aging life forces, I cannot resurrect again and again the forces I need both for my spiritual-scientific research as well as my daily human and social life.
But, then, what is, and who is, this "youthful self"? This question leads naturally to another question: what it means to be teenager, adolescent, in reality in our time? (After the end of your 50’, one becomes so young that this spiritual quest can also turn to the first years of life, to early childhood).
It means what I call the modern initiation of puberty that all teenagers undergo today un-or semi-consciously, but that can be consciously raised to full consciousness later in our adult life by means of spiritual scientific development. Then it becomes a variant, an important one at that, of the modern conscious crossing of the threshold. This specific crossing is actualized as a major de-actualization and reversal of physical time, that is, as going out of physical linear time into living time, in which our past coexist with the present as living reality. This process makes the past inot the teacher of the present older self, and makes the older self the teacher of the younger self/vs. The adolescent matures to the same extent as it makes maturity younger and more creative.
Let us try to describe this process more closely. It means that we learn how to merge and be energized by what I may call, variously, our “existential self, or our "soul-self", or even the pure “human animal (astral) self”, before it is taken up and suppressed by the physical hardenings and consolidations of personal identify and social configuration around the earthly birth of the “I” around the 21st year of life. Especially fruitful it becomes when one is able, in the 40', when one works on developing the forces of Spirit Self, a transformed, spiritualized astral body, to connect directly with the fresh, natural astral body of the 3rd seven-year period. When I consciously transform my adult state of consciousness in my 40', in order to connect with my youthful astral self and commune with it, I can actually "incarnate" or better "incorporate" myself in its fresh, raw, yet pure and hospitable being. I begin to sense, feel, taste, smell, and thus “see” the world through its un-blinded eyes and experience it through its unblocked heart.
What does it really mean, then, to be “born again” in a reversed way, moving in time from the future to the past, and awake consciously inside the being that I was before the “I” was born at 21, say at 17, and experience it through one’s being at 45? (And then, between 49 to 56, with the forces of the Life Spirit, to go even farther back into the past, to the 2nd seven-year period, to reawaken in oneself the fresh etheric forces of childhood, which we cannot describe here)
Let me describe this experience in this way. Incorporating myself in my 17 years old astral self, I first of all die, or fall asleep, in regard to my present adult self. It’s really like going to sleep in the night, when the astral body and “I” separate from the physical and etheric bodies. However, normally when this happens, one loses consciousness as falls into dream-and dreamless sleep. But one can also experience an awakening in the sleep itself, in a wholly different stat of consciousness. Something similar can be experienced when one transposes oneself to a different life period. One falls asleep in regard to one’s present state of consciousness and awakens in one’s 17 years old consciousness. As in falling asleep, I experience how I am letting the sheaths of my present, older bodies, soul forces and representations of my self, fall away, and I begin to see and feel my life without them. I am as it were striped necked and begin to experience reality as a 17 years old, without the help of all my intellectual fences and defenses, normative habits and conventions that I developed and accumulated since then, that is, before individual adult traits and social norms have covered up and subdued this astral being. I am now facing again- as mature adult but transformed adult- with fresh and fierce elemental bodily and heart forces, life's original mystery, awe, wonder and trembling. Let me single out, from the life of this new and strangely un/familiar young being, an essential existential “Stimmung”, which characterizes its being and becoming.
What is the most remarkable and precious in this experience I can only describe as an all-embracing, engulfing and pure state of the absolute meaninglessness of all personal soul existence as such, which is, at the same time, a primordially virgin, naked and immaculate expectation and openness to pure- yet wholly unknow- "meaningfulness". In my spiritual scientific research work, I invoke this being as my pass of entry to this place, as a kind of starting point from which to launch spiritual research in a specific direction (as I said above, more advanced starting points are used by means of earlier ages). That is, when my work demands it, for spiritual reasons, I transpose myself to this youthful state of original purity of existential meaninglessness, in order to find again at present the abyss as well as source of all authentic spiritual quest. It is important to emphasize that this transposition into my unique being of becoming, this becoming “my being 17”, has nothing do to with psychological regression of any sort; it has really nothing do with returning or enlivening of my personality traits and experiences at that age, but all the more with the spiritual process of becoming 17, that is, with the original elementary forces that make up the new born astral body that discovers the world afresh for the first time, when its eyes and all its senses are opened to perceive and experience physical reality as such, in its absolute elementary originality. This pure youthful experience of the sense world with an astral body hatched and liberated from its enveloping motherly sheath, is something that latter goes under the awakening “I” and sentient-soul during the 20’. It lets me experience again what it really means to live without any I” centered intellectual, emotional, and volitional meaning: the true elemental forces of brute meaninglessness. Pure naked astral life without any trace of adult, intellectually tainted, sense, notion and experience of life’s meaning!
In this manner, I constantly resurrect my "unsaved" youthful self, the longing-filled, craving, naked soul self, and with it I resurrect in my greying adult soul, life's original mystery with all its original elemental force and energy. Only with the consciously sought for help of this being I can once more enter into the world's original riddle of existence in all its pristine, primordial, purity. (In this connection, read also my obituary's note about on JD Salinger as the "Faithful Guardian of Childhood and Adolescent").
The reawakening of the pure soul self brings you again in full consciousness to the birth of the “I” in the 21st year of life. One knows that true “I”, the spiritual core of the true self, only in this manner: one experiences its birth as the purest light in the purest darkness, as fullest meaningfulness in outmost meaninglessness, as spiritual birth of the Chris child in the human-and earthly soul.
This standing in full astral-soul nakedness inside the real being and becoming of the physical world, “falling asleep” to all my adult life and personality, allow me to "baptize" my old and burnt out self in the living and fresh waters of the fountain of soul youthfulness; if extended to the 2nd and 1st seven years periods of life (described in my book, Cognitive Yoga: How A Book is Born), it brings about a rebirth of my whole constitution, body, soul and spirit; I will be able to experience Spirit Self through the original spiritual experience of the astral body, Life Spirit through the etheric body, and Spirit Man through the physical body. The 21 years of my spiritual development, from 42 to 63, will be charged and refreshed, resurrected, with the backward stream of time, that flows from the future, my pure astral, etheric and physical forces between 21 and birth. This will allow me, after 63, to experience my soul members and forces, developed between 21 and 42, deepened and expanded in both direction, and find my living, dynamic middle, in the middle of my being, and carry it with me in my sojourned in life and spirit everywhere, moving as a whole human being through all the worlds I am traveling through. This fountain of youth is the place to which I always return and consecrate as an intimately personal-spiritual sanctuary of my conscious adult initiation into the unconscious initiation of youth and childhood.
Life's mature wisdom, love and creativity are ripening and growing ever younger and fresher, in older age, through this baptism and rebirth in the fountain of eternal youth and childhood. One growth younger and younger in this way the close one approaches the gates of death and may hope to experience death itself as the ultimate, absolute, fountain of eternal life, and as the celebration of resurrection, rebirth and rejuvenation of one’s whole humanity.
This is what I experience when I let original youth experiences resound again in my soul, and ask them to take me back to my youthful self. For example, I may chose some verses from a beloved poem, to work upon my soul now and lead me backward in the stream of my life-time, across Lethe, awakening my youth from the sleep of physical forgetting, to become again the becoming of my youthful self, as I let both selves read to each other, and experience through each other, what the younger one experienced for the first time ever when he was 17 years old...:
In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me
I have spent my life
Seeking all that's still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me.
In the book of love's own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me
You
flew
to me
In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me.
Grateful Dead: "Attics of My Life". Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
An installment in The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. By David Dodd 1997-98 Research Associate, Music Department, University of California, Santa Cruz