Growing Older ... and Wiser?

Age happens by itself, but wisdom must be won through hard work

Age and Wisdom

Think of a young plant growing up from the ground, shooting up vertically. At first, its only job is to eagerly grow straight up, throwing out leaf after leaf. But after a certain point, it starts branching out. It grows wider, explores and fills out the surrounding space. By the time it has become a full grown tree with a strong bark, it is regularly producing flowers and fruits, feeding the insects, animals and man, and also gives us shelter. It offers itself to the world.

What the tree does naturally, we have to learn to do only with great effort. Many times, we grow old, but we do not grow wise. It can even happen that growth itself stops, leading to stunted growth. Growth rate is like the "default setting" on a computer, wisdom is not part of it. If we still focus only on producing leaf after leaf after leaf, we do not branch out. There are no flowers or fruits of our efforts, and we have little shelter to offer the next generation. We realize that age is no guarantee of maturity - older people can also act juvenile. When this happens, we have to treat it like a sickness, not of the body, but of the soul or the mind. How do we go about diagnosing and curing it?

Digesting Experiences: Food for the Soul

A proper cure requires a proper diagnosis. When we look at the difference between those who gain wisdom through experiences, and those who don't, the question to ask is: If two people experience the same thing, how does one grow wise and the other doesn't? What is happening when we say we have to "learn from the experience" and add to our store of wisdom? The experience is like food, and the learning process is one of digestion - except it is a consciously chosen activity. Food gets digested without any effort even while sleeping, but experience gets digested only with tremendous effort with all our forces of alertness and wakefulness.

Body <---------> Soul/mind

Food <--------> Experiences

Digestion <-------> Learning

Sleeping <---------> Waking

Just like undigested food leads to all sorts of problems in the body, undigested experiences lead to long term problems in the soul and mind, which in turn affect the body even more.

Think of an experience we might have had in our life - a situation that is discussed a lot in our older philosophy. In twilight, we may see a rope, but we may mistake it to be a snake.

The experience may be the same between two people, they may both experience a rope falling on them that they are not sure for a moment if it is a rope or a snake. But if one of them quickly concludes that the rope is a snake - for that person - the fear is a real factor in the soul. This error leads to many real bodily changes - biological panic, hormonal imbalance, adrenaline rush, increased heart rate, vasoconstriction (blood vessels constricting), sympathetic imbalance, syncopal attacks (fainting), even heart attacks. All of that can follow when the experience is not digested properly. One major reason for health problems today, especially the chronic ones, is precisely this sort of digestive disturbance at the soul level.

The same thing happens when we are half-asleep, or just groggy when waking up - we are not in a position of digesting our experience properly at that moment, and hence we get easily startled. It is only when an experience is patiently penetrated through and through with our understanding, just like our body penetrates the food with digestive juices, and which the cow gives us a wonderful example of, does it then get absorbed into our soul in a healthy way. When it is properly absorbed, it becomes wisdom.

This brings us to the next question - if experience is the food for the soul, what kinds of experiences constitute our soul "diet"?

Soul Diet: The Tough and the Easy

In today's health-conscious age - we know that we need a balanced diet. It is not enough to just eat candy and chips - we need raw vegetables, fibre, fresh fruits and juices, and good protein. If an adult eats baby food continuously, we know that will lead to digestive trouble very quickly. These are simple ideas that, whether we follow it or not, we definitely understand.

But unfortunately, with regards to our soul, we rebel against a balanced diet and are always seeking potato chips and baby food. We want everything to be easy, and our digital society gives everything at the click of a button with no effort. At school, the textbooks that we "consume" are rarely digested, made our own and overcome; instead they just sit there, and we feel as if we have consumed heavy processed food that just sits there, either giving us indigestion or making us "fat". It is even possible for many physically fit people to have very lethargic and obese souls. It operates at a different level. When life throws a difficult experience in our path, instead of accepting it as tough fiber that we can digest and gain strength from, we do our best not to even take it in, or even to avoid digesting it because it is too hard.

The addiction to potato chips is mirrored in the addiction to certain experiences - where the same youthful experiences are yearned for again and again. For example, sports and games are exciting and healthy experiences until we are teenagers. But when that extends into adulthood, we have the sports industry, the games industry, and massive amount of energy being put into things that we should have outgrown a long time back. When a 35 year old seeks the pleasurable experience of kicking a ball to the goal or hitting a ball to the boundary in the same way as a 15 year old, then we have a fixation on the potato chips, and a stunted growth of the soul. Our society is being particularly influenced by the Western part of the world to hop on this bandwagon, since it is quite common there to artificially extend youthful experiences well into old age.

It can also happen that we lose interest in food, and go into starvation mode. This happens when don't even try to digest our experiences, but just let them pass by us like a movie, or like the landscape in a moving train. When Henry David Thoreau said "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", this is what he meant. Soul starvation definitely leads to stunted growth, and a host of other issues.

As a result of all these digestive issues, more and more people get simply older, fewer and fewer people grow wiser.

Digestive exercises

Since digestion is a conscious process in us humans, it will not happen until we do it. And we can kick off our efforts at growing wiser by questioning and pondering on our past experiences, and more importantly, pondering on experiences of others. Pondering on our own experiences is like cooked food, pondering on others experiences by internally living through them is like raw food - harder to digest but health giving. Everything in life that adults take in simply on authority works inside us exactly like undigested food, so it is critical to dissolve all authority from our worldview, and instead ask questions:

Why did this happen? Why now, why in this manner, and to this person?

How did this happen? What is the lesson here? How do I understand it?

Starting questions are like saliva, and more penetrating questions are like digestive enzymes. Thinking is like chewing - we must always chew our food before swallowing. This process is then followed by different activities and generating changes: growing wider, sinking deeper roots, transforming leaves into flowers and fruits:

How do I correct my previous errors? How do I do things differently?

How do I offer something to society, something of my own?

How do I contribute precisely where it is needed?

We are fortunate in India to have a wonderful reservoir of stories and mythology - other cultures also have their Manna from Heaven. All of these, and especially the understanding of karma in the right way that helps us accept the food put in front of us, shows us more ways of digestion. Our aim must be to make ourselves so strong that we can even digest iron - the toughest of humanity's experiences - instead of only pumping iron in the gym.

The end result of good digestion is productive physical activity, and the end result of a good soul digestion is a productive and healthy humanity. It is a doctor's responsibility to not only help nourish the body, but even more to nourish the soul so that people can be active contributors to the world.

Dinner is ready! Any takers?