A primary preparation in old age is an orientation toward the Spirit/Energy/Power that has birthed us and continues to inhabit us.
Aligning with Spirit
By Kamla K. Kapur
One cannot be happy without a thrust towards wisdom and a grounding in spirit. Wisdom is not the sole property of prophets, sages, and philosophers but everyone’s birthright. Each of us has a spark that can be fanned by intention and desire into a flame. We have but to turn our faces, even a few nano degrees, towards our Source, our saints tell us, for the Universe to go to work for us.
Embracing Your Inner Light
Much research has been done to show that people with spiritual leanings have a happier old age and live longer. Victor Frankl survived a Nazi Death Camp and writes in his account, Man’s Search for Meaning, that people who had a spiritual attitude and the imagination to have faith in non-sensory phenomena fared much better in the camps. ‘They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom.’ They had a source of support when all support was stripped away; when they were blinded by suffering and hunger, they yet had a perspective that saved them and kept them safe.
“If you contemplate God long enough, something surprising happens in the human brain,” say authors and scientists Newberg and Waldman. “Neural functioning begins to change. Different circuits become activated, while others become deactivated. New dendrites are formed, new synaptic connections are made, and the brain becomes more sensitive to subtle realms of experience.” The authors go on to tell us that “spiritual practices also can be used to enhance cognition, communication, and creativity.”
So why shouldn’t we contemplate God, whatever image of Him or Her that we hold dear? Humans are images in need of images. A warm, supportive, personalized Multiverse, even when we know it is imageless, beyond personification, incomprehensible, works best for us emotional creatures. We have to suckle on Imagination’s teats to get nearer our gods, make them real, make them come home to our hearts. As we age, we urgently need our gods.
We also need to make new synaptic circuits and new pathways to promote better neural functioning and daily living and stay connected in a fundamental way to ourselves, our environment, and our world. The mind, soul, and spirit, because they are not physical — though housed in a physical organism – can grow in energy and become more active and intense even as the body begins its decline. As the scope of our external world narrows, we need to move towards more ‘subtle realms of experience’ towards greater contemplation of the ‘Invisible’ from which we came.
Even for people on a spiritual path, this reorientation towards spirit has to happen frequently, repeatedly, for it is easy for our default systems to forget new directions, paths, get confused, disoriented, unhappy, bitter, impoverished by a search for ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ for what our hearts know to be true.
Doubters, as all of us are sometimes, can you find comfort in Newberg and Waldman’s words: “As far as we can tell, most of the human brain does not even worry if the things we see are actually real. Instead, it only needs to know if they are useful for survival.” So, God may only be an image, an illusion, but illusions help us stay in the game for long enough to prevail in it. Illusions are an informed choice. Hope is part of our practical, expedient, and clever strategy to circumvent despair. It is a choice made in recognition and honor of the ingenuity of the fictile human mind and its power to invent that which may not, strictly speaking, exist and to bring into being, from airy nothings, tangible, edible fruit.
“Let us not forget,” says Einstein in The Human Side, “that knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and dignified life. Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high moral standards and values above the discoveries of objective truth. What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of inquiring and constructive minds.”
Before embarking on a newer, happier, more hopeful way of being, pray, even if just to plead, help me. Most of my answered prayers are screams of despair. Sincere, heartfelt, honest prayer makes us humble, softens us, and gives us hope. The word for prayer in Spanish is esperanza, hope. When we pray, we acknowledge that we are not masters of our destiny, not in control of most things in our lives and that we are often in need of help that we can get from no other source but the Source of our being, alive and kicking within us. Prayer reassures us that help is available to sustain us during difficult and dark times, shows us ways to access and harness our own energies, and thinks in ways that liberate instead of imprison. Prayer focuses our attention on the task at hand and gives us the courage to begin, persist, and succeed.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kamla K. Kapur was born and raised in India and studied in the United States. An award-winning playwright, poet, and author of several books including her latest, The Privilege of Aging: Savoring the Fullness of Life (July 2024, Park Street Press), her writing has been featured in anthologies and journals such as Parabola and The Sun. A former literature professor at Grossmont College, she and her husband divide their time between the remote Indian Himalayas and San Diego, California. More at www.kamlakkapur.com.
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