I Love Getting Older. You Can Too.
Meditation can change our identity and offer a revolution within.
I’ve not long embarked on my 58th year and I feel better than ever. I feel a pressing urgency to share what I have found.
My days, sometimes weeks, are largely spent in solitude. My own ascent is through a meditation path which literally takes me to the top of the mountain within.
Currently, I am on day 12 of a juice fast and my time consists just now of a healthy triangulation between my meditation practice, juicing and writing. Due to a knee injury, my little exercise consists of walking, but sometime soon I aim to be back running.
Around that clusters conversations with my friends and children, films and reading. It’s the perfect life for me, but I never would have wanted this if you had asked me 20 years ago and would never have seen it coming.
How many of us see divorce down the road, our kids — if we have them — grown and gone and a life spent doing pretty much what you want?
I still need to earn money but my wants are minimal, my needs even fewer. To get happy, I had to face my own emptiness, allowing the divine to come into me. That can be a painful time but persistence pays off.
When I look at my old school friends and see how many have done well in worldly terms, I applaud them but have no envy of their success.
For my own definition was always different.
Raised in a highly ambitious family, who made their money through property development, I knew the world of bricks and mortar could never be mine. My world was on the inside and for years I thought there must be something wrong with me, a suspicion often unkindly fanned by those around me. I have walked a road less travelled for much of my life.
Yet it is the most wonderful surprise. When I was a boy it was instilled in me that I could do anything and I had fantasies (really not mine but those of my crazy ‘stage-mum’) one day I would be Prime Minister here in Britain.
Now I couldn’t imagine anything worse and wouldn’t thank you for the travails of celebrity and all that goes with it.
Recently, as my meditation has progressed and the light within has grown, I find more and more people, strangers often, coming out of the woodwork, wanting to connect.
I rarely want to and rarely feel bad about it, but I help people where I can, both in my quiet psychotherapy practise and in my personal life.
In these long years, amid all the changes of my life, I notice the world plays the same old game, politics and ego a wheel perpetually spinning its tired old stories.
There may be different faces but the world never waivers from its illusory ground. One minute you’re up, the next you’re down.
I have seen other people get old and bitter despite and often because of all they have accumulated — the houses, the cars, the money, often does not reach the corners of their being they had hoped.
I cottoned on early the world would not satisfy; I believe it is something we all have to learn eventually when we will all have to look within.
There are whole universes inside, what Jesus referred to as the many mansions of his father’s house - although I am not a Christian. This physical plane is just the first and for us all there comes a time when we need more.
In meditation, it is possible to travel through the spheres of this creation — astral, causal, mental, unconscious, back up to the soul plane, which is not part of this creation rather where we came from.
My happiness has come from the deep recognition that firstly I am a soul, my human vessel simply a vehicle for its expression. All those on a mystical path eventually have direct experience of this god within, the spiritual marriage between the divine spark we carry and the soul.
This is the meaning behind the old fairy tales where the princess is awoken by the prince’s kiss. Finally, after a hundred years asleep, the soul is awakened.
This is the human journey, our death nothing to be feared but a doorway into new adventures.
We live in a world which fears death to such an extent that we shut it out of our awareness and live life as if the one thing that is certain will not happen to us.
That is utter madness. We need to think about our death, the passing over, which is inevitable. There are a couple of key stories which tell us the way to go.
In the Bible, Lot’s wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt. In the Greek stories, Orpheus is told not to look back for his beloved as they escape the underworld, but he can’t help himself and she too is lost.
Both of these stories are telling us that when we die, we need to keep looking up and not look back to our attachments — our relationships, property, status, self image — on the earth plane. All these things are temporary.
If we do so, we should expect another ride here. That may suit you, but I am ready to go on and see what’s waiting for me.
With the state of the world as it is, I am unsure why anyone would want to come back. Many of us however, don’t realise how much we are suffering, that life does not have to be hard, there is a peace we can access.
The longer I have meditated, the more my soul has strengthened and moved to begin to take dominion over my mind and body.
That takes practice, for the soul is the weakest element here and has to build its muscle through inner work. Yet when the balance shifts and we discover we truly are neither the mind nor the body and, more importantly, learn to live from that place, we find home.
Our days of seeking are over, the veils that separate us from oneness gone, the rest of our time here remains to continually bring us home to our true identity, often long forgotten.
I have been sad to see how many people gain more and more on the outside, those things the world says are important, yet wind up bitter and confused as to why this did not bring the promised happiness.
Much of my family has travelled this road.
But there is another, not easily found, but there if we diligently seek it.
It alone can provide the ultimate joy, a peace that passes all understanding, that those who live by the reflected light of the mind will never understand.
There is a light within, which we can fan into a giant flame.
Once you’ve tasted the kiss on the inside of the heart, nothing is ever the same again.
© Simon Heathcote
