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Aging and Awakening - Dharma Talk - David Chernikoff

The following talk was given by David Chernikoff at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on January 21, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Aging and Awakening - Dharma Talk

I wanted to share some reflections upon the theme of this retreat, Aging and Awakening, hopefully to round out some perspectives that were brought up in the previous discussion, among other things. I'd like to start by sharing a little bit about my own interest in this topic. My interest in aging and what it means to age wisely actually began when I was a toddler, although I didn't fully realize what was happening at the time.

One of the most important people in my early life was my maternal grandmother, who was essentially a simple Russian peasant lady. She came over when she was chased out of what was then Russia, modern-day Belarus, because of pogroms, because she was Jewish. But I noticed growing up in a middle-class, upwardly mobile suburb that, starting at a very young age, there was a pressure to perform and achieve. The message I was given, although well-intended, was somewhat misguided in that the emphasis on achievement and attainment was very strong. The feeling I had was that I wasn't there yet, and I needed to push most of the time for good grades, high athletic performance, and various other aspects of my life to make me someone who stood out from the crowd.

There was a sense of what one of my friends, who is a Zen teacher, calls a "lack project." I didn't feel like I was enough the way I was; if only I could arrive at point X, I would be enough. With my grandmother, however, she was the only adult in my early life with whom I felt like I was enough. She seemed to understand the relationship between being and doing. I didn't understand this at the time, but my parents and the people in the community I grew up in were so focused on upward mobility and performance—trying to get into an Ivy League school and things like that—that you never really got to be a "finder." You could be a spiritual seeker, but you were never really a finder. My grandmother had a relaxed way of being, so that when I walked into the room, her face lit up in a way that said to me, "I'm really glad you're alive." That was a critically important message for me. I used to like to hang out with her and the group of women she played cards with. I would visit and secretively raid the candy dish on a regular basis. That planted a seed in my life in relation to an interest in older people.

When I was in my twenties, because I had a number of sudden, unexpected losses growing up—including my father when I was thirteen—I became interested in hospice work. Since most of the hospice patients I worked with were elderly, that work further fueled my interest. I recognized, as many people later did, that the ways in which we often treated our older people at the end of life did not honor them spiritually. The hospice movement took off because we had so medicalized the dying process, just as we had medicalized the birthing process in our culture; those processes needed to be reclaimed.

I found a great deal of inspiration in my hospice work. When I was an undergraduate at twenty-one, I was introduced to meditation, spiritual practice, and yoga, subsequently becoming a yoga and meditation teacher in my early twenties. Two of my major mentors were Ram Dass and Stephen Levine. Both frequently shared that working with people at the end of life felt like the most transformative spiritual practice they had ever done. Because I respected Stephen and Ram Dass as much as I did, hearing them say that inspired me. It fueled my interest in exploring the life experience and wisdom of older people, and wondering about ways our culture could learn to be more compassionate and wise in relation to the aging process. The contrast between our culture and indigenous cultures, who recognize their elders as lineage holders and wisdom keepers, was something else I was very aware of from having traveled.

What really shifted things for me was in 1995. I was teaching in the transpersonal psychology department at Naropa University. The religion department created a new chair called the World Wisdom Chair and invited Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi¹ to fill it. I had known about Rabbi Zalman—as his students and friends called him—for many years because he was a close friend of Ram Dass, and I had worked for Ram Dass's dying center in Santa Fe and later for his organization in Nepal, the Seva Foundation. Rabbi Zalman came to Naropa University and was this really inspiring elder because he loved being an elder. He was the founder of what was then called the Spiritual Eldering Institute (later renamed Sage-ing International).

When he began to teach at Naropa, we established a close personal connection. Like a good Jewish grandfather, he coaxed me onto the board of directors for the Spiritual Eldering Institute, after which I went through their training program and trained as a certified Sage-ing leader. I began to teach the kind of material we're talking about here.

What's interesting is that when I met Rabbi Zalman, I was forty-five years old. Aging was largely theoretical to me. I would introduce myself at workshops with an element of apology as an "elder in training." At this point, a few days short of seventy-four years of age, the aging process is a lot less theoretical and a lot more real on the physical, emotional, and spiritual levels of my life. I feel incredibly inspired to look deeply at what Buddhism and other contemplative wisdom traditions have to say about how to experience late life in a wise and compassionate way, and how to help other people do that as well. I have a tremendous passion for this work because our society has a diluted perspective on the aging process, rooted in an obsession with youth and a lack of recognition of the incredible contribution that wise elders can make.

Seeing Reality Clearly

I've chosen a couple of aspects of Buddhist teaching that I think have particular relevance for those of us who want to age consciously, compassionately, and wisely. The first one has to do with the Buddhist emphasis on seeing reality clearly. The word Vipassanā², often translated as insight, literally means in Pali to see things clearly or to see things as they are. There's something important about looking honestly, with an open heart and self-compassion, at the truth of our experience as we move through different stages of the lifespan.

I remember reading the shortest short story I ever read, written by Lydia Davis. It captured our culture's attitude toward aging in one sentence: "At 28, she longed to be 24." That was the whole story. If you look at the Hindu tradition, in one of the great scriptures, there's an exchange between a sage and his disciple. The disciple asks, "Teacher, of all the wonders in this world, what is the most wondrous of them all?" The teacher thought about that and said, "Of all the wonders in this world, the most wondrous of all is that human beings can live in a world surrounded by people who are dying day in and day out, and persist in believing it's not going to happen to them."

That's how powerful denial is as a psychological defense mechanism. It's built into all of us by evolutionary biology, and that's part of what leads us to fear and dread the aging process, because we know it's approaching physical death.

There's a practice done as part of the daily liturgy in various Buddhist monastic communities called the Five Recollections³ (or Remembrances). It's one example of a wise way that we can use reflection, like water on stone, to erode the denial of the aging and dying process. Just take a moment, take a nice deep breath, drop out of your thinking mind into your heart and body, and hear these statements. Notice without judgment what goes on inside:

I am of a nature to grow old. I cannot avoid aging. I am subject to illness and infirmity. I cannot avoid illness and infirmity. I am of a nature to die. I cannot avoid death. I will be parted from all that is dear and beloved to me. I am the owner of my actions and heir to my actions. Actions are the womb from which I have sprung. My actions are my relations. My actions are my protection. The fruits of all my actions, both wholesome and unwholesome, skillful and unskillful, I will inherit.

This is the kind of teaching that leads some people, upon their first encounter with Buddhism, to see it as grim and depressing. But Buddhism isn't particularly optimistic or pessimistic; Buddhism is realistic. It's about seeing reality as it actually is. It's when we do that that we can begin to stop adding unnecessary emotional suffering to the changes inherent in the human lifespan.

Years ago, I invited a monastic named Bhante Rahula, who lived at a monastery with the wonderful Sri Lankan teacher Bhante Gunaratana⁴. Bhante Rahula gave a wonderful Dharma talk. About halfway through, he interrupted himself with great excitement and said, "I have to tell you people, I've come up with a mathematical formula for suffering: S = P × R. Suffering equals pain times resistance."

He was using the words "suffering" and "pain" with a particular nuance. Pain refers to the existential difficulty inherent in the human condition—what the Buddha talked about in the First Noble Truth. If we are born as a human being, we will experience aging, illness, loss, and death. That's unavoidable. Suffering, however, involves our emotional response and reactivity to those existential givens. Our bodies can have pain, there's no question about that, but how I respond either increases the suffering or minimizes it.

If I grew up in a religious environment where my belief about physical pain was that it was a punishment from a punishing God, there is a whole secondary layer of suffering on top of the physical discomfort. This is what the Buddha called the Second Arrow⁵. There are the inevitable difficulties of loss, change, growth, and diminishment. We do not have control over those. What Buddhist training teaches us is how to develop wise ways to respond to the aging process so that we less and less frequently add this unnecessary second arrow.

When I was the Director of Education and Training for the Spiritual Eldering Institute, the Executive Director asked me to write a definition of conscious aging for our newsletter. I spent two and a half weeks wrestling with it. This is what I came up with:

"Conscious aging is a growth-oriented way of living that emphasizes the cultivation and celebration of wisdom, love, and insight into the nature of ultimate reality."

This way of thinking runs directly counter to all the pernicious messaging we get from this culture about what bad news aging is.

Attachment to View and Models of Aging

That leads me to the second Buddhist teaching: "attachment to view." Every one of us has some kind of viewpoint of aging. When I was training in Nepal, my primary Tibetan teacher referred to the Dharma as three aspects woven together like a braid: view, meditation, and action. View is the conceptual model; meditation involves the formal practices; action is how we integrate them into living ethically. View matters a lot, and Western cognitive psychology agrees.

Here's an example of a view from George Carlin on the process of aging:

"Do you realize that the only time in our lives when we're excited about getting older is when we're kids? If you're less than ten years old, you are so excited about aging that you think in fractions. 'I'm four and a half!' You get into your teens, 'I'm going to be 16.' And then the greatest day of your life comes: you become 21. But then you turn 30. Makes you sound like bad milk. You're pushing 40. You reach 50. You make it to 60. You hit 70. After that, it's a day-by-day thing. You hit Wednesday. You get into your 80s, and every day is a complete cycle. You hit lunch, you turn 4:30, and you reach bedtime."

There's humor in what Carlin is talking about, but underneath the surface, there's pain, because he's mirroring back our cultural attitudes. Our beliefs about aging partly determine the way we experience it. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled "Longevity Increased by Positive Self-Perceptions of Aging" found that older individuals with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived 7.5 years longer than those with less positive views. They isolated the belief a person had about aging, and this advantage remained even after socioeconomic status, loneliness, and functional health were included. If someone discovered a pharmaceutical drug that helped us live 7.5 years longer with no side effects, it would be on the front page of the New York Times. Our views begin at early ages with the messages we get.

My good friend and colleague, Drew Leder, was given a grant to study the dominant models of aging in American culture. He identified three primary models:

1. The Sociomedical Model: Embraced in geriatric medicine. It compassionately attempts to ease suffering, but its shadow element is treating the older person two-dimensionally, almost like their symptoms, lacking appreciation for the richness of their life.
2. The Productive Model: The "stay busy, stay productive, use it or lose it" model. It's helpful up to a point, but as we pass into late life, our inner agenda shifts toward what Rabbi Zalman called "life completion"—life review, life repair, addressing unfinished business, and reflecting on legacy. The productive model often becomes the "die-in-the-saddle" model. We are not our roles. Connie Zweig⁶ subtitled her book on aging From Role to Soul.
3. The Consumer Model: The "I've paid my dues, now it's my turn to play golf or go on a cruise" model. It's wonderful, but most of us want something deeper and more meaningful.

Rabbi Zalman proposed a fourth model: the Spiritually Oriented Model. This recognizes that the later stages of our lives represent an opportunity to actualize our best human qualities, what in Buddhism we call the Pāramīs⁷ (or Pāramitās in Sanskrit)—compassion, wisdom, joy, patience.

When people live this way, they relate to aging differently. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, at the age of 90, described it this way:

"How much easier it is then, how much more receptive we are to death when advancing years guide us softly to our end. Aging thus is in no way a punishment from on high, but brings us its own blessings and a warmth of colors all its own... Growing old serenely is not a downhill path, but an ascent."

Polly Francis, a fashion illustrator and writer, wrote in her 90s:

"A new set of faculties seems to be coming into operation. I seem to be awakening to a larger world of wonderment, to catch little glimpses of the immensity and diversity of creation. More than at any time in my life, I seem to be aware of the beauties of our spinning planet and the sky above. And now I have the time to enjoy them."

Ram Dass, after a devastating stroke, wrote at the end of his book Still Here:

"These days I'm the advanced scout for the experiences of aging, and I've come back from the scouting party to bring good news. The good news is that the spirit is more powerful than the vicissitudes of aging. My stroke was a good test for my faith... I can say to you now, with an assurance I couldn't have felt before, that faith and love are stronger than any changes, stronger than aging, and I am very sure stronger than death."

We can choose to see our aging process as a natural, inherent aspect of our humanity rather than bad news. If we buy into negative perspectives, we're at risk of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. But by looking at things clearly, our hearts of compassion naturally open because we recognize we are in the same existential boat. We can see the changes inherent in aging as a curriculum for spiritual growth. We can develop wise ways to respond that turn us into wounded healers, enabling us to cultivate a heart as wide as the world.

Questions and Answers

Question: Having just had a lunch date with someone who is turning eighty, who shared that three people in her life have chosen "death with dignity" when they knew they were entering the Alzheimer's phase so as not to burden others—my question is, how does one wake up or continue awakening when the mind diminishes and retracts from awareness, as in dementia and Alzheimer's? Where does the mind go, and can awakening still happen when there is a loss of mind? Also, how do you view the growing death with dignity movement?

David: It's a wonderful question. I won't pretend to have an easy answer. What I would suggest is that every moment of our lives is part of a preparation process. When the Buddha taught about karma⁸, his emphasis was on intentionality. If, prior to becoming seriously symptomatic with dementia, we have lived a life in alignment with the precepts, and we've been generally kind and tried to live a life of non-harming, the way other people relate to us will generally be caring and supportive. We will have laid some groundwork to receive the care that we need.

Exactly what goes on in the mind stream when dementia sets in and becomes quite advanced—I've observed that on many occasions in the work that I've done, and I don't honestly know what relationship that has to the process of awakening. It's an open question for me. There's a whole range of questions as we approach late life and the dying process that fall into a realm I call mystery. And yet, at the same time, there's a place in me that simply trusts the life process all the way to the end. My hope would be that that trust will be accessible even if my cognitive functioning is not.

Regarding the death with dignity movement, the intention behind that legislation is compassion and alleviating unnecessary suffering. There are medical guidelines that have to be followed, and it's most often applied when someone has a predictable illness involving intractable pain, where a few more weeks or months will not benefit the individual. It allows a person to say goodbye and bring their life to completion in a way that can be very beautiful. I understand it's an ethically charged issue for many people, but for me personally, it's a step in the right direction so that we're not misusing medical technologies to unnecessarily extend someone's suffering when they clearly wish otherwise.

Closing Dedication

I'd like to bring us to a close with a traditional Buddhist blessing called the Pattanumodana⁹.

Just as water flowing in the streams and rivers fills the ocean, Thus, may all your moments of goodness touch and benefit all beings, Those here now and those gone before. May all of your wishes be soon fulfilled as completely as the moon on a full moon night, As successfully as from the wish-fulfilling gem. May all dangers be averted. May all disease leave you. May no obstacles come across your way. And may you enjoy happiness and long life. May those who are always respectful, honoring the way of the elders, prosper in the four blessings of old age, beauty, happiness, and strength.

May it be so. Thank you.