Kathleen Dowling Singh Quotes

Love one another." If we took those simple words to heart, we'd already be the Buddhas Jesus wanted us to be.

Our small little ego will not save us from the predictable sufferings of aging and death. It has no strategies, no power. It offers no refuge.

Like the medieval cartographers of Europe, who felt one would fall into endless space at the edges of the oceans of their maps, we fear the presumed nothingness of no-self. Fortunately, there have been many spiritual circumnavigators who have returned to tell the tale of the beauty beyond self.

The small man            builds cages for everyone he knows,            while the sage,            . . . . . . .            keeps dropping keys all night long            for the beautiful rowdy prisoners.            —HAFIZ

Ego is like a street urchin, born of fear and wanting and left to its own devices....

Because whenever you start the spiritual journey, the whole of humanity, and perhaps creation, goes along and shares the journey with you.

To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are. There

To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are.

dying

The laying down of the self, the letting go of attachment to self, is our biggest challenge.

Zero is the still point where form and formless meet in perfect balance. This is the awakened state. To live at the zero point is to live liberated.

heart. Ego is not present in this deepest of intimacies; it cannot enter the sanctum sanctorum.

you did not think possible and see what shimmers within the storm. —JAN RICHARDSON

ones, whether that loss be through their death or their dementia. Without strong mindfulness, we can almost drown in the chaotic turbulence of reactivity.

Surrender Laying down the self, like the hero who is too tired, too weakened, too bored, or too disenchanted with it to keep carrying it around, we cede the victory. Seeing through the self, the hero recognizes it as illusory, mere imputation, and lays it down.

With a wispier sense of self and growing courage and longing, we remain surrendered. This movement allows us to ripen every positive potentiality, our buddhaseed, our Christ consciousness, in transcendence. Here, as Martin Laird, a contemporary Christian contemplative, puts it, is “not the loss of identity but its flowering.

In the same way, if we choose to use these older years to awaken, a map of the territory is essential to expand what we hold as possible, to point out the way. So far, most of us have only navigated form. With our attention virtually trapped in form, we’ve missed an entire half of the universe—the formless, always already here.

TO CHOOSE a spiritual path is to adopt a view of the process of awakening. That view allows the path to be spoken of in a way that our conceptual mind, the mind in which we all begin to walk a spiritual path, can grasp.

All wisdom traditions recognize the necessity of freeing our attention from self-reference. A predominant aspect of almost all

We are so caught and small and deluded in the minds of self-cherishing and self-grasping. We can define self-cherishing as the secretly harbored belief all egos have that my happiness is more important than anyone else’s.

Lightening our attachment to self is the only thing that is going to get us through the decline, illness, and loss that we will, almost inevitably, face from now until we die with some equanimity and peaceful sanity, rather than with weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

We need, also, to find peace in the new landscape of superfluity, as we no longer are at the peak of our engagement in the world.

Adjusting our views of ourselves can take some time. Adjusting our views of our place in the world and of our further direction can also take some time. The contemplation of these necessary adjustments is meaningful. Our views determine our experience.

Who am I, bare?

We’re looking at finitude. Aging forces us to look at our shelf life.

If we haven’t yet come to the recognition that we’re old, perhaps we’ve been lulled by an extended midlife—a new experience in human history. Nevertheless, it’s a bit disingenuous of us to pretend that we’re not aging, as if all of this could just go on forever, as the unexamined assumptions of our ordinary minds would lull us into believing.

Our generation’s short time is falling away. We’re moving into new terrain.

It is time pounding at you, time. Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop though air, and feeling it hit hard.

From the vantage point of six or more decades, we can clearly see that we have much more “was” to look back on than “will be” to look forward to.

This foreshortened future, as it appears to our minds, leaves far less room and time to maneuver.

There’s far less time to choreograph a new outcome.

It is a piercing rite of passage for all of us to compare our Photoshopped hopes and dreams with the mug shot of our reality.

wish to rest and live and die in a peaceful mind, free from the limitations we’ve endured for so long.

Coming to a place of acceptance, of ease and peace, with the way it is and the way we are in our oldest decades is demanding work, to be sure. It is, though, necessary, if we

There are important questions to ask ourselves if we wish not to waste these last years of ours. Where have my past habits of body and mind, enacted throughout the decades of my life, led me in terms of peace and happiness? What really matters at this point in my life?

Entering our later decades calls us to look more deeply and more truthfully than we perhaps ever have at what we are doing with these lives of ours.

If we have any desire to ripen into spiritual maturity—into the abiding experience of the sacred, of all that lies beyond this small self—now is the time.

Opening deeply to the truth of our own aging is wise. Opening deeply to the truth of our own impermanence is wise. Although such opening may not come easily at first—we all know how the ego tends to resist vulnerability—it is important to do so if we wish to mindfully use the time remaining to us.

We know aging in the losses we experience. There’s a growing awareness of death all around us.

A good measure of stressful effort can go into avoiding any call

It’s simple—how could we have missed it for so long? Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings, But please, let’s not be so shocked by them. Let’s not act so betrayed, As though life had broken her secret promise to us. Impermanence is life’s only promise to us, And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability. To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild, And her compassion exquisitely precise: Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth, She strips away the unreal to show us the real. This is the true ride—let’s give ourselves to it! Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage: There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high. We are not children anymore. The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost. . . . —JENNIFER WELWOOD

No matter how much we’ve shoved it to the back burner for other matters that seemed more pressing at the time, our hunger for awareness greater than this small self, bound by birth and death, can still be ours to fulfill and to experience and to abide in. At this point in our lives, we

need to decide if we really want to live and die smaller and more impoverished than we need to be. Are we willing to leave this unimaginably precious gift of a human life unopened?

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old. I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health. I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. —THICH NHAT HANH

For the most part, we live contracted, defended. We live small and unfree. To be fair, the culture in which we were raised offered virtually no options.

deeply

We’ve lived many decades in a bit of a fog, in the denial of impermanence. The implications of our own aging seem threatening to our ordinary view of self, to our unexamined expectations, our unconscious points of perspective. Enmeshed in denial, we’ve lived in all of the stress—physical, mental, emotional—that is denial’s inevitable companion, however deeply we may have tried and may continue to try to numb ourselves.

Aging, illness, and death are treasures for those who understand them. They’re Noble Truths, Noble Treasures. If they were people, I’d bow down to their feet every day. —AJAAN LEE

There was, at the time of our conception, a coming together of absolutely immeasurable causes and conditions.

We all have reservoirs of fear, some large and some small and subtle, around entering this new terrain of unknown and mystery: our last years.

The “moment that changed everything” usually arrives unannounced.

The only person who can answer the questions posed by the often painful challenges of aging is the person we will be in the moment we confront those circumstances. The shaping of that person into someone with greater wisdom and equanimity can begin in this moment.

Our suffering will be in direct proportion to our resistance, to our unwillingness to perceive and accept the reality of impermanence.

We fear these attacks on who we think we are and on what we think we need and on how we want to be perceived. We fear the loss of our illusions of control.

To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost.

As Linda Hogan, a Native American writer, observes, “You are the result of the love of thousands.” For those of us in these last chapters of our life, perhaps only one or two of the beings whose conception was a cause of our own are left. All the rest have vanished. This life-in-form is mortal.

We have always viewed the path of human development as one that arises with dependency. We have forgotten or dismissed or ignored the recognition that it also often ends in dependency, a dependency arising from diminishment.

Diapers to diapers. That’s the nature of the curve. And then, on that continuum of a human life, comes death, the end of life-in-form. Dust to dust. We’ve always known that this is the course of a human life. We just have not put our sense of “me” into the equation. Many of us act betrayed and affronted and certainly humbled when we are forced to recognize that impermanence also applies to us.

We have become very used to dismissing the importance of the last years of our lives, because they do not measure up to the criteria of midlife. The old are measured by midlife values.

Deepened awareness and recognition of our impermanence, quite simply, can provide the urgency

urgency to want to let go of all of the stress and confusion, the suffering large and small, of living on the surface.

We can choose to bear witness to the grace in aging. Doing so, we can reveal the profound and noble value of the wise use of this time. The attainments of minds of peace, compassion, and sanity, the fruits of committing our last years to awakening, have very little to do with the cultural standards of success at midlife.

TO AWAKEN, we want to look at where we resist looking. In addition to fear of the loss of independence and relevance, fear of appearance deemed conventionally unattractive,

Most of us do not yet know our own essential nature. Maybe we can feel the pain of limitation and the unease of contraction and the longing for liberation beyond self, but we cling to what’s familiar. We are like a chick, afraid to break through the ever-so-thin shell of the already outgrown and painfully confining egg.

is wise to come to know our own depths, to plumb and explore them, to allow our hearts to break open, to allow our minds to investigate that which they would rather deny, to allow ourselves to contemplate impermanence, to take death in—our own and the deaths of all of those we love.

To contemplate dying each day brings forth a view with more wisdom. It reorients us and keeps us moving in the right direction, toward deeper wisdom and into greater love. To contemplate dying each day calls forth an instant reordering of priorities.

If we were to take to heart the fact of our fleeting and precarious existence, would we really continue all of our worldly striving and consuming? Would we really be upset about the same things today that upset us yesterday? How many of our grudges and disappointments would still seem important? Would we continue to have unhealed relationships? Would we still leave the words of gratitude and of forgiveness and of love unspoken? How would we greet each wondrous being that engages in connection with us? How would we live each day differently?

aging. It’s primarily our fear of the end of “me” that keeps us attempting to overlook the reality of our own advancing years and our declining physical body.

WE CAN INTEND to use these last years with skill and meaning, seizing the essence of this precious human life. Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, we can remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We can remain in our intention to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.

Contemplation of our death provides the urgency that keeps us aware that this moment right now, this opportunity to enter the timeless present, is passing. We begin to imprint the truth of impermanence at a deep level with a breath-by-breath acknowledgment. Impermanence does not occur only in reference to decades or years or weeks or days. Impermanence is the nature of every arising moment. Each precious moment matters. It has never arisen before. It will never return again.