No topic is more popular than aging, except for all other topics. Gwyneth proves she's vital with Cee-Lo Green. She's in your face when a "Glee" cheerleader accuses her of being too old to be hip. But, as Betty White proves, 80 is the new 74.... and as "Hanna" (actress Saoirse Ronan, who celebrates a birthday today) shows, 16 is the new 21. In other words, there's no rule.
We crave to continue pleasure, to put away pain, and to escape neutral feelings, which we find distressing and "boring." This is dukkha (suffering, unsatisfactoriness, woe). This is the very thing Siddhartha set out to find a solution to. We are born (in whatever plane of existence we can imagine).
"Lost the Comic" (ytorf.com)
It is possible due to karma. But the force of karma eventually becomes exhausted. And we fall away -- sadly, even from heavenly states and, fortunately, even from states of perdition. What is the cause? Ignorance, craving, aversion, and fear lead to suffering, when our mental-verbal-physical actions bear fruit. How can we ever get off the merry-go-round the ancient Indians called Samsara?
Siddhartha became the Buddha, the "Awakened One" precisely because he rediscovered the solution. Buddhism is the teaching, the practice, the instructions that lead to enlightenment and liberation from ALL suffering.
Old Age, Sickness, and Death
A pivotal moment in the life of the Buddha was the day he ventured outside the gates of his home and encountered three aspects of human life that changed him profoundly: old age, sickness, and death....There are many things in our life that move us to practice, issues that arise in our life and demand attention. We begin to see the infinitely various ways that our greed, anger (one manifestation of which is fear), and ignorance become sources of turbulence and suffering....
But old age, sickness, and death are something we can’t get around. When these become real for us, they can’t be ignored.... [S]ickness, old age, and death constitute the major impulse behind the religious search, our desire to understand and come to peace with all that we see, feel, and experience.
They are the great equalizers; they touch us all. There’s nothing we can do [ultimately, even though there is a great deal we can do to be healthy and vital no matter what the calendar says] -- no measure of accomplishment, prowess, cunning, bribery, deviousness, or cleverness that can ultimately help us with these problems....
How much of what we do, of how we go about our lives, is colored by the constant awareness that our lives are not forever?
...What we can do is concentrate on NOW. If the way we die is the way we live, then how are we living? What can we do about that? Not just for the moment of death, but for this moment too.
New painkiller discovered by science: mindful Zen meditation (medindia.com).
[Zen] Master Dogen said: Life and death itself is the life of Buddha [awakening]. If you despise and reject it, you lose the life of Buddha. Consequently, when you are attached to life and death you also lose the life of Buddha and are left with only the outer form. Only when you do not hate life and death, or desire nirvana, will you enter the mind of Buddha. Do not try to define it with your mind or describe it with words.
When you cast off body and mind and enter the realm of Buddha, Buddha will lead you. If you follow this way, you achieve detachment from life and death and without effort or using your mind, you become Buddha. If you understand this, there is no longer attachment. So if we despise and reject life and death, we lose the life of the Awakened One, we lose the life of our own true, unhindered nature.
Can we live and die without attachments on either side? When we cling to life or death, sickness or health, youth or old age, then all we’re left with is the outer form of the Awakened One, the shell. It’s hollow and so is our experience of today. Only when we completely release our grasp can we allow the mind of Buddha to be manifest.
So how do we not despise and reject that which we are afraid of? How can we transcend our fear? What are we afraid of? ...This sickness and health we attach to, that we alternately love and hate, where is it? How can we not despise one and attach to the other? We can’t will ourselves to do this....
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