Elixir & Epiphany - On 'Growing Old' & The Cloud Within

Indiana Jones: Do you believe Marcus.... do you believe the grail actually exists?

Marcus Brody: The search for the cup of Christ is the search for the divine in all of us. But if you want facts Indy I have none to give you. At my age I am prepared to take a few things on faith.

Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade

Heaven is lasting and the earth enduring.
The reason why they are lasting and enduring is that
they do not live for themselves...

Lao Tzu



There are so many people I know who are still exactly the same as they were 25 years ago, only a little heavier, a little balder, a little more wrinkled and neurotic. In other words, any changes that have occurred have been emphatically for the worse. There has been no transformation.... and thus no chance of transfiguration. Any changes that have occurred have been, as a result of our being duped by a system of conventions that outsources the spirit to some grand fantasia, cosmeticisation at the cost of the less expensive (and more expansive) cosmic-isation. In other words, we have forsaken the capacity to embrace the universal within, for the desire to cosmeticise the self from without. Identity, as the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart was apt to say, is not what you put on, it's what you take off.

'Growing old' is another of those delusional terms (like 'birthday')  that is bandied about like candy, until finally the brain eats so much of it that the self becomes clotted to its authentic and actual reality. It is then taken for granted as a self-evident truth. The reality, however, could not be any different. The term comes about from a single-tracked view of life that sees living as some kind of stand off against dying. This view is forced upon us by our 'outsourcing' economic system which requires the divestment of the inner in order to sell it back as an outer. In short, and to take a rather facile example, if we were aware of our intrinsic nature as universal beings (and as divine icons of reality) who are constituted through being and not having, then the cosmetics industry (which is just about everything) would not last very long, and the economy would soon implode in a thunderous roar. There is, then, a vested interest on behalf of the industry in keeping the individual cosmeticised and 'covered-up' in the great tacit conspiracy that we call capitalism. Consequently, life and death confront each other as separate entities as if it were the Gunfight at the O.K Corral. Death, however, is an immanant condition; it exists within us as we live. Breathing in can only come about through the act of breathing out. 

What we have done to death is one of the great crimes of humanity, for in exiling her we have, albeit inadvertently, betrayed the very essence of being. The result is an unhealthy attachment to life and a desire for longevity (on a purely quantative basis) without acknowledging the ramifications of such a duration. Without death however (without the living process of dying, which is what Plato, Paul the Apostle and Eckhart meant, as well as the eastern mystics, when they talked of daily meditation upon death) we are unable not only to live fully but to live infinitely and universally. In this sense, dying whilst alive ('fractioned sartori' as it was sometimes known by Buddhists) may be regarded as the resurrection of the soul, and the clearing away of the clutter in order to do so. It follows that the meditatio mortis of the true philosopher is in reality a means of spiritual resurrection during life - a beginning of that complete deliverance from the bodily tomb which the soul hopes to attain at death. 

But, in our neurotic rush for life and more living, we have allowed this 'resurrection' to be consigned to its furthest point away from life, to the moment of physical death itself. We have thus unwittingly introduced the concepts of 'growing old' and 'senility', whilst simultaneously searching in a manner fit for a maniac for the mysterious elixir that might banish them forever. But the elixir is here, hidden, so to speak, in plain sight. It is death itself, 'death' not as the complete cessation of bodily funtions and the physical end of living, but as the reappropriation of the senses, of our mind, of clarity and vision. Of transformation and metamorphosis.

Seen in this light, 'growing old' thus becomes symptomatic of one's lack of transformation, of natural inner change, and of emergence into the light, what Heidegger referred to as 'physis'. What is required, then, is, a series of epiphanies, where the quality of awareness (as a transformation of consciousness) allows one's being to be brought into the light (phanos, from the Greek meaning 'shining', itself from phainoos, to bring to light). These epiphanies furthermore allow the self to be dissolved in this light and to be transfigured, until such a point where the self cannot be said to exist. 'Growing old' simply becomes absurd.

The modalities of thinking that currently dominate our conventions are anti-thetical to this experience. The scientific system, at best, feels uncomfortable with uncertainty and the nebulous. Clouds must be classified. The strict codes of scientific conduct are rigid to the point of neurosis. The lack of inherent flexibility (and morphing) leads to a stoppage of the cyclical and the eco-intuitive-self that is necessarily in balance and harmony with nature at large. Man thus becomes 'broken'. He cannot for the life of him figure out how to fix himself, since, necessarily, he is using reason and logic to guide him to the sought-after solution. As an analogy, this is like trying to look for darkness with a torch. It will never happen. It cannot ever happen.

How, then, does one remedy the soporific mind that has been waylaid by the sleep of reason? In brief, one must have faith in the inner cloud (the divine in all of us), that nebulous, ineffable being within.... inscrutable, unfathomable, indefinable. The very same cloud which the painter Caspar David Friedrich had called an 'emblem of a limitless freedom'. [Curiously, Friedrich had opposed the classification of clouds by Luke Howard (and his own countryman Goethe) in the early 1800s, maintaining that the deep obscurity and imprecision of clouds were their greatest attributes. Forcing the 'free and airy clouds into a rigid order and classification' he said, would only undermine them].

Only then, free and airy, obscure but not in the dark, and when the mind is allowed to move naturally with the wind of the spirit, will one's being be brought into the light, will one dissolve into the immense and into that which cannot be measured, whilst coming to the slow realization that, whilst a-live in the infinite (and equally the eternal), the possibility of growing 'old' is just not there.

[Cumulonimbus over Hardgate, 1.10.2006]

I am the daughter of Earth and Water, 
And the nursling of the Sky; 
I pass through the pores, of the ocean and shores; 
I change, but I cannot die...

[P.B. Shelley, The Cloud]