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 As
more and more middle-aged and older people become interested in making an
inner journey of spiritual discovery and engaging in spiritually rooted
service, interest in "conscious aging" has grown. In the early 1990s, a
new movement articulated a vision for conscious aging. In our mass
society, though, popular movements have to take the market into account if
they want to spread. Those of us involved in this new movement have had to
ask whether it is possible to retain the power
of the original vision of conscious aging and still meet the demands of
the marketplace
In
1992, the Omega Institute for Holistic
Studies hosted a two-day conference
in Manhattan titled "Conscious Aging." It was the first major
effort to bring together a wide range of people to explore conscious
aging: growing old with awareness or being spiritually awake as we age,
not simply being aware of our advancing years. The conference attracted
over 1,500 participants from all parts of the United States to hear some
of the leading figures from the consciousness movement and from the field
of aging lay out their visions.
Ram
Dass and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi from the consciousness movement
and Maggie
Kuhn
from the field of aging were among the keynote speakers. Each of these
keynoters--all elders--were able to articulate a broad vision in which
aging brings opportunities for spiritual deepening and for new kinds of
engagement with younger generations.
The
Inner Journey
During that first conference, Ram Dass stressed the importance of an
intentional inner journey as an effective foundation for dealing with the
challenges of aging as well as for continuing opportunities for social
engagement, even if mainly with caregivers. This perspective, leavened by
his having survived a major stroke in 1998, infuses his book, Still Here:
Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying. Schachter-Shalomi articulated his
vision of conscious aging as a process that could lay the foundation for a
new role for the elder in our society. In his vision, spiritual elders are
people who prepare, through specific work and years of life experience, to
mentor and nurture upcoming generations and to bring healing to
organizations, communities, countries and the planet. This vision led
Schachter-Shalomi to found the Spiritual
Eldering Institute,
now based in Boulder, Colo., which facilitates the preparation of
spiritual elders, and to write From Age-ing to Sage-ing, A Profound New
Vision of Growing Older. I attended the 1992 conference, where I was
privileged to meet both of these sagacious people, among others.
By
1994, I was serving on the Spiritual Eldering Institute's advisory
committee and on an Omega task force to plan further development of
conscious aging programming, and was presenting with Ram Dass and others
at a conscious aging conference in Clearwater, Fla. In early 1994, Omega
offered another conscious aging conference in Stamford, Conn. Again, Ram
Dass and Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi were featured as speakers and
"conference weavers." However, in an attempt to attract higher
numbers of participants, Omega, which is headquartered in Rhinebeck, N.Y.,
invited speakers with high name recognition but spotty experience with
either the consciousness movement or issues of aging.
For
example, one featured speaker had done important research on the
conditions under which people die and had written a best-selling book
about it, but he had no background that would allow him to tie his
research the issue of dying with spiritual awareness. Thus, the emphasis
on using well-known authors to attract larger numbers of people led to
choices that I felt began to erode the quality of the enterprise by
diluting the message of conscious aging.
A
third conscious aging conference was held in the fall of 1994 in Atlanta.
There, the featured speakers list was dominated by figures who had written
well-known books or held high office, but unfortunately they tended not to
know much about conscious aging. This fact was apparently obvious to
prospective participants, and the turnout was much smaller than expected.
Omega did a fourth conscious aging event in 1995, a smaller conference for
about 200 participants that was presented exclusively by Ram Dass and
Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi. This very successful conference was filmed by a
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. crew and is available on video.
This conference also
marked the end of Omega's large conscious aging conferences. Omega staff
indicated that they felt unable to meet the challenge of remaining true to
their vision while attracting substantial audiences.
Can
programs that see later life in terms of inner spiritual growth and an
enlightened contribution to the community survive in our materialistic
culture? Maybe yes and maybe no. On the one hand, those of us who gave
birth to the conscious aging movement are still involved and moving
forward. Figures such as Ram Dass, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Connie
Goldman, Drew Leder, Harry R. Moody and Wendy Lustbader are busy lecturing
and writing to bring their perspective to a wider audience. But if we seek
a wider audience, we experience commercial pressures from promoters and
publishers to make our efforts fit within their models of what
spirituality or self-help programs and books ought to look like. We have
to fit into their categories. Even Ram Dass, who has a large following,
reported privately that his publisher pushed for him to tone down the
spiritual aspects of Still Here and simplify his presentation.
Best-selling
titles such as Deepak Chopra's books Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and Grow
Younger, Live Longer: 10 Steps to Reverse Aging, coauthored with David
Simon may offer valuable tips and ideas to their readers, but their
inherent promise of rejuvenation also implies a denial of aging. Many of
the top-selling 50 books on amazon.com's category of spirituality and
aging claim to offer methods of "reversing aging" or allowing us
to live "agelessly." They bring to mind the old joke,
"Aging is about mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't
matter." Ultimately, though, the enterprise of conscious aging is
about developing and maintaining integrity. This journey involves
enlightening the mind, not tricking it into thinking there are shortcuts
to becoming enlightened. It involves developing spiritual resources to
adapt to aging, not to deny it.
The
vision laid out by the early framers of the "aging with
consciousness" movement involves developing and nurturing a
contemplative life and engaging in service rooted in the higher levels of
consciousness that a contemplative life makes available. Aging with
consciousness is neither quick nor easy. It requires that we come back
over and over again to our intention to be awake as we age. It requires
that we practice compassionate listening and look at the world from a
long-term vantage point that transcends our purely personal desires and
fears. With years of such practice, we may begin to see what will actually
help. This message may not be easy to sell in a culture fixated on quick
solutions. 
 Robert
C. Atchley chairs the Department of Gerontology at Naropa University,
Boulder, Colo. Among his books is Social Forces in Aging, ninth edition
(Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2000).
Published
by permission of the Author.
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