Harry Roberts was a part Native American who had spent his youth on a Yurok reservation in Northern California, training with his Yurok uncle in how to be a medicine man. When I lived at Green Gulch Zen Temple in the 1970s, Harry, by then in his 70s, served as a farm adviser, horticulturalist and down-to-earth spiritual adviser.
One day a group of us was walking with Harry to inspect a water reservoir. Harry brought up the rear. We were all chatting among ourselves when suddenly from behind he spoke up sharply, "Stop! Don't step on that."
We all froze. Usually Harry spoke quietly, in a barely audible voice. It was a surprise to hear him talk so forcefully.
He strode past us and pointed at the path beneath our feet. "That's yerba buena. That's a medicine plant. You never step on that."
That's when I learned that Harry always watched where he put his feet.
In my last post I wrote about elderhood, the stage of life when we assume a role in society of mentorship, guidance and wisdom. I pointed out that in traditional societies elderhood is well-defined, with specific roles, tasks and honors that are granted men and women once they reach a certain age. The Yurok reservation where Harry grew up was such a traditional society. His admonition about not stepping on the medicine plant was a typical expression of an elderhood role. It was the kind of teaching he would have received from his uncle, who himself was a teacher and elder for Harry.
In modern societies that kind of mentorship is less likely to happen. Harry knew how to express his elderhood because his uncle showed him how, but these days we each need to define our own expression of elderhood. Nevertheless, I believe elderhood does come organically as an emerging stage of a fully developed human life. This is what I mean by the word "buddhahood" in the title of this post -- not the technical definition, but the innate spiritual flowering of any deeply mature person.
When I was a senior in college, I was fortunate to take a class from renowned psychologist Erik Erikson. The subject of the class was the human life cycle -- the "eight stages of man" that Erikson first presented in 1950 in his book "Childhood and Society." Erikson designed our college class to provide us graduating seniors with a useful perspective to help us make the transition to productive adulthood. The class was hugely popular. Three times a week hundreds of us crowded into a large lecture hall to hear the great man hold forth.
What I am calling elderhood, Erikson called "integrity," the eighth and final stage of life, which he described in "Childhood and Society" as "the time when we have come to the point of being able to understand our place in the world and the life we have lived in it." We have reached integrity, he taught, when we can look back at our life, with all its triumphs and sorrows, and accept it as it has come to be. That acceptance is what allows us to serve as elders to others, and to give back to others all that our own life experience has given us.
In his earlier published writings, Erikson did not describe the Integrity Stage in specifically spiritual terms, but as he grew older his thinking may have gravitated in that direction. After his death, his wife Joan Erikson published a book (with Erik as co-author) called "The Life Cycle Completed," in which she described a ninth stage of development called " gerotranscendence." Quoting sociologist Lars Tornstam, who coined the term, she wrote, "Gerotranscendence asserts that spiritual development gradually and steadily increases from middle age onward and results in a shift from a materialistic, role-oriented life philosophy to a transcendent, spiritual perspective in late old age."
This is, in a nutshell, the thesis of my upcoming book, "Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser." I believe that this "transcendent, spiritual perspective" is our natural potential and destiny. Not everyone who grows old becomes wise, for sure. Aging alone is not a sufficient cause for wisdom. Other things, such as a regular religious or contemplative practice, may be required. Though this spiritual perspective may not be everyone's cup of tea, it is the goal of Buddhism and all the other great wisdom traditions. It is also one answer to the question we first may ask in adolescence and often return to again as our life comes to completion: Why are we here? What is our purpose on this earth?
Adulthood, elderhood, buddhahood: From childhood onward, there are these many "hoods" or stages, each one building on the insights and accomplishments of the last. Do we still know how to negotiate them? Someone (I forget who) once commented that these days everyone seems to be about 18 years old. Popular culture and cyberspace notwithstanding, surely this statement is somewhat an exaggeration. But when I think of Harry Roberts and mentors of his ilk -- those who are still scattered everywhere, anonymously for the most part, guiding as best they can -- I wonder if in our haste to re-engineer our lives for material perfection we have lost something vital from the realm of the spirit that has from time immemorial always sustained us.
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Lama Surya Das: Life in Buddha Standard Time
Lewis Richmond: Elderhood: A Buddhist Approach to Aging Well
Society has fragmented, probably mostly because of increased communication. Now even uneducated people know a good deal about other countries and a variety of ways of life. For this reason, it is difficult to define elderhood because few people in any given society really share values to the degree that we used to.
Also, young people tend to be very wary of old people right now because many have refused to give up their prejudices against other ways of life: foreigners, gay people, etc. Losing that bias is pretty much obligatory to really participate in the emerging global culture.
I guess that's really the core of the problem. An expansive global culture is emerging right in front of us, and just about nobody is both old and wise enough to truly be an "elder" in the context of this brand new culture.
To me it's more like our brain spends a lot of time creating associations to live by, and then it gets older and starts noticing that half of them aren't working. If they really aren't working it compels our consciousness to pay attention and fix it. We call it getting older and wiser but it's not like we have a choice. If someone is old and crabby and rigid it's because it works for them.
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Kind of like two railroad tracks that appear to run parallel, but just a slight degree in difference changes the course of one completely.
I hope this made sense to *somebody* out there...
I agree that as we age we have an incredible chance to continue our spiritual journey to our own version of buddha-hood, at least in part because we no longer need the ego driven roles and responsibilities of our middle age. This is the essence of a functional midlife crisis ... to allow myself to be pulled into a closer alignment with my true self.
When this is done with elegance and grace, we can become a more spiritual, wise, loving, contributing, teaching, sharing and buddha-like person over time.
My two cents,
Dike
Dike Drummond MD
http://www.threehourmidlifecrisis.com
Elderhood happens much less often. It takes someone who is willing and able to teach as well as still learn.
Buddahood is even rarer. That takes a person who has taught and realizes that they are always going to be learning but are willing to share what they know. As well as a level of kindness, gentleness and caring that does not occur in every person.
I was blessed with one in the person of my mother.
At the top of the pyramid is where one arrives at the stage of Self Actualization. After the baser needs are met, mankind ask; now what? Great read on this, too long to post all of the stages and atributes, have a look. http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/tp/self-actualized-characteristic.htm
Philosophy and religion point to the man of self realization as the final frontier in our evolution.
Open, unafraid, loving, whole, forgiving, non-judging, clear headed, accomplished, magnetic, caring; he who arrives here, does more good in the silence of deep reverence, then a hundred men shouting in the market place.
"It is the young who, by their responses and actions, tell the old whether life as represented to them has some vital promise, and it is the young who carry in them the power to confirm those who confirm them, to renew and regenerate, to disavow what is rotten, to reform and rebel."
- Erik Erikson
Identity Youth and Crisis
I regard the Dalai Lama as successful rather than wise. A capacity to recite wisdom literature is no guarantee of being wise. He is a successful teacher because crowds of people are willing to listen to him. But gathering a crowd remains simply a mistaken measure of success.
Is it wisdom that prompts the saying, "Nothing succeeds like succes"? To me that simply means that so long as you can sell your product, you can claim that it is good. Yet at the same time, if you live long enough, you discover that success may or may not be justified. Charlatans are far more common than those who may be wise.
Knowledge of medicinal herbs is admirable, unless they are used when a visit to a physician is required. Is one of those more spiritual than the other? If so, I need to know which and why. What we need is a means of distinguishing wisdom and spirituality from cleverness and make-believe.
definition of turiya: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turiya
Research on the physiological correlates of turiya found during TM practice:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7045911
Breath suspension during the transcendental meditation technique.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10512549
Pure consciousness: distinct phenomenological and physiological correlates of "consciousness itself".
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9009807
Autonomic patterns during respiratory suspensions: possible markers of Transcendental Consciousness.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10487785
Autonomic and EEG patterns during eyes-closed rest and transcendental meditation (TM) practice: the basis for a neural model of TM practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19862565
A self-referential default brain state: patterns of coherence, power, and eLORETA sources during eyes-closed rest and Transcendental Meditation practice.
Research on the physiological correlates of turyatita in long-term TM meditators:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12406612
Patterns of EEG coherence, power, and contingent negative variation characterize the integration of transcendental and waking states.
http://www.tm.org/american-psychological-association
Abstract for the 2007 Conference of the American Psychological Association
Brain Integration Scale: Corroborating Language-based 
Instruments of Post-conventional Development
Research on the physiological correlates of turyatita in non-meditators:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2009.01007.x/full
Higher psycho-physiological refinement in world-class Norwegian athletes: brain measures of performance capacity
ki/Turiya
Maybe you can reach your own understandings of these things through experience, but I doubt you'll ever be able to 'define' them either. Some understandings escape definition, no? And why would anyone want everything to be defined? Definitions are often either limiting, or ridiculous in their totalizations (sort of like Lewis Richmond's annoying universalizations..), which becomes particularly clear when one struggles to define something as abstract as wisdom or spirituality.
People who cling to the promise of a logic or science that is able to understand and define everything will have trouble with this, because they are likely to desire 'objectivity' and understand the opposite of objectivity to be subjectivity, while overlooking the possibilty of situated knowledges.
"The grossest ignorance does not disgust like this impudent knowingness. The physicians say they are not materialists; but they are:--Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin!--But the definition of spiritual should be, that which is its own evidence. What notions do they attach to love! what to religion! One would not willingly pronounce these words in their hearing, and give them the occasion to profane them. "