About Aging

"One wants to live without aging, and in reality, one aging without living."
 (Alexander Mitscherlich, psychoanalyst)


When I ask someone about his age, I always get a number in response. But how does he know what age I meant? Or does everyone assume we only have one age? I suppose so.  But, we have more than one age. We have three ages. 


The first is the chronological age. It describes the section of time we have already spent on time. It is the common temporal age, which is calculated according to the date of birth. We celebrate our birthdays and when we are young, we wish their number to be larger (finally grown-up) and when it is large, we wish it to be smaller again (to be young again). It is always past, is fixed and cannot be changed. Although completely meaningless, it is the age to which we pay the most attention. But no matter how hard we try, we cannot influence it, we cannot change it.


The second age is the biological age. It corresponds to the present and describes the state of the body. It influences and limits our life span. It can be measured and often there are significant deviations from chronological age. One possible method of measurement is to determine the length of the telomeres. Telomeres are the ends of our genetic threads, the chromosomes. The telomeres are structural elements of the DNA, which are responsible for its stability. With each cell division, they shorten until they fall below a critical length and the cell stops further cell division or triggers active cell death. In contrast to chronological age, biological age can certainly be influenced, i.e. it can be slowed down, in some cases even turned back slightly. The methods used to do this are often found under the term anti-aging. Of course, we can also accelerate it. In fact, this is what we do best. Decisive for our biological age is our lifestyle, especially nutrition, exercise and relaxation. Our modern lifestyle with fast food, predominantly sedentary work and constant stress accelerates the biological age enormously. Medical advances can extend chronological age, but not a healthy, full life. 


The third age is the spiritual age. It corresponds to the future. It is the age of wisdom and knowledge. Here most people achieve what they want for their chronological age. They stay young and hardly age at all. In contrast to chronological or biological age, a high age is desirable here. For here a high age does not mean decline and death, but development, experience, and knowledge. Just like biological age, we can also influence our spiritual age through our lifestyle. Decisive for this are our thinking, compassion, mindfulness, heartfulness or meditation.


The chronological age is simply the passage of time. The biological age is our physical/material development and the spiritual age is our mental/spiritual development.


Although usually negative, aging is always positive. If we did not age, we would not develop, and we would not progress. Many don't want to age, but they also don't want to spend their whole life as a newborn baby.


Strangely, we pay the most attention to the age we have no influence whatsoever, namely the chronological age. As you get older, you discover your biological age and start to care more about your body. But we hardly care about our spiritual age. That is a pity. At best we can slow down our physical decay, but we cannot stop it. Instead, we should rather worry about our imperishable part and prevent our soul from atrophying as well. To do this, we must age spiritually. Spiritual aging is beyond all time.


It is not so important how old you get, it is much more important how you get old.

Reality and Truth

 

"There are no facts, only interpretations."
 (Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher) 

What is real, and what is an illusion? And if it is real, is it true?

For the natural sciences, the reality is that which is accessible to scientific observation and research. However, it can only investigate where forces can be measured. Since these forces always arise in masses, it is limited to matter. Only the atoms are allowed to claim the status of reality, and everything that exists must be derived from it. For us, the reality is simply the world in which we live, and since we all live in the same world, we all experience the same reality. Don't we?

How is reality created? Does a god create it, or does it arise from the laws of nature? Reality is created through a process, and that process is us. We, more precisely, our consciousness, creates our reality. Like any process, this process consists of an input, processing, and an output section. As in every process, information, energy, and matter are transformed, transported, or stored. In our environment, our world, there are only elementary particles and forces, only vibrations. They form the potential of possible input values for our process. The majority of these possible input values lie outside our perceptive faculty and therefore, cannot be grasped by our senses. This applies not only to colors, sounds and smells but also to thoughts and sensations. Every human being, indeed, every living being receives an individual frequency or information spectrum and can only process it. Anything beyond this, we can neither see nor hear, neither think nor feel. Through this process, we create our real conditions out of our potential possibilities. Our brain did not develop in order to see the world as it is, but to be able to cope with it as well as possible.

We do not recognize the environment directly, but only the effects caused by the things in our consciousness. Our consciousness filters and processes these input values. This processing is influenced by our education, culture, knowledge, previous experiences, fears, and wishes. The outputs or results of the process are the manageable everyday experiences that we call reality. In beings of the same kind, i.e., about two people, the results will be similar, because the sensory organs, the brain, and the working process are constructed in the same way, but not exactly the same. With different beings, e.g., humans and dogs, the results will differ more. But even with the equal creatures, the results will always differ more or less. They are never exactly the same, depending on the differences in the components and their communication with each other. Everyone lives in his own reality, and everyone considers his reality of being the truth. But the reality is not the truth. There is no objective reality. Every reality is only the subjective interpretation of the one truth. The question is not what is real and what is an illusion, because reality is the illusion.

“It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.”
(Oscar Wilde)

Our biggest problem is: We confuse our reality with the truth. But the reality is only our interpretation of the truth. Since we regard our interpretation as the only correct one, as fact, all other arguments are wrong or at least not completely correct. No matter whether religious or non-believing, smoker or non-smoker, meat-eater or vegan and, and, and. Everyone raises his interpretation to an ideology, to a dogma, which has to be defended. Followers of their own interpretation are good and are always right; all others are evil and are always wrong. Therefore, they must be excluded, converted, re-educated, fought against, or, in extreme cases, destroyed. We live in a dictatorship - a dictatorship of our mind, our consciousness. This dictatorship has controlled humanity since the beginning and has led to violence, torture, war, and bloodshed. Everything that happens around us is a consequence of this dictatorship of consciousness. For our consciousness creates our reality. It creates our reality because we can only live in reality. We cannot abolish reality, but we can recognize its true nature. We can let reality rule us or learn to rule it.

If we want to overcome this dictatorship, if we really want to become free, we must expand our consciousness and overcome the limits of our present reality. When we expand our consciousness, we extend our receivable information spectrum. We grow our processing possibilities and with it also the output, our reality. This also includes our matter, our body. We change our body on a cellular level via metabolism and the hormonal system; we change the nerve cells' physical and physiological structure. In this way, we directly influence the nature of our future perceptions. We change our reality until we finally recognize it for what it is: our interpretation of the truth. Just one of the infinite number of possibilities. None of them is true and none of them is not true.True and untrue, right and wrong, only exist in reality. The truth lies outside of any reality. If we overcome the boundaries of reality, we stop interpreting the truth and experience what we really are.