These results were as valid among younger subjects as among older subjects. Further research
on the overall health status of 2, 000 meditators in a group insurance plan
confirmed that they enjoyed remarkable good health in all age groups. Those who practiced
m t visited the doctor and entered hospitals once for every two of those who
were members of the control group. Marked reductions were noted in 13 major health
categories. Heart disease, for example, was less common than in the control
group, by more than 80 percent, cases of cancer by more than fifty
percent. Significantly, the greatest improvements were presented in the meditators who were over
sixty- five years of age. A decade later I had to play my
part in demonstrating that these benefits were precisely related to the type of hormones that
I have analyzed as the main markers of aging in my medical condition since nineteen
eighty, I recommended practicing it to MT. Besides practicing it myself. At
the end of that decade, a colleague of mine, Dr jacosm invited me
to collaborate in his investigation of a very intriguing spherroid called hydropiandrosterone DHA. DHA
is an abundant substance, but we hardly know it vaguely, segregated by the
adrenal cortex, circulates in the blood thousands of times larger than both sex hormones,
estrogen and testosterone. However, the specific function of DHA in the body
is elusive. Glaser decided to investigate a DHA property. The one about being
the only hormone that declines with age. In a straight line. DHA levels
peak at around twenty- five years. They fall in increasing proportion after menopause
and are reduced to five percent in the last year of life. She was
known to be a precursor to stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol.
That means that when the body makes these hormones, part of the DHA reserve
that we were born with should be used. This would explain the fact that
DHA declines over time. However, this decline is not the cause of aging,
but a reflection of stress, as it continues to accumulate throughout life.
At the end of the 1980s there was great enthusiasm when Arther schworths biochemist from
the University of Champole, administered dh to certain mice and observed a notable reversal
of aging. The old mice regained youthful vigor, the fur returned to light
again and soft disappeared incipient cancers were induced by artificial means or by natural causes.
Obese animals regained normal weight, increased immune response, and those affected by
diabetes improved dramatically. The race began to patent a version of the Dha molecule,
although there was a worrying risk of serious side effects as with all hormones,
and it was not useful to administer the laryn by mouth, as it
was broken down in the digestive system. But glacer agreed with me that DHA
was a marker of the body' s exposure to stress. We know that
with the acceleration of stress glucocorticoids increase, while decreasing the DHA reserve. On
the other hand, high levels of this hormone are associated with a lower incidence
of coronary artery disorders, breast cancer and hosteoporosis. This makes sense because all
these aging ailments can be associated with an excessive response to stress. High levels
of DHA are also associated with increased survival and decreased deaths from any type of
disease in older men. As further evidence, it was also discovered that cortisol
levels increase markedly among those awaiting surgery and are maintained during the day following surgery
with a slight elevation of DHA. Two weeks later, cortisol follows, but
dh has decreased, supporting the theory that the reserve of this hormone has been
reduced by nervous tension. The logical conclusion of this evidence is that if someone
can keep their DHA levels high, their body must be resisting stress. With
less stress reactions, aging should be delayed. There was an explanation of why
those who practiced MT had a lower biological aging. Apparently, Glaser took three
hundred and twenty- eight experienced meditators and compared his DHA levels to those of
one, four, six two subjects who did not meditate. For greater accuracy,
it sought the level of hydropandrosterone sulfate, which has a close relationship.
He classified his subjects by sex and age. In all groups of women,
DHA levels were higher among those who meditated. The same was true of eight
of the eleven groups of men As the highest level of DHA occurs in younger
cláser people, this was interpreted as evidence that biological age decreased with the practice
of MT. The interesting thing is that the most marked differences were presented in
older objects. Meditators older than forty- five years had twenty- three percent
more DHA, women forty- seven percent more. This impressive result did not
depend on factors such as diet, exercise, alcohol consumption, or weight.
In general. Pleasure estimated that DHA levels were among those who meditated equivalent to
those of people between the ages of five and ten, connecting body and spirit
mind. If DHA is as significant as it now seems, this linkage between
aging and meditation is very important, but the implications are even deeper. Meditation
is a spiritual practice. That is its purpose, in India and throughout the
East, millions of occide such mistakenly assume that this makes meditation, something not
physical, something that is done inside the head. Nothing is really just in
the head or alone in the body. When I knew his most wonderful holiness,
it was Yoggi, who introduced the MT into the West, who made
a profound impression on me with a predominant assertion. Spirituality should not be separated
from the body. Sickness and old age represent the inability of the body to
achieve its natural goal, which is to join the mind in perfection and contentment.
At all stages of spiritual growth, your greatest ally is your body.
This statement surprises you. Almost all of us assume that body and spirit occupy
the opposite ends of the spectrum. When we experience sensations entering the body,
such as hunger and thirst pain and pleasure, we do not consider them spiritual
experiences. We often believe that the sensuality that encompasses all variants of physical delight
is rude compared to the heights that the soul can reach. But spirituality must
also be sensual, for it is the spiritual person who lives in the fullness
of the present moment, and that means living fully in the body. Marsi
made me see that using meditation as a means to defeat aging was a legitimate
spiritual goal. Unfortunately, our culture has made the mistake of deciding that the
human body is a machine, an inert pile of matter that works without its
own intelligence. This erroneous concept led to a second mistake, that the most
spiritual persons are those who renounce the body, deny their passions or, at
the very least, try to control their desires. This kind of prejudice against
the body is contrary to the way nature created us. Nature balanced body and
spirit as co creators of our personal reality, cannot be done from falling in
love to uttering a prayer, to metabolizing a molecule of sucrose without affecting all
that is. The body is the shape plant that allows all experience to arise
and see the light of day. It is a three- dimensional projection of
millions of individual processes that occur at any time, including a process as profound
as getting to know the reality of God In our society. People suffer from
the feeling that the spirit is basically separated from it. The body processes,
food, air and water to perfection. No need for the spirit. The
mind thinks of a million things without touching it. It is easy for us
to rule out spiritual life in anticipation of the day when some still impossible leap
will take us out of everyday reality to lead us into a more exalted realm.
All aspects of reality are a piece of mystery, a facet of the
totality of what exists. Atoms, molecules, rocks, stars and the human
body. They are material expressions of what is pleasure and pain. They are
psychological expressions of what compassion and love exist. They are spiritual expressions of what
exists when when the dimensions of the material, the psychological and the spiritual are
balanced, life becomes a whole and this union provokes feelings of comfort and security.
Only if you feel secure of your place in the universe can you begin
to face the fact that you are surrounded by the creation and destruction that are
constantly unfolding. Entropy cannot be challenged as a physical force, but it is
possible to rise to a plane of understanding that entropy cannot touch in the deepest
plane. Intelligence is immune to decay. Your cells come and go, but
the knowledge of your body, which knows how to make cells, survives and
passes from generation to generation. Evolutionary intelligence, corporatized by DNA, has many
planes. As human beings, our task is to experience them all and make
each one a part of ourselves. In the middle of change. There are
five perceptions that entropy cannot affect. They are expressed in all spiritual traditions and
form the core of personal evolution. It was back. One. I'
m spirit two. This moment is what it should be. Three, uncertainty
is part of the total order of things. Four, the change is imbued
with no change. Five entropy offers no threat because it is under the control
of infinite organizing power. These perceptions are crucial because they allow the individual to
rise above the world of duality that is inevitably caught in the battle of reaction
and destruction. There is a prospect that the New Testament calls seeing with one
eye Unity state in which all the facts, however painful or worrying they may
be at the time, serve an end that is intelligent, loving and orderly.
This unified perspective cannot be imposed on anyone until his consciousness is prepared to
accept it. If you find yourself trapped in your pain and convinced of the
drama of your life, that' s your perspective and you have a right
to it. But we all want to put an end to pain and suffering.
At a certain height of your personal evolution. These five perceptions will form
the trail that leads the mind out of suffering. Let me translate each point
according to the new paradigm. One is spirit, although my physical existence is
limited to space and time, my consciousness has no such limits. I am
aware of the whole field as a game of creation and destruction. Matter and
energy come and go burning and extinguishing their existence as fireflies, But all the
facts are gathered together and ordered by the deep intelligence that runs through all things.
I' m one aspect of that intelligence. I am the field that
unfolds in local events. My spirit is experiencing the material world through the lens
of perception. But even if I don' t see or hear anything,
I am still an eternal presence of consciousness. In practical terms it is this
perception that becomes real when no outward fact can move your sense of self,
who knows spirit, never loses sight of the experimenter. In the midst of
experience, this inner truth says I carry the awareness of immortality in the midst
of mortality two. This moment is what it should be. The present moment
is an event of space, time within the eternal continuum. Like that continuum,
it' s me, nothing that can happen is out of me.
Therefore, everything is acceptable as part of my greater identity, just as each
cell reflects the total process of the body. Each moment reflects all other past,
present and future moments. This perception does when one renounces the need to
dominate reality. That need is a natural response to past pains and frustrations,
as it is the memory of old traumas that leads us to manipulate the present
and anticipate the future in Unity. Every moment is what must be the shadow
of the past. It does not spoil the fullness that is only possible in
present time. Therefore, each moment is like a clear window that lets in
the possibility of equal joy, equal appreciation of what is unfolding before you.
The voice of inner truth says my desires are part of this moment and what
I need is provided to me here and now three. Uncertainty is part of
the total order of things. Certainty and uncertainty are two aspects of your nature.
On a plane, things must be safe, otherwise order could not exist.
On another plane, things must be uncertain, otherwise the new would not
exist. Evolution is progressing by surprising facts. The most illusory attitude is to
understand that the unknown is only a synonym of creation. This perception saves us
from the fear that arises whenever we resist uncertainty in unity. The human being
appreciates the wisdom of uncertainty. He understands that his next breath, that the
next heartbeat or the next thought are totally unpredictable. But in this total openness
the order is maintained. The opposites can and must coexist. In reality,
it encompasses felt all opposites, just as the quantum field encompasses the two great
opposites, entropy and evolution. The uncertainty of things does not arouse fear in
those who are in the consciousness of unity, for they are sure of themselves.
The voice of inner truth embraces the unknown, because it allows me to
see new aspects of myself. Four, the change is imbued with no change.
Life is an eternal dance. The movements of dance are composed by your
consciousness. Your wishes and attentions guide the course of your growth. As attention
flows constantly, dance never ends. This is the essence of living. Each
movement is part of dance. So, it' s s nr space event.
Time is important and necessary. It' s order in chaos. When
you realize he' s safe. Within this framework, the unchanging joy of
free will arises. It will be impossible for you to exercise free will if
you fear it will bring you uncertainty accidents and calamities. However, whoever is
in the unit accepts each choice within the total scheme. If you choose the
field, it will suit your choice. If you choose b the field,
it will adjust to it. Although it is diametrically opposed to the field,
all possibilities are acceptable, because, by definition, the field is a state
of all possibilities. The voice of inner truth says I will know the absolute.
Playing here in relative five, entropy presents no threat, because it is
under the control of infinite organizing power. Your body reflects the simultaneity of order
and chaos. Food, air, and water molecules swirling in your blood wings
move chaotically, but when they enter cells, they are used in exact order.
The neurons that shoot in your brain produce a chaotic thunderstorm of electrical signals,
but what emerges are meaningful thoughts. Therefore, chaos is just a point
of view. The things that a limited consciousness perceives as randomly delivered fit perfectly
to its site. When consciousness expands in unity, you understand that every step
towards decay, dissolution and destruction is used to organize new patterns of order.
When your perception can see the birth that springs from decay, the inner voice
of truth says through alternate steps of loss and gain, silence and activity,
I walk the path of immortality. These are mere descriptions. There are no
written words that can replace personal perception, what I have called an inner voice,
as it unfolds for each individual. But we all intuitively want to get
rid of the annoying and we need satisfactory answers about who we are and why
we are here to put an end to internal discontent. In its true nature,
life is comfortable, easy, unforced and intuitively correct. This means that
the state of self realization is the most natural. The accumulation of stress,
along with the aging it produces, indicates that tensions and discomfort are still present
While we do not realize life is a struggle. We constantly try to relieve
old wounds, escape old fears and impose control over the uncontrollable. The next
section in practice is dedicated to ending this struggle by means of the technique that
finally results in learning to accept your life not as a series of events of
chance, but as a path of awakening, whose purpose is the maximum of
joy and fullness. He practices it, the wisdom of uncertainty. The uncertainty
of life exerts constant demands on our usher coping mechanisms. There are basically two
ways to deal with uncertainty, acceptance and resistance. Accepting means allowing the facts
to unfold around you and react spontaneously to them without suppressing them. Resisting means
trying to change the facts by moving them away from what they really are and
reacting to them. In family and safe ways. Acceptance is healthy because it
allows you to clear any tension as soon as it occurs. Resistance is unhealthy
because it accumulates residues of frustration, false expectations and unfulfilled desires. In his
book I show and was emotionally free, the notable psychiatrist David Besket refers to
the accumulation of feelings as a state of emotional debt that directly links with aging.
Grief ages us prematurely when you are in emotional debt you are pessimistic about
the future and even in your years of fullness, you long to go back
to the past to remedy the lack of love and opportunity that you have suffered
sometimes you crave more attention, spend more time with someone who is no longer
having the opportunity to speak frankly and get rid of your emotional burden, or
just solve your confusion by finally discovering what really happened to you. Countless people
find themselves with an emotional debt that grows over the past few years. Ageing
is a psychological state in which emotional debt increases until the coping mechanisms of the
body can no longer properly handle current stress. The result is weakness, sickness
and death. A conscious effort is needed not to fall into this trap,
although every new moment is unknown and therefore a potential threat. There is no
real security in turning to the past. Just like Discott writes. You can
speculate, you can mourn, you can long, but as much as you
wish to go back and perfect your emotional experience. You' ll never be
able to go home. Your real home is in this place and right now.
The present is for action, to make, to become and to grow.
Biologically, your body is perfectly equipped to live in the present and there
it acquires its greatest joy and satisfaction. Your body never knows what its blood
pressure will be the next moment. That is why it has a built-
in flexibility that allows for a wide range of pressures. The same flexibility is
found in any other involuntary response. This is the wisdom of uncertainty, which
allows the unknown to happen and receives it willingly as a source of growth and
understanding. We see this wisdom expressed in the spontaneity of each cell, of
each organ. Your brain' s electric shock patterns aren' t the same
twice in life. However, this radical uncertainty allows you to have new and
original thoughts. At every minute about three hundred million cells die that will never
be seen again, and this torrent of death is assimilated into the greater torrent
of life that keeps your body running. However, it is much more difficult
for the mind to accept. Uncertainty fears change, loss and death. This
is the source of resistance that the body translates into stress. By imposing mental
resistance, you create a threat that your body must face. On the roller
coaster, some shout with enthusiasm others of terror. The journey is the same,
but those who pull back and strain the body by generating a stream of
stress hormones experience terror. Those who let themselves be carried away without resistance experience
exaltation in the following exercises. You will learn to restore in your consciousness a
state of acceptance so that living in the present will be as satisfying as possible.
However, you must first give yourself an idea of the resistance you are
now presenting. Our psychological defenses are too good to hide this from us.
By definition, the contained emotions are the ones that we cannot feel. However,
longing resistance gives rise to a revealing pattern of conduct. The need to
have control is a compulsion that takes root in fear and threat. Even if
you cannot reach the threat your dominant behavior betrays its presence control questionnaire put a
mark on it along with the following statements if they apply to your case often
much of the time or almost always. Some of these statements don' t
sound very flattering, but try to be as frank and honest as you can
about yourself. One likes to master work situations and I feel much more comfortable
working alone than with two others. When I' m under pressure. The
most easily demonstrated emotion is anger or irritability. Three, I rarely tell someone
I need it, four tend not to forget the old offenses, instead of
telling someone who made me suffer, I prefer to fantasize about taking it out.
Five I keep several resentments about the way my brothers treat me. Six,
the more money I spend on someone else means that I want it.
Seven. I don' t usually say unfairly that it' s the others.
Stop me. Eight. If a relationship starts to go wrong secretly,
I wish I could get back everything I bought for that person. Nine.
If the house is mine, the ones in it should follow my rules.
Ten. I find it hard to admit that I' m vulnerable I rarely
say I' ve really made a mistake eleven. It' s better to
hide my wounds than to show someone my weakness. Twelve. I' m
better at talking than listening. Thirteen. What I have to say is generally
important. Fourteen In secret, I think the others don' t take my
opinions as seriously as they should. Fifteen. I know pretty well what'
s good for people. Sixteen, at least once in my life, I
' ve been caught opening other people' s correspondence. Seventeen. Sometimes I
' ve been treated cynically or negatively. Sixteen. In fact, I have
high standards that others sometimes confuse with a tendency to criticize. Nineteen I tend
to be a perfectionist, it bothers me to let go of poor work.
Twenty I feel uncomfortable if someone gets too close to me in the emotional.
Twenty- one when a relationship is broken, I look back and think that
in general I was right. Twenty- two. I' m clean and
tidy, I like my way of doing things and I have a hard time
living with a careless person. Twenty- three I know how to plan my
day and give a lot of courage to punctuality. Twenty- four I know
how to meet the needs of others, but I am disappointed that they do
not think so much of mine. Twenty- five I have a logical explanation
for my way of acting, although the others cannot always accept it. Twenty
- six. I don' t care too much that other people don'
t appreciate me. Twenty- seven. In my opinion, people don'
t usually express the real reasons for their cut- off purchase. Twenty-
eight I do not serve to deal with noisy or naughty children. Twenty-
nine. I still blame my parents for a lot of my problems, but
I haven' t told them. Thirty. When I argue with my spouse
or lover, I can' t help but bring up old complaints. Total
score, biion bass script, low score zero to ten points. There is
no excessive need to control your personality. You tend to feel comfortable with your
feelings and be tolerant of others. As you know, imperfect. You understand
other people' s faults. It' s easy for YOU to let events
take their course and surprises don' t make you lose your balance. You
probably give a lot of value to spontaneity and the expression of emotions. Ten
to twenty points control for you a frequent problem you have more fears and wounds
than you let see. But you don' t try too hard to solve
these feelings. Mandar doesn' t seem fundamental to you, but get away
with it. Yes, you consider yourself organized and efficient, but don'
t worry too much if things get a little loose you' ve found someone
you can be honest and frank with, but it' s limited what you
can say or do safely even with that person. More than 20 points.
You' re a dominant person. You think control is necessary because people hurt
you a lot and you have memories of this guy that go back to your
painful childhood to keep them from hurting you you try to control your feelings.
That basically means you' re very selective about being honest with others. Your
predominant need for command or for things to be done in your own way drives
people away from you even though you strive hard to take care of their needs.
The only emotion you express easily is anger or irritability. You spend explaining
your motives and giving reasons to be like him, but that doesn' t
help you get what you want, which is the love and affection of others.
The purpose of this questionnaire is not to label someone as bad because they
are dominant. For most it is very unpleasant to lose control and we all
apply our energies to preserve it. But there is a healthy way to control
and an unhealthy way. The healthy one is to have enough assurance in yourself
as to your courage, your merit of love, and your achievements so that
external events do not jeopardize your coping ability. The unhealthy way is to manipulate
people and facts to cover your weaknesses and your insecurity to adopt. The first
must be frank with yourself you need to know your limits in various situations,
which make you feel weak and which ones bring out your strength. Self-
knowledge is an anchor that makes the unpredictable tolerable. Once a wise person told
me if my approach to a situation doesn' t work. I trust there
' s more to learn Either someone can give me help, or the flow
of facts will reveal what' s needed. In any case, I won
' t get to the solution if I don' t. I start by
admitting that my answer is not perfect. Those who apply unhealthy control lack this
flexibility and humility. They insist on handling the facts and on seeking excuses to
put themselves on the convenient side of all conflicts. This conduct causes a lack
of harmony both within themselves and with the environment. As they are unable to
allow, they simply pay the price of never truly experiencing the emotional food that
is achieved when life is allowed to flow within and through us exercise one frees
your interpretations. Your life can only be as free as your perception of it.
Every time we look at a situation, we see in it our past,
because all facts receive an interpretation and interpretations take root in the past.
If you were scared of spiders as a child, you will project that fear
of spiders at tins today, if your father was an alcoholic, your way
of judging those who drink will be tarnished by your painful past experiences. Just
understand that you' re giving an interpretation to everything as trivial as it is.
It' s an important step to free you from the past. You
have to understand that you always see things from a point of view. If
you' re surprised to rhyme with someone, for example, holding on to
your point of view will make the other a threat. On the other hand,
recognizing that two opposing views can be valid equally removes the threat. Remember
that the second stage of stress response, appreciation, is the only one in
which you can master your body' s reaction. Once you have interpreted a
situation as a threat, your body will automatically experience some kind of stress reaction.
That' s why it' s important to verify your interpretations. Generally,
the old ones do not remain valid outside the original situation. You can
only end the stress by sensing its end. Much remains to be said about
how to achieve this, but in my own life I try to deal with
every tense situation with the intention of defusing its threat in myself. These five
steps have been of immense help to me. You become aware that you have
an interpretation in a conflict situation. I' m trying to tell me my
point of view is limited. I don' t own the truth. Two
put aside your old mental position. When I feel tense, I take this
as a sign that it held me too close to my point of view.
Three, look at things from a new perspective. I focus on the sensations
of my body. In doing so my mind always begins to see things in
a different way. Four, evaluate your interpretation to see if it' s
still valid. Five, focus on the process, not the outcome. Tensions
will always arise if you concentrate on the end you must obtain is the downside
of thinking that events can be controlled. Two forced to end in a predictable
manner. To overcome this tendency to impose false control, I remind myself that
I do not need to know where I am going to enjoy the road I
walk. When I follow these five steps, those daily nuisances that create inadequate
tensions are soon dissolved. I' m trying to be tolerant of myself.
Sometimes, some situation pushes too many buttons and the response to stress starts before
I realize it. In such cases, the only sensible solution is to let
the body go, it will not loosen its tensions, but when the reaction
has completed its course. The exercise is to read these five steps and think
of them to change your interpretations. Then you have to apply them. At
first, you should apply these techniques to a worrying event of your past.
Think of someone who hurt you a lot and who you can' t forgive
the five steps can lead you to this kind of reasoning. I feel hurt,
but that doesn' t mean the other person was bad. Or he
' d want to hurt me. You don' t know my whole past
like I do. I don' t know yours. There' s always
another side to the situation. Despite my pain two. It' s not
the first time I' ve been hurt like that. Therefore, perhaps I
hastened to judge this incident. I have to see every thing as three.
I don' t need to see myself as a victim when was the last
time I found myself in the same situation. But on the opposite side,
I didn' t feel quite wrapped up in my own motives. Did I
give other people' s feelings more importance than they gave to mine this time?
Four Let' s forget for a second my feelings what that other person
felt. Maybe he just lost control or. Maybe he was so absorbed in
his own world that he didn' t realize I was hurting five. This
incident may be useful to me. Actually, I' m not interested in
criticizing that person or taking it out on me. I want to discover the
kind of things that make me feel threatened. The more I think about that,
the more it seems to me like an opportunity to accept responsibility. From
what I feel that will make it easier for me to forgive, since whoever
teaches me something about myself deserves my thanks when you begin to acquire the habit
of examining your old interpretations. Thus, consciously and carefully, you create a
space for spontaneous moments of freedom. It' s the moments when your old
mental position clears up in a flash of psychological penetration. With that flash comes
a sense of revelation, because you are looking at reality itself, not a
reflection of your past. The most valuable things in life. Love, compassion,
beauty, inspiration must come spontaneously. We can only prepare the way for
a spiritual friend of mine calls this to open a hole into the fourth dimension.
There is great freedom in psychological penetration. I know a man in many
years could not visit the father' s home on the day of Action of
Grace, without binding himself in a violent dispute with his father. There came
a Thanksgiving day when he was forty years old and his father seventy- five.
When I got off the plane, my father greeted me and, as
always, we set out for the luggage storage room in a friendly manner.
It takes about half an hour for us to assume our usual roles as combatants.
I tried not to get tense, but I knew as soon as we
got in the car, he would criticize my driving and start boiling my blood.
While we were waiting for the luggage, we didn' t say much.
Usually that' s when we' re left with nothing to say.
When my suitcase came down the hopper I reached out to her and he pulled
me aside to take another part of the rite, which has not changed in
twenty years. On this occasion, however, he staggered a little bit to
lift that heavy suitcase. For the first time I noticed he was getting old.
It may seem to you that it was not a great revelation, but
I realized that during all that time I had been fighting with my father as
if I was still seven years old and he was an immensely powerful and strong
adult. I didn' t take his suitcase because he' s proud,
but on that occasion I didn' t follow him to the car like the
boy driven by an arrogant father. I realized that I wanted to help and
that that was his way of showing me affection. It is difficult to express
how powerful that transformation seemed. This is a perfect example of how a different
reality emerges when we get rid of old interpretations. For my part, I
began to notice that losing the plane, which happens to me with strange frequency
on my lecture tours, caused me to become increasingly tense. One day,
as I was running down the runway, I saw the ramp slowly being removed
from the plane. I stopped with a knot in my stomach and a crazy
feeling of frustration. But then it occurred to me to wonder how my life
will change within a year because I lost this plane. The effect was almost
magical. My heart stopped beating hastily. My breathing calmed down, my muscles
relaxed, my stomach knot disappeared and my intestines stopped stirring. In questioning my
interpretation, I realized that my stress was not on the lost plane, but
on my supposed inexpressions. My body was conditioned to think oh not again the
same, as happens in almost all stress reactions are expectations. You remember your
last marriage brawl, the last time they criticized your work, the last hostile
question of an assistant to your lectures and a complete reaction to stress arises.
I felt like the rat jumping horrified, even if the discharge didn' t
happen. Well, look at things. Losing the plane didn' t matter.
By eliminating false interpretation, my body got rid of its old habits exercise
two peeling the bag from the past. The past forms in us many intricate
layers. Your inner world is full of complex relationships, for it contains the
past, not just as it happened, but in every way you would like
to review it. Everything that should have turned out different does change, in
that place where you escape fantasy, revenge, longings, sorrow, self reproach
and guilt. To get rid of those distractions, you must understand that there
is a deeper place where everything is fine. If Darth German Ness writes inside
you there is a quiet and inviolable place that you can withdraw from at any
time. To be yourself. This sanctuary is the simple awareness of comfort that
cannot be violated by the whirlwind of events. This place doesn' t feel
trauma if it doesn' t build up wounds. It is the mental space
that one seeks in meditation, to which I believe, one of the most
important activities that we can devote ourselves. However, not but pretis meditation you
can approach that place of calm by means of the next exercise. Write this
statement. I' m perfect, just like I am everything in my life.
It happens for my last good. I' m loved and I'
m love. Don' t stop to analyze the statement. Just write it
down. When you finish, close your eyes and let any reaction that comes
to mind bloom. Then write the first words you can think of. Write
that answer directly under the statement. It is likely that your first thought contains
a lot of resistance and even anger, because no one lives in a perfect
way and it is hard to believe that everything is working as it should.
Typical stupid answers. This is silly. Not if your reaction expresses a similar
emotion, it is sincere. Now without stopping, write the statement again,
close your eyes and re- write the first words that come to mind.
Don' t stop to analyze your reaction. Continue the exercise until you have
repeated the statement and your response twelve times. You' ll be surprised how
much your reactions change. In most cases, the last response will be much
more positive than the first. Essentially this exercise allows you to spy on the
deepest levels of your consciousness. Most people have the strongest resistance on the surface
of the mind, as that is where their most public and circumspect reactions operate.
Your social self who behaves as expected of you is superficial. He was
primarily trained to make a good impression and not reveal too much. These upper
layers of your consciousness will not respond very deeply to statements as powerful as I
am love. In depth we touch planes of frustrations, desires and more recent
contained emotions. When you touch these layers unexpected or irrational reactions may arise.
The statement I am love can trigger an angry outburst that relates to a recent
episode in which you did not feel loved. By the way, deeper still
are the layers where your most entrenched feelings are kept. If you feel basically
unworthy of love, on this level there could be a lot of pain and
resistance, but under the more rigid conditioning, there is a layer of consciousness
that fits without hesitation with words I am love. If you can love and
be loved, it is because this layer of your consciousness evokes that feeling.
That is where the deepest human values are known. Without that knowledge not only
of love, but of beauty, compassion, trust, strength and truth,
these words would have no meaning. Love is part of essential human nature.
We recognize it because it vibrates in us far below the plane. Conscious that
it is being able to live from this plane provides complete satisfaction. But that
only happens when you solve the layers of conflicts and contradictions that constitute your resistance.
When you resist the flow of life, what you are really resisting is
your own inner nature, for all that happens to us is a reflection of
who we are. This is not a mystical affirmation, but part of the
apparatus of perception. To perceive is to grasp the meaning of something. A
rock is not rock unless you are familiar with the concept of rock. Otherwise,
the rock would be a meaningless sensory data, such as Arabic or Russian
writing. If you do not understand those languages, you must learn a foreign
language and you must know all the objects that are there, out in the
world, but you have no obligation to learn to exist. Existing is something
that occurs, naturally, to have a human nervous system is to exist.
Included in that nervous system comes human consciousness, knowing that you are human as
opposed to being part of another species. With this knowledge emerge the primordial feelings
that make us respond to love, trust, compassion and other states of essential
sensations are our beginning, but they are also what we seek, because each
one of them can grow. Living from the plane of consciousness that says I
am love means living from a level where love can grow. In the early
stages of personal evolution. Almost all doubt these essential States. They are not
sure that they are worthy of love, confident, strong, valuable, etcetera.
You can' t know anything about these States trying to prove them to
yourself. If you try to get love, acting well, being nice,
learning the game of social appeal, etcetera, you always end up in failure,
because when you stop behaving as you have been taught, the basic attitude
that remains is the doubt that was your starting point. The end of the
search for love is beyond conduct, for in due time the mind decides to
look inward. When it does, the search becomes a search for the essential
self, the self that knows that its onus and love on all sides of
your consciousness. There is the truth about yourself but after removing all layers of
the onion, this is the most basic truth. You are love, you
are compassion, you are beauty, you are existence and he is consciousness and
spirit. Any of these statements can be used as an affirmation, which,
as you insinuate, the word, is just a way of saying something,
of saying yes. The technique is extremely powerful to make you remember your nature.
But more still it reminds you of your purpose, which is to grow
to the point where I am love be on the surface of your consciousness.
Not buried in the dark, deep exercise three living in the present. Everything
you think and feel reflects who you are. If you think and feel from
a superficial level of consciousness, that is you to dive deeper into yourself and
be lucky enough to get to the place where you are love, compassion,
trust and truth must follow the path of your current answers. Those who do
not feel loved may find love in its purest form, but they must make
their way through the layers of resistance that block the feeling of pure love.
Your current emotions reflect the current state of your nervous system. With all his
past prints. Every time you have an experience, these footprints come into your
answer. This means that most of your reactions are echoes of the past.
You don' t really live in the present. However, at least you
react in the present, and that is where the search for your true begins.
I your emotions are the most present- centered thing that you have an
emotion. It' s a thought tied to a feeling. Thought usually refers
to the past or the future, but the feeling is in the present.
Your mind soon connects sensations with thoughts. But when we were babies, our
first experiences and emotions looked much more like physical sensations. We didn' t
have inhibitions or think twice before we browned, when we were wet or we
felt cold, loneliness, fear, etcetera. Our mind didn' t know
those pompous words bad and not bad. It teaches you that certain thoughts are
shameful. It doesn' t teach you to resist your own impulses. Then
came more complex words and interpretations. Already grown- ups. When we deny
the immediate experience of an emotion, the mind raises a biomo of words and
this takes us out of the present to throw us already into the past,
already into the future. To feel a total and complete emotion, to experience
it and then to let it go is to be in the present. The
only moment that never ages stripped to the basics, emotions only awaken two sensations,
pain and pleasure. We all want to avoid pain and seek pleasure.
Therefore, the complex emotional states in which we find ourselves are the result of
not being able to obey those basic impulses. Psychiatrist David Ves reduces emotional complexity
to a simple cycle that repeats countless times in the life of the whole world.
This cycle begins in the present, where only pain and pleasure are felt,
and ends with complex feelings centered exclusively on the past, such as guilt
and depression. The cycle of emotions is as follows. The pain in the
present is experienced as an offense. Pain in the past is remembered as anger.
Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety. Inexpressed anger, redirected against
oneself and contained within is called guilt. The energy depletion that occurs when anger
redirects inwards creates depression. What this cycle tells us is that the accumulated suffering
is responsible for a wide range of psychological distresses. Buried wounds are disguised as
anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression. The only wrong way to treat
these layers of pain. Find out who errs when the pain occurs, resolve
it, and move on. Living in the present means having the honesty to
avoid the easy emotion that is anger and expose the pain, which is more
difficult to face. When pain does not resolve in the present, the cruel
accumulation of anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression can only get worse.
Exercise consists of learning the steps to feel in the present. One understands that
pain is the most basic negative feeling. You can' t be in the
present without being willing to feel hurt two. Stay with your feelings, don
' t give in to the urge to deny what you feel or turn it
into anger. Three say what you feel to the person who caused that pain.
Four solve your emotion and go ahead. This may seem like an exercise
in suffering, but it is actually an exercise in freedom. His suffering r
s NS is pleasant, but it does really put you in the present,
while the conditioned reactions of anger, anxiety, guilt and depression get you out
of it. Once you are in the present, you can follow the trail
of your emotions to their source, which is not pain, but love.
Compassion, truth, the true you suffering has no purpose, except to guide
you to your truth. In itself and in itself. The pain is only
worth as a sign that it will get you out of the pain. When
a baby suffers, she cries, takes the suffering out of her body,
and then relaxes. Return to the basic state of the body that is pleasure,
tranquility and comfort. If you want to feel those things, just be
yourself. But being yourself means going beyond the tendency to repress or divert your
emotions, which we all learned in early childhood. Getting to the moment by
focusing your attention on pain allows you to free yourself from it. As soon
as he shows up. That liberation occurs in nothing. Naturally, it is
what the body wants to do and attention is the healing power that activates it.
Focusing attention on your feelings, which is closer to the witness state,
you observe suffering without letting yourself be involved in secondary attitudes that usually follow evasive
and negative guilt in the act of witnessing psychological penetration becomes possible. Objectivity is
required to achieve understanding. If you let yourself be caught up in suffering,
you won' t see the motive behind it. Today no one can hurt
you without activating a wound from your past. You have to understand that in
order to find yourself. When you learn to say I feel hurt and to
really be with that feeling, a greater openness will develop. The emotions that
frighten us are the complex ones because they overwhelm the natural mechanism of deliberation.
You can' t just get rid of guilt or depression. They are secondary
formations that arise once you forget how to free yourself from suffering. The more
suffering you feel frankly more comfortable or you will be in pain, because the
ability to get rid of it will grow. As this happens, you will
feel more comfortable with your other emotions for a blocked mind. Positive emotions,
such as love and trust, often present the same difficulty as negative ones,
such as hatred and mistrust. The old unsolved wounds allude to both of them.
If you' re comfortable with your emotions, you won' t get
so confused with other people. Instead of blaming those who throw you, you
can forgive them. The lessons of this exercise are very profound. We all
act from our own plane of consciousness. That is all we can demand from
ourselves and others. As much as anyone knows is doing the best you can
given the limits of your consciousness. Forgiveness to others only comes when you can
free yourself from your own suffering. The more complete your release, the more
sincere forgiveness will be. No one can really hurt you unless you give him
the power to do it. This power lies in your own unresolved pain.
You can take control of the old pain and claim power over your emotions.
As long as you don' t, your feelings will continue to move according
to the whim of others. External events do not have the power to make
you suffer. Suffering occurs when your mind makes its interpretation. You can live
beyond interpretation in a witness state the pure and untouchable consciousness that is the true
you. Again, the reason this exercise defeats aging is because it brings you
back to the present and the consciousness of the present moment never ages is the
same at five or eighty- five years old. The discovery of freedom in
the present opens the door for the permanent experience of temporality in which past,
present and future are revealed as illusions compared to the true reality that is always
here and now fourth, the science of longevity. I don' t know
beautiful uden, but I' m looking at her picture in the morning paper.
She' s a tiny, smiling old woman waving a handkerchief with lace
fliers. Bel is in the diary because he has reached the remarkable age of
one hundred and nine years. Despite being older than several Member States of the
Union, their eyes are clear and alert. The article says that his mind
is more awake than many of the younger residents of the nursing home in which
he lives. I imagine the ruckus that everyone built around bel preparing her for
her moment of celebrity. She is seen sitting in a cheerful granny dress,
with pink flower print and wide lace collar, certainly purchased for the occasion.
The article displays some statistics on those that reach centennials. Eighty percent of all
centennials are women, seventy- five percent have been widowed, fifty percent are
in geriatric residences, sixteen percent are black. The general population comprises only 12
per cent of Blacks. This last figure comes to mind because he is a
black woman. Born and raised in the gruesome agricultural territory of Texas. Until
he met it, a hundred lived alone in a cabin without running water.
She' s now the starhouse of a Houston nursing home. No mention is
made of his state of health, but he is likely to be fragile.
When you reach the limits of human longevity. Life flashes like a candle without
despairing. At his hundred and nine years of age, he sails far beyond
biological probability into mysterious and uncertain survival. Longevity holds a riddle, for science
cannot yet foresee who will come to an extreme old age. Genetics doesn'
t have the full answer. There is no news of a centennial whose parent
has reached the age of one hundred. The lifestyle is also problematic. A
person like Viji, raised on a marginal diet and subjected to strenuous physical labor,
has had a hideous way of life for modern customs. However, it
has survived ninety- nine thousand nine hundred ninety- nine percent of its generation,
including those who lived under much better circumstances. Officially, the oldest survivor
in American history was Olina Fewkens, a peasant in Erquimer County, New York,
who died in nine hundred and twenty- eight at the age of thirteen.
People who have reached much higher ages are often officially mentioned and it is
quite possible that an anonymous individual has survived one hundred and fifteen years or more.
Vela is not close to the record yet, but the mere fact of
competing puts her on the longevity elite. She feels lonely, asks a journalist.
Yes, sometimes yes bel answers the very elderly are inevitably alone, for
they have left far behind the family and friends with whom they began the journey
of life. In this respect, Bel' s case is typical. He
has buried three husbands and seven brothers, one male and six women, differing
from most of the women of his generation. Bel had no children even her
nieces are already too old to take care of her. It is said that,
in a typical climbing season of MountÉbrez, an average of sixty-
four climbers arrive at the base camp of this number, which is a tiny
fraction of the trained mountaineers of the world. A third tries the final assault
on the summit. Two climbers will perish in the attempt and only four will
reach it. Beloudem is like one of those four climbers standing ten meters from
the peak of human longevity, exhausted barely able to take a step further,
but there present. In the coming decades, the mountain summit will be much
more crowded, except for a premature heart attack, a fatal illness or an
accident. You and I are likely to get to base camp, at least
in the future. Getting to be eighty- five and ninety will be as
common as it was. In the past. The newspapers will talk about people
who turn 100 as often as they now announce the birth of twins. It
will only be considered news that someone reaches the age of one hundred and ten
you imagine what you will be the day you turn one hundred. It'
s a big conceptual leap, comparable to asking a two- year- old
to imagine himself in his middle age, but imagine yourself at fifty. Maybe
you' re already there and then try to learn this amazing fact. The
day you turn fifty will be the day of your second birth. In all
probability a complete life will extend before you that will last at least thirty years
or more probably forty- fifty and up to sixty years for all previous generations.
The fiftieth birthday marked the time to slow down. The children were already
raised and in college, when not married and with their own children. The
race was a matter, resolved and one knew quite well whether it was a
success or a failure. The idealism of youth had long vanished. The crisis
of the middle years was already overcome as a violent storm. Oh with luck,
like gloomy downpours threatening the horizon, but to be born at fifty years
of age little in life has prepared us for this. However, according to
studies by a California health department, if medical science could eliminate the only major
risk of arteriosclerosis, average life expectancy for California women would rise to one hundred
years and we talked about the average compared to your first birth. The one
you will experience at the age of fifty has its advantages and its disadvantages.
In both cases there is a completely new and unknown existence. But the big
advantage of the second birth is that you can plan ahead. The first was
thrown at you without warning, including two perfect strangers who turned out to be
your parents, a report body that needed to be trained to accomplish the simplest
tasks and a disconcerting world of chaotic images and sounds with which your brain must
have modeled something that made sense by the age of fifty. All that work
is done now that the fearsome images of old age quickly dissipate. The obvious
disadvantage of the second birth, which is not having a new body, will
not be so incapacitating. Sickness and disability will have been postponed if not completely
eliminated. Enthusiasted by the possibilities of planning a whole new life, I decided
to take the opportunity seriously, I set aside all stereotypes of old age that
choke the mind and cherished second birth, which is only four years away,
with a list of desire. What I would ask if I could live until
I was one hundred years old immediately came to mind the following desires. I
want to survive even longer, if possible I want to stay healthy, I
want a clear mind and alert. I want to be active, I want
to have reached wisdom. While writing down these wishes, something surprising happened.
Everyone seemed to be within my reach. That prevented me from living as long
as possible while life was aggratulating. It is natural to wish to remain in
it. That prevented me from enjoying good health. I know what I have
to do to stay healthy now and I can live tomorrow the same way.
My mind is now clear and alert. There is no reason for it to
be hindered over time, as long as I do not stop using it.
If I' ve always been active, why fear that one day I'
ll fall into an armchair so I won' t get up again and if
I haven' t yet achieved better wisdom. Thus, it is a gift
that comes in due time. My other wishes wouldn' t make sense if
I didn' t expect that last golden fruit to be granted to me.
When I was ready with this simple list, I had made survival stop being
a threat to becoming a desirable goal, because on my list there were things
I wanted very much. According to public opinion polls, 80 percent of Americans
say yes, when asked, they are satisfied with their current lives. However,
a majority answer that they do not want to live until they are 100
years old. They must therefore share the assumption that the road between the present
and the hundred years leads to losses. This self- fulfilling prophecy can only
be changed if we decide to improve over the years. Old age is a
grace if one comes to it with joy, creativity and curiosity. These qualities
require a full living of the present moment, for today is the youth of
your longevity. The supposed question of the old paradigm was that, as the
body wears out over time, life becomes less and less satisfying. The provision
of possibilities was exhausted after a certain age arbitrarily defined by each society and individual.
The new paradigm tells us that life is not a process of decline,
but of constant transformation and, therefore, full of potential for unlimited growth to
continue to deploy new possibilities decade after decade, it is necessary to know what
these possibilities are, what we should expect physically, mentally and emotionally in the
second fifty years of life. A new science of longevity has emerged to answer
these questions. Even the loyal advocates of the old paradigm now agree that automatic
decline is not programmed in our body. Longevity is presented to those who have
discovered this on their own. Science only validates the numerous improvements in bodily functions
that older people already experience In this section. I want to examine these new
findings in the hope of discovering the most essential keys to longevity, which are
valid for the majority, but for all. Human life is incredibly adaptable.
It would seem unlikely that a person like Bellowden could survive so much against her
many disadvantages accumulated. Being poor, being black, being deprived of proper medical
care, spending most of your life on a diet that is probably rich in
fat and poor in essential vitamins. The science of longevity must explain these anomalies.
I think the only way to do that is to probe certain points of
mind and heart that transcend physical factors, you see much more than your lifestyle.
And the same can be said of all of us. Biologists and gerontologists
have accumulated fascinating information on how to survive to a very advanced age, but
new data are not enough. We need practical examples of sacred life. As
an inspiring experiment in this direction that Luis and his colleagues from Berkeley, California
carried out the Sage Senior Current Station project at Welth Explorations Old Age Update and
Development Explorations. Saje founded in a thousand nine hundred and seventy- four tried
with amazing success, revitalizing people between sixty- five and eighty- five years
old. Many transformed his life. A woman who clearly claimed that her life
was over at seventy- four years old, wrote a book at ninety-
one, and began to travel as a speaker in a campaign for a decent
means for the dying. Others found that working with breathing and attention could eliminate
old symptoms, migraines, headaches, and arthritis discomfort. A retired woman who
was thought to be practically color- blind, discovered through an art process that
could be dedicated to interior decoration and remodeled her home. There is in all
life a secret nucleus of meaning that is expected to be discovered. Those who
have found it are the teachers I observe for my own future survival. They
have lived the years following the second birth. They are the true scientists of
longevity and, therefore, their true geniuses a hundred years of youth, which
the elderly can teach us. Very few know anyone who is a hundred years
old historically reaching 100 was such a rare feat that it was almost a phenomenon.
A research carried out in the Victorian era in the lineage of British aristocrats,
presumably the best- fed and cared for members of their society, failed
to dig up a single pair of the Kingdom in the preceding ten centuries that
would have reached centennials. The first was Lord Penrin, who died in nineteen
hundred and sixty- seven at one hundred and one years of age. Today,
in almost all industrialized countries, out of every ten zero people there is
one that crosses the mark of the century and that proportion is rising faster than
any other population growth statistics. The older people of today tend not to be
mere survivors of chance, but rather individuals who embody enviable attitudes and values.
Sociologists who study the centennials continue to be amazed by their strong attachment to freedom
and independence throughout their lives. Centennials tend to avoid restrictions. Traditionally, most
work on their own, very few of the boundaries of modern companies. They
put a very high price on autonomy. As I said earlier, the word
that researchers most often apply to centennials is adaptable at a certain height of life.
They have all suffered losses and setbacks, but after mourning the most serious
loss like that of the spouse, after fifty or sixty years of marriage or
ns. These individuals continued to be studied in a group. Centenarians have other
significant similarities in their interesting book on longevity Pound Javert and cheu ouper wrols Enfaud
makes a report on interviews conducted with a twelve- zero people dependent on social
benefit who said they were a hundred years old or older. It was evident
that, although these individuals worked hard and enjoyed the work, there was a
notable lack of great ambitions among them. The tendency had been to lead a
relatively quiet and independent life. In general, they were happy with work,
family and religion and had little to regret. Almost all expressed a strong desire
to live and a great appreciation for the simple experiences and pleasures of life.
If aging was simply a matter of wear and tear, it would be expected
that all the centennials would be in poor health, trapped in bodies with many
damaged parts. Indeed, among our centennials there are good levels of health.
Less than one in five report being incapacitated or so sick that they require help
to eat, walk, bathe, etc. Most still move unaided, almost
always without crutches or sticks, and many continue to work, at least in
household chores and personal care. Trying to articulate a specific long- lived personality
is too constrictive for the centennials. The benign, quiet and wise grandfather is
only one type among many. They also reach the hundred selfish, sarcastic and
antisocial people. The common thread is a sense of self- sufficiency much deeper
than personality. In support of this point, a study conducted in one thousand
nine hundred and seventy- three in New York City between seventy- nine healthy
people older than eighty- seven found that they hardly ever went to a doctor.
They were not found in homes for the sick and rarely in geriatric institutions.
Dr Steven Page wet p psychias s NS, led the New York study,
made it clear that his subjects were not mere survivors by chance or fortunate
receptors of good genes. Undoubtedly, the seventy- nine people studied had escaped
catastrophic diseases, such as heart attack and cancer. In the middle critical period
between forty- five and sixty- five years. That' s when they
tend to get the most tithe, bad genes, high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, smoking, alcoholism, and other negative factors. But Jehuet' s
subjects were made up to stay healthy already advanced the eighth and ninth decade of
life. That indicated that some powerful positive factors were in their favour. Jehuet
' s study considered longevity in broad terms. Most of the factors he found
were subjective in nature related to what these people thought of themselves. By comparison,
the purely objective factors linked to long life were few and very general,
physical characteristics, no excessive obesity or thinness, little weight fluctuation throughout life,
good general muscle tone, strength in the hands young- looking skin, still
driving cars and practicing physical activities, psychological characteristics, including lifestyle and behavior.
Superior natural intelligence, marked interest in current events, good memory, free of
anxieties, few diseases, are not prone to worry independence. In choosing vocation,
they tended to work autonomously. They worked in agriculture and plant husbandry and
in the professions of law, medicine and architecture. Others had small businesses of
their own, in a few cases large companies. Most of them took time
to retire. Almost all had been severely affected by the depression that occurred when
they were quincuagenaires or their exagenaries, but they recovered and built a new future.
They enjoyed life. They all showed a degree of optimism and a marked
sense of humor. They responded to simple pleasures. Life seems to have been
a great adventure for them. They were able to see beauty, where others
only saw ugliness great adaptability. Although many treasured the memories of childhood, everyone
preferred to live in it present. With his many changes. They didn'
t care about death. They continued to live with satisfaction day by day.
All could be described as religious in a broad sense, but none of them
exhibited extreme orthodoxy were moderate in eating but were willing to experiment. They did
not follow special diets. His diet included a wide variety of high- protein
and low- fat foods. Everybody got up early. The average rest was
between six and seven hours, but they spent eight hours in bed. Abbreviated
or interrupted sleep is typical of old age. There was no uniformity in drinking.
Some drank moderately, others gave in sometimes, and others were non-
smoking. Some were abstaining, some had smoked very moderately, but they had
not been smoking for a long time, and others were old- fashioned drug
smokers. They had used fewer medicines in their entire lives than many elderly people
in a single week most drank coffee. I have previously analysed some of these
factors. I' d like to play some others first. The physical characteristics
of the list, although few are very revealing, longevity and weight. Maintaining
a fairly stable weight throughout life seems to be more important than being above or
below normal weight, as is the case with so many findings on longevity.
This one seems insignificant, but it could have profound implications. In a study
of eleven point seven, zero zero larver graduates from the classes of one thousand
nine hundred and sixteen to one thousand and nine hundred and fifty, special attention
was paid to what was happening from the mature age onwards, the data collected
between one thousand nine hundred and sixty- two and one thousand nine hundred and
eighty- eight revealed that a still moderate weight gain or loss in a long
period increased the risks of death. Compared to those who had maintained a constant
weight. Those who dropped five or more kilos over a period of ten years
had a mortality rate of fifty- seven percent higher, including a seventy-
five percent higher risk of dying from heart attack. Those who increased five kilos
or more over a period of ten years were only a little better with a
higher mortality of thirty- six percent than those who maintained a stable weight.
The risk of dying from a heart attack jumped dramatically to 200 percent. This
finding made by ground the common error that obesity is the main risk linked to
weight. In fact, as long as it is not a clinical obesity defined
as an excess of fifteen percent or more over the normal body weight, a
few extra kilos are not related to shortening of life. It happens on the
contrary. The current extensive studies carried out by Dr Rubén Andrés have shown that
the lowest mortality occurs among those who are 10% overweight, the highest among
those who have chronic weight insufficiency. Andrés' s work, based on studies
by millions of people of different incomes and social classes, creates chaos in social
values that equate thinness with everything good and healthy. As a result, many
doctors have preferred to ignore facts that do not coincide with prevailing beliefs. Hurver
' s study further undermined the stereotype by stressing the need to maintain a stable
weight. It also supports the old idea that fast diets are unhealthy. But
it seems to me that it is a mistake to take this as a purely
physical finding. The weight is inevitably related to the image that each has of
himself. In the youth. Both men and women learn to use diets as
a quick solution to improve their own image. The thinner they are, the
better they consider themselves and the more likely they are to believe that they have
cured all their problems. However, the improvements to that of the gazar two
three or five kilos are superficial, since the deepest emotional problems remain intact.
It is typical that chronic diet addicts fall into yoyo syndrome. It thins to
a few kilos when its self- esteem is relatively high, only to recover
them very soon and with some aggregates. When self- esteem decays again.
The fact that both raising and losing weight to cutting my life leads me to
think that the real culprit is the lack of self- esteem. Subjects who
have maintained a stable weight are usually stable in the psychological plane as well.
That is his saving virtue, not the weight itself. Clinical obesity remains a
proven risk of heart disorders and type two diabetes, but physical activity can compensate
for overweight because carrying those extra kilos provides the heart with considerable aerobic exercise.
Longevity and exercise firm hand and good muscle tone found in Jehuette subjects indicate they
were active people. However, the lack of organized physical exercises is notable,
although it is known that exercise delays aging. To understand this apparent anomaly,
we must study more deeply how much activity is really needed to make a significant
contribution to longevity. Dr Steven Duaire and his colleagues from the Institute for Aerobic
Exercises Research conducted wheel tests on more than ten zero men and three zero women.
Then they followed the group for ten years to determine to what extent good
physical condition was a defense ons. Another way of expressing the same is that
developing any physical activity is very preferable to remaining inactive. According to the Bler
study, the mortality rate of sedentary men and women was twice that of people
walking every day. Walking burns between two hundred and ninety- four hundred and
thirty calories per hour. Depending on the speed at which you walk, this
is equivalent to an average of 180 calories. In the thirty minutes necessary to
stay healthy. You can burn about the same amount of calories as thirty minutes
of dance, twenty minutes of tennis, seventeen minutes of hiking uphill fifteen minutes
of swimming. If you want to spend these calories on household chores, the
times turn out to be forty minutes of house cleaning, thirty minutes of deserving
the garden, twenty- five minutes of mowing the lawn twelve five minutes of
snow removal. I' m not suggesting you count calories when you exercise.
I offer these daughters to point out how easy you can keep your health without
feeling guilty for not jogging seven kilometers every morning or swimming in the gym every
time you climb the stairs. Instead of taking the elevator, your body uses
only four five calories per stretch, but this low figure is misleading. Climbing
the stairs is an excellent aerobic exercise that accelerates the heart rate in ten beats
for each elevated stretch. A study in Finland showed that those who climbed at
least twenty- five stairways per day achieved a remarkable physical state. Going up
all that once too much the heart would suffer a dangerous overload, but whoever
lives in a two- storey house can easily climb the stairs twelve times a
day. Let' s add the opportunity to climb the stairs at work or
when doing the shopping. Every time you see a escalator or lift, the
stairs are nearby and the total of twenty- five stages per day is achieved
with amazing ease. It' s just a matter of being alert to the
opportunities. Exercise a little every day is much better than waiting for the weekend.
The activity that starts and stops produces tension to the body that prefers short
daily sessions. It will be you who decide to call or not exercise your
activity. Some people don' t care about sports or gymnastics, but you
can stay active making the bed, climbing stairs, walking instead of taking a
taxi, coming home on foot with a bag of supplies, etcetera. A
longer and more sustained exercise is required to develop general good condition, build muscle
and increase endurance. The above activities basically serve to tone the cardiovascular system by
pumping the blood a little faster and giving a little effort to the lungs.
Regular aerobic exercises will make you healthier, but they will not necessarily give rich
dividends as to adding years of life. In fact, some detailed studies that
followed some Huver graduates over three decades showed that intensive exercise, which consumes 2,
000 calories a week, or the equivalent of running thirty kilometers lengthened life
between one and two years. Cardiologist Dinon has been estimated to be required in
thirty minutes of career six days a week to burn 2, 000 calories.
At this time you should add half an hour to change and go to the
track and another half an hour to go home, shower and change your clothes
again. If someone starts running at the age of thirty, at seventy-
five, the hours spent on the exercise will amount to between one or two
years. As this equals the additional life that can be obtained. The net
dividend is zero. Intense exercise offers only the illusion of prolonging life. This
does not mean that you should not exercise thoroughly, but if you do,
you should know what you will not get more time, but a better quality
of life, which is certainly a very great advantage longevi In Jehuet' s
study shines, because of its absence, the role of diet is not made
any mention of rigorous attempts to control cholesterol. There is no insistence on the
use of vitamins and minerals. Healthy diets, fiber supplements, and vegetarianism are
not recommended. Centenarians eat a wide variety of foods, as all studies have
confirmed, but the fact that they maintain a constant weight suggests that they tend
to eat in moderation. Beyond that, it seems that many of our current
food beliefs should be less rigid. This point has been strongly pointed out by
a recent revealing study. In Finland, which traditionally has the highest rate of
heart attacks in the world, some cardiac disorders researchers chose one, two,
zero zero executives from companies considered to be at high risk of an attack,
as they presented one or more of the classic risk factors obesity, high blood
pressure, high cholesterol and high tobacco addiction. Each one smoked more than ten
cigarettes a day. Half of these men were given an intensive five- year
programme, with a controlled diet, regular examinations and detailed information on their potential
risks. The other group was allowed to live as they wished, but with
regular exams. At the end of the five years, researchers took a big
surprise to discover that mortality was much higher in the group that had been advised
to avoid cholesterol, calories, sugar and alcohol, including twice as many deaths
from heart attacks. This despite the fact that the group closely monitored. He
had been advised to consume more unsaturated fats, mainly margarine, replace red meat
with fish, chicken and vegetables, stop smoking and reduce alcohol consumption. After
fifteen years, statistics continued to be asymmetrical. The closely monitored group had suffered
34 deaths from heart problems. The control group only fourteen. According to all
estimates, the group that was allowed to continue smoking, drinking, and overeating
should have been in much greater danger than had happened. The perverse results may
or may not imply that controlling ingested cholesterol is important for health, but they
are certainly a condemnation of the stressful current prevention techniques. One of Britain'
s leading cardiologists expresses this strongly. These results do not mean that one can
foolishly get fed up with impunity. But my opinion is that if a patient
exhausted by effort and stress sees his existence invaded by doctors and other benefactors eager
to constrain his or her way of eating and other behaviors, the factor of
harassment and loss of autonomy can be the gout that overflows the glass. Here
the significant phrase is loss of autonomy. As we have seen, a strong
sense of individual freedom, combined with personal happiness, is a critical factor in
surviving to advanced age with good health. Fear is not a good motivator because
it causes its own tensions. However, millions of people have been indoctrinated on
cholesterol in the assumption that the price of fear is small compared to the price
of a high cholesterol index. This is a very short- sighted strategy.
For forty years, cholesterol has been promoted as an enemy of the body,
even though all cells need it to survive. Cholesterol is a fundamental part of
cell membranes, among other functions. And even though two thirds of our body
' s cholesterol is not absorbed by food, but is manufactured by the liver,
the very premise that a low rate of beneficial cholesterol has fallen under increasing
suspicion In an intense review of 18 studies carried out around the world that covered
six hundred and fifty people from the United States, Japan, Europe and Israel,
the benefits of having under ns the level of zero cholesterol were refuted.
The one hundred and twenty- five zero point, zero zero women studied had
the same life expectancy with high, low or medium cholesterol rates. Moreover,
there were no specific causes of death, such as cancer or heart attack that
related to cholesterol levels were high or low. These findings are of dual importance,
since almost all the classical studies that prevented against cholesterol were based on male
people. Among the five hundred twenty zero point, zero zero men studied,
the findings were somewhat more complex. Men whose cholesterol rates ranged from the acceptable
maximum of 200 to 200, had the same survival cups as those with low
rates of one hundred and sixty to two hundred. The worst were those with
very high or very low rates. Men who had a cholesterol level below one
hundred and sixty had a seventeen percent greater chance of dying for all causes,
as well as those with very high rates above two hundred and forty. This
research, published in September of one thousand nine hundred and ninety- two by
the prestigious publication being that ASSIN loosely represents the largest number of data ever collected,
deeply attacks our conventional idea that fat and cholesterol are bad, but the
result is not yet clear. Tests against fat- rich diets remain strong,
especially considering the additional risks presented by common state obesity. In rich diet countries,
keeping fat at 30 percent of total calories remains the most prudent attitude.
What this all means is that a healthy diet must have two components. One
must be psychologically satisfactory, two must provide a balanced amount of nutrients several times
a day. These are very basic requirements, but in a society obsessed with
good and bad foods, which eats half of its meals in fast food stalls
and presents record cups of obesity, alcoholism, eating disorders and instant diets.
It' s hard to meet them. Due to its evolution, Our body
has been designed to ingest a wide variety of foods, but we have endangered
that great adaptability with a nutritional overload in the paleolithic recipe. This boeril and
its co- authors point out that supposedly primitive diets were much more concentrated on
all vitamins and minerals than modern diets, paying much less attention to fats,
proteins, salts, sugar and calories. Stone- age man, like most
tribal communities today, ingested a low- fat diet consisting mostly of plant-
derived foods, with some occasional bite of meat or fish. Since all foods
were fresh and low in fat, our ancestors avoided one of the main dangers
of modern diets, the high concentrations of useless calories. The human body was
designed to eat all kinds of food, but nature provides few with concentrated calories.
Walnuts, seeds and meat are the most concentrated foods found in wildlife and
constitute a relatively small part of the usual diet of almost all tribal societies.
For the most part, indigenous peoples must consume large amounts of fruits, grains
and vegetables up to three kilos a day in order to obtain the same calories
as we get with one third of that consumption. This also explains the faster
digestion of indigenous diets and the higher volume of elimination up to two kilos of
feces per day. Fruits vegetables and cereals contain large amounts of water and non
- digestible fibers. Therefore, you need to eat a lot of them to
extract calories that serve as fuel to the body. Indigenous diets, in addition
to providing enough fiber to the intestines, have the benefit of entering the vitamins.
A handful of wild vegetables can contain all the vitamins needed for a day
of fifty to sixty mg with less than ten calories. Instead, a toast,
a doughnut, a plate of cereals, coffee, and a glass of
milk satisfy only four percent of the vitamin required for the day with five hundred
calories as a source of vitamin C. Wild vegetables are one point two,
five, zero times more effective by calorie. By contrast, almost all processed
foods contain large doses of salt and sugar, along with extremely high fat proportions.
Although diet was not a distinguished feature of centennials, inadequate nutrition is clearly
linked to disease and premature aging. The most recent statistics indicate that the typical
American diet contains forty percent fat, sixty- five kilos of white sugar per
year and three to five times as much as the one needed by the body
can' t be a coincidence that eighty- six percent of the States meeting
over sixty- five years of age suffer from one or more generative disorders,
such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis, diabetes, and osteoporosis. Although
these diseases have long been considered to be diseases of old age, we see
them more appropriately as diseases of a lifestyle. There are alarming signs that these
same disorders occur in people under 50 years of age and even in young children.
If members of primitive and tribal societies survive childhood diseases and escape accidents,
the two main causes of premature death in wildlife enjoy strong and healthy constitutions throughout
life. By contrast, our Moidern lifestyle creates the foundation for cancer and heart
disorders in all age groups. A hundred years ago, when Americans ingested much
less fat and processed foods, much more fiber, and only a fraction of
our consumption of white sugar, the incidence of chronic diseases serra n n n
p NS. It is therefore worth returning to a more natural diet. Given
all the evidence associated with diet, there is the issue of alcohol, which
has its own ambiguities for several decades. Population studies in Europe have indicated that
those who drink a moderate amount of wine only one or two glasses a day
have lower heart attack cups than large drinkers and abstemies. The exact mechanism is
the subject of debate, but it is known that alcohol raises HDL rates,
high- density hypoproteins, good cholesterol and dilates blood vessels, thereby reducing blood
pressure. It also overrides emotional inhibitions, perhaps counteracting the tendency to accumulate emotional
tensions. Against this, however, we must weigh some very negative effects.
Alcoholism is a serious social problem and alcohol as a chemical element is toxic to
brain cells, it dehydrates the intestines, without being able to reverse the assimilation
of vital nutrients, especially in the elderly. There are various types of cancer
and birth defects that have been associated with the habit of drinking, albeit moderately,
not to mention the wide variety of disorders affecting alcoholics. If we consult
Jehuet' s study of octogenarians, but enagenaires who aged well, the fact
that subjects presented wide variations in their drinking habits suggests that alcohol itself is not
a definitive factor. The only clear implication is that the centennial alcoholics are very
few, if any, died at a much earlier age. Despite the lower
incidence of heart disease, which is the largest contribution of alcohol to health,
there is no evidence that drinking significantly increases longevity as a goal. By summarizing
the physical findings of Jehuet' s study, we discovered that his subjects maintained
a stable weight, ate moderately to s, and remained active throughout their lives.
Obviously, these factors are not enough to explain longevity. Millions of people
have those same habits and do not reach such an advanced age. It is
the psychological factors in Jehuet' s profile that differentiate these subjects more clearly from
their optimism, lack of worries, emotional adaptability, the ability to enjoy and
the love of autonomy. All this indicates a high degree of psychological health.
The fact that they had a higher intelligence than the average also correlates well with
similar studies. Higher intelligence makes it easier to maintain good health, earn a
stable income, and solve personal problems at the other end. People of low
intelligence are often unable to take advantage of the advice of books and articles on
health and nutrition. They fall more easily into low- income groups that cannot
afford good quality housing, food and health care. In addition, poor and
uneducated people have the highest consumption of cigarettes, which are powerful in terms of
cutting off their lives. One wonders whether longevity belongs only to those who are
lucky enough to be born with certain advantages. Psychologically healthy people tend to come
from psychologically healthy families. Parents with higher education and good incomes tend to provide
better education for their children, who in turn go on to earn better wages.
There is no doubt that these advantages are very useful. In a brief
but very suggestive study conducted in one thousand nine hundred and seventy, the psychiatrist
Erec Fifhred took thirty- four advanced sexagenic men and women qualified as the best
aging group by the University of Duke' s longevity study, one of the
main projects of his species. When comparing these successful elders with 34 men and
women with the worst aging, Feiffer discovered a significant difference in longevity. Men
of better aging survived on average, fourteen comas eight years longer than those of
worse aging. The women were separated by a slightly smaller difference, thirteen comma
eight years. This difference was not due to a single factor, but rather
to a constellation of biological, psychological and social factors resulting in what could be
qualified as elite status. According to Feifer, the characteristics of this elite status
were the following men one financial state. Seventy percent of the long- lived
men described their state as unbridled. Eighty percent of those short- lived said
they were poor, two self- perceptions of health as they grew old.
Seventy- five percent of the long- lived said that their health was equal
to or better than at the age of fifty- five. Eighty percent of
the short- lived said their health had worsened three self- evaluated physical functionings
in the sixties. Three percent of the long- liveds said they had no
disorders or at most mild disabilities. Sixty percent of short- lived people fell
into a 20 percent disability category to total disability. Four improvement in the financial
statement. Seventy percent of long- lived men said their income was equal to
or better than at the age of fifty- five. Sixty percent of short
- lived people said they were worse. Five marital status. Ninety- five
percent of long- lived men were married to seventy- five percent of short
- lived women one intellectual ratio. Long- lived women had a score fifty
percent higher than those of short- lived, two self- perceptions of health
as they grew older. Forty- seven percent of the long- lived women
evaluated their health as better than at the age of fifty- five, while
fifty- three percent of the short- lived women considered that their salutation had
worsened three civil states. Seventy- one per cent of long- term women
were married, seventy- one per cent of short- lived women not four
physical performance evaluations. Were many more long- lived women considered to be healthy
or barely disabled? There were many more short- lived women who were considered
to be partially or totally incapacitated. Five changes in the financial statement. Among
the long- lived, many more were financially better than at the age of
fifty- five, among the short- lived, many more had impoverished.
The conception of an elite of aging supports the idea that biology can suffer the
influence of external factors. Coming from a disadvantaged environment does not automatically disqualify a
person to improve their situation. As long as a person achieves a stable income,
good health and a satisfactory marriage, he or she will be increasing his
or her chances of living longer. But longevity itself can be proposed as a
conscious goal. Although almost all of us try to achieve the best possible life,
we do not always equate that goal with a long life. Throughout history,
longevity has been a prime goal, conscious only for a small number of
people. However, it is important to bear in mind the wisdom of those
few. In the 19th century, when only one in ten people reached the
age of sixty- five, whoever survived until the age of ninety or a
hundred could be considered a source of wisdom on longevity At the end of the
century an Englishman called g. M. Hombray, a doctor and professor of
surgery at Cambridge, examined nine hundred patients over the age of ninety, selected
fifty- two who were believed to be centennials and made a list of their
habits. He discovered that most of them were moderate or frugal in eating They
swallowed little meat and some alcohol, got up early and liked to work outdoors.
A vast majority more than eighty percent declared that they slept wonderfully. Almost
all declared as an average of more than eight hours per night for most of
their lives. As usual, centennial women vastly outnumbered men, ranging from thirty
- six to sixteen. Most of them had been married. Most of them
had large families. These characteristics respond to the same patterns as seen in modern
studies. They also originated what we might call the movement for longevity, according
to which the conscious attempt to reach a long life became more feasible. At
the end of the Victorian era, life expectancy was constantly increasing. The work
of paster and car had aroused enormous optimism about eliminating epidemic diseases. With social
reforms, housing, sanitary facilities and working conditions were improved. Instead of assuming
that long life was a gift of providence, people began to accept the resity
of their existence and to believe that things could be changed through self- effort.
Thus the first seeds of the prolongation were sown. Conscious of life.
Several nonagenary doctors of the Victorian era wrote books on longevity. Everyone was eagerly
advocating a simple diet and abundant exercise. Alexandre Geneoth, a Parisian doctor who
reached the age of one hundred and three, revealed that when he was ninety
- nine, when he got up every morning to work on his book,
he came to his studio by climbing three sections of stairs. His English colleague,
Sir Herman Webber, a doctor who lived until the age of ninety-
five, was inflexible as to the importance of constant plain exercise. In Genario
he recommended between one and three hours of daily walking and taking vacations that included
climbing mountains and long walks in the countryside. Other long- standing authorities of
the time believed in the virtues of rural life, to remain active in old
age and to maintain close social ties with the family and community. It is
also interesting that many of these elderly doctors advised vegetarian diets with small amounts of
farm produce. Most of them argued that he had to be low about two
point, five, zero zero per day, which is a frugal amount for
an adult who exercises several hours daily. Certain fortuitous tips appear that do not
have scientific proof, but still seem valid. Bever and Geniot had in high
esteem massages and deep breathing exercises. Today we would call them aerobics to stimulate
vital organs. None of these counsels has ever been denied. On the contrary,
many are supported by modern prevention techniques. In the 1930s, the writer
Mobison examined in his book of Lonrolife the longest life the biographies of centennials belonging
to many European cultures, going back to ancient times. Ernest came to the
conclusion that knowledge of some physical processes would prolong life to the age of one
hundred or one hundred or one hundred and twenty years and give the following indications.
Eat with frugality, exercise and take plenty of fresh air, choose an
occupation according to character, develop a placid or carefree personality, maintain a high
degree of personal hygiene, drink healthy fluids, refrain from stimulants and sedatives,
rest enough, move the intestines once a day live in a typhusua. These
pefrimalcas tried to reach a long life. For centuries, the literature of longevity
has been full of testimonies about the virtues of strict abstinence in the diet.
A 15th- century Venetian nobleman named Luigi Cornaro is famous in gerontology because,
after a blatantly dissolute youth, he resolved to lead a healthy life and try
to survive until he was one hundred years old. At least, his success
was spectacular. At a time when the average person could be considered lucky if
he was thirty- five years old, Cornaro lived to the age of one
hundred and three and remained active and lucid to the end. His method to
accomplish this feat was to abstain from drinking and eat very little in essence,
fasting from thirty- seven years on, Following the idea that the ancient Greeks
and Romans had of the frugal diet as a secret of longevity, Cornaro'
s indications achieved scientific credits centuries later, at least in animal experiments. In
the 1930s, Dr. Padmekey from Cornell University took freshly weaned rats and fed
them with only sixty percent of the calories a rat eats if he has food
constantly. The restricted diet was complemented by the right vitamins and minerals. Restricted
diet rats grew very slowly compared to normal, but seemed extremely healthy throughout their
lives. They could be kept in a retarded growth cycle for a thousand days,
when by then all rats maintained on the diet had died without restrictions.
When rats on restricted diets were allowed to eat a complete diet, they began
to grow normally and showed interest in sexual activity. Until then, the method
of undernourishment of em is absent to this day. Providing whole foods on a
very low calorie diet is the only proven way to lengthen the maximum life of
animals. The follow- up investigation indicated that the maximum life of fully fed
rats, approximately on average at 1, 000 days, could be extended to
one point, six, zero zero days in undernourished rats, representing an increase
of sixty percent. This technique would work in humans perhaps, but the test
cannot be applied in newly weaned babies, considering the risk of stunting their development
and taking into account obvious ethical objections. A human diet restricted to sixty percent
of normal calories approximately one point, five, zero zero daily for the average
adult bound with fasting. It would be intolerable to impose that on children and,
like adults, young people themselves do not detect any signs of aging,
they do not have too many incentives to avoid it. Cornaro began his fast
in the middle age, which may be enough. Dr. Bow Wafer,
a notable gerontologist at the University of California and declared an advocate of undernutrition.
He is one of the few scientists to practice the method personally. Balford.
He believes that reducing calories is a safe and effective procedure. Long after childhood.
To support his point of view, he applied a diet restricted to mice
who were about thirty or thirty- three years old. On the human scale,
he discovered that they lived 20 percent more. Unlike animals following a restricted
diet from birth. These did not exceed the age above the mice. On
the other hand, twenty percent more life represents about fifteen years in humans.
The animals had excellent health throughout their lives and were aged with a fraction of
the tumors and heart diseases that had fully fed mice. Balford did not subject
animals to total fasting every day. Previous research had shown that following a restricted
diet only on a daily basis was highly effective in increasing the duration of life.
In addition, they were gradually introduced into the new diet, allowing their
bodies to change the metabolic adjustment point to give rise to food restrictions without abrupt
changes. The metabolic adjustment point is a brain mechanism that regulates the speed with
which the body burns fuel. It also indicates when to be hungry and when
to be satisfied. If you try to impose a diet that disagrees with your
metabolic adjustment point, the brain will create cravings for food until more food is
supplied. By gradually changing the metabolic adjustment point, Valford induced them to get
in line with the low calories required by undernourishment. It advises the same gradual
process for those who adopt its method to take several months or whole years to
adjust to a forty percent reduction in calorie consumption. This gradual plan forms the
basis of Balford' s diet. He believes that this will allow anyone to
overtake the horn and live up to one hundred and twenty years of age or
older. The idea is to lose weight gradually in the next four, five
or six years. It says until it' s ten percent to twenty-
five percent below the adjustment point. That' s the weight you' ll
get if you don' t eat too much or too little. It is
usually what was weighed between the ages of twenty- five and thirty. Gradual
calorie restriction should include a careful selection of foods that includes all vitamins and minerals.
It' s not the same undernourishment as undernourishment. From a medical point
of view, Balford' s diet could induce almost safe improvements in health,
especially in cancer and cardiovascular diseases, instead of eating the thirty- seven percent
fat consumed daily by the average American not even thirty percent advised by prevention experts.
The Balford regimen reduces fat to a marginal eleven percent, approximately the one
containing a tablespoon of vegetable oil plus a picca of cereal vegetables and fruits.
Although this consumption is so minimal that only the most intensely motivated person could realistically
expect to survive with it does not normally offer any danger in the short term.
The published program to reverse heart disease devised by moneg' s cardiologist contains
only that amount of fat, as does the Pritiqui Plan and the previous jub
University rice diet. Another advantage of dietary restriction is the elimination of useless calories
and processed foods in a one- zero- zero- calorie- daily regimen.
There' s no place for cakes, cookies, ice cream, hamburgers
and chips. Sugar and fat should be strained to make room for an abundance
of whole foods. This is a desirable goal. Although the Balford Plan does
not lead to longevity, some gerontologists point out that really interesting animals are not
those on a restricted diet, but those who were allowed to eat as much
as they wanted. Dr. Lannar Heffleck, one of the country' s
leading research gerontologists, says the argument should be reversed to restricted mice. They
are only allowed to reach the maximum limit of their life to the control group
or kills excessive feeding. This argument makes a lot of sense when applied to
humans. The excessive generative diseases afflicting our society in old age indicate that we
are being prevented from reaching it. The long and healthy life that a few
achieve about fifteen percent of those over sixty- five years of age has no
generative disorder such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, or osteoporosis.
No one has yet discovered why the calorie restriction prolongs the life of animals.
Balford' s guessing he' s postponing immune system failures. Today,
a huge government facility in Backens has been dedicated to sub- feed 30,
000 rats. Similar tests are being carried out on monkeys. Undoubtedly, the
results that have so far been favourable will be widely disseminated in the near future.
It seems unlikely that many people will submit to a severe caloric restriction as
a program of longevity given the rigors, but my cultural formation predisposes me in
favor of occasional fasting. In India there is a centuries- old tradition according
to which longevity can be achieved by taking little or no food a day a
week in the form of fruit juice, hot water with honey or skim milk.
The principle is simple. This allows the digestive system to take a break,
regain balance and free itself from accumulated impurities. Modern physiology has not accepted
these principles, but all spiritual traditions exhibit long- standing ones that respected them.
As I believe, the success of frugality in eating is that it must
be combined with a lifestyle in which fasting is not a punishment or a disciplinary
measure, but a respite from daily activity. The usual time spent eating should
be spent alone and in serenity. In this way, fasting would allow the
body to participate in a feeling of mild inactivity. It seems to me that
centennials tend to take a lot of advantage of gerontologists in terms of what they
know about life. There is a pathetic lack in any piecemeal approach to life
by intriguing that results in any separate failure. Food restrictions do not touch the
rich psychology of human beings and what we know so far about longevity indicates that
this factor is of paramount importance. I recently read an interview with an inspiring
hundred- year- old call to Edna Ossen. She' s very devoted.
He has spent his life singing, praying and writing poems to express his
faith. When asked about his life, he said when he was only two
years old, God spoke to me. He told me that he was God
and that he wanted me to believe in him and he told me I would
take care of you and he did so. He said don' t tell
your mother yet. She' ll say you' re a silly girl and
you don' t know what you' re saying. I will send you
dreams and God sent me dreams in the morning before waking up and they were
always true dreams. They told me what to do. So I have lived
my whole life a woman fed by a thousand or thirty zero rats kept with
scarce rations. I know that the right position seems strange, but I cannot
conceive of survival without vision, even if it does not wake up with dreams
sent by God. Every new day must mean something to me and when so,
I am convinced that the battle is won. However, this emphasis on
the personal qualities of the heart and mind is at odds with current gerontology.
The greatest strength of the field is in biotechnology. The most exciting discoveries that
the media announce with extravagant enthusiasm are related to hormones of youth and genetic engineering.
That' s the real hope. There is an attractive simplicity in the
idea that youth is only a matter of injecting the right chemical elements or manipulating
a whimsical gene into the minds of many people, including numerous gerontologists. The
science of longevity is ultimately reduced to finding a magic bullet, a substance that
chemically alters the propensity of our cells to aging. Therefore, we must evaluate
this perspective and ask why the type of longevity that seems feasible in test tubes
is so far from that achieved by centennials in real life, longevity without limits.
The future of an unlikely survivor. It seems logical that the strongest creatures
are those who live the most, but in that case the naked monkey would
be a bad candidate for longevity. When we come out of the womb in
a state of total defenselessness unlike the Arctic Caribu, for example, whose calf
falls to the direct tumbdra in mind from the belly, immediately collects its swinging
bearing and a few hours later walks satisfied. Along with the flock. As
we know, human newborns cannot even sit or change positions. The things we
can do just out of the belly. Sucking, swallowing, salivating, emitting
hiccups blinking, yawning, coughing, sneezing, stretching, crying and falling asleep
are very useful for survival, except for the first two, sucking and swallowing,
which allow us to feed. The baby also has certain reflexes that must
have made survival easier for our remote ancestors. A human newborn is able to
close his hand so tightly that he can hold his own weight. If he
gets it up, likely echo of the baby monkey holding on to his mother
' s fur. But this specter of genetic past disappears after two months.
Almost all the beasts have evolved in some way to protect their DNA from the
elements, either with shells, feathers, coats or scales, but the human
skin is naked and so thin that it is easy to pass through. Our
adn is vulnerable to wind, rain, cold and heat. Until we stay
a few hours in the sun, it makes us susceptible to cancer. After
years of maturation, many more than any other mammal requires. Humans still cannot
run fast enough to escape lions and tigers if we decide to stop and present
combat. Our teeth, nails and fists represent a pathetically inadequate defense. Therefore,
it makes little sense for man to live more than any other hot-
blooded creature. Up to one hundred and fifteen and one hundred and twenty years,
at least one man of today, a Japanese islander named if Chillo Izumi
reached that limit and Sumi born two months after the murder of Dwenken in one
thousand eight hundred and sixty- five, died one hundred and twenty years and
two hundred and thirty- seven days later, in one thousand nine hundred and
eighty- six, his doctor said that Isumisan remained healthy and lucid until a
few months before his death. In his eleventh decade he still walked daily and
drank the rice beer of the area. In the Guines Book of World Records
there is a lovely photo of him showing him as a good oriental with his
long beard, nive surrounded by two or children born in his village since his
one hundred and ten birthday. Other people without faith- deserving birth certificates may
have lived as much or more than izumi. American Artherby is believed to be
one hundred and twenty- four years old when he died in a thousand nine
hundred and eighty- four. That means he was born in the year LINKLN
was elected for the first time. Today, the oldest person appears to be
the French Jim Lewis Hawment, one hundred and seventeen years old. As governments
and health agencies are not very reliable when it comes to following the long-
lived trail. The most notable are those mentioned in the book Guiness generally for
its advertising value. She recently mentioned three women, a Welsh woman of one
hundred and twelve years and two Americans of one hundred and fifteen as the oldest
in the world. The fact that all these possible records are women agrees with
the advantage that women have over men throughout their lives. Among the centennials,
women outnumber the sonsore by two to one. Almost all longevity studies first mention
the giant tortoise which is cold- blooded with a lifetime of 150 years,
at least one specimen of that age was registered living in an old fort on
Mauritius Island, in the Indian Ocean. This turtle, in particular, was
captured as an adult and not died of old age but by accident, falling
from a canyon site that had been technically rotten speaking. A coral colony can
be considered as a single organism of extremely long life. Although individual polyps do
not survive long, the entire colony lasts thousands and thousands of years among mammals.
Our closest competitors in terms of longevity are the great whales that can reach
a hundred years and more a certain blue whale returned every season to its feeding
territory off the coast of Australia for almost a whole century in the best conditions.
The elephants can survive until the age of seventy, but among small mammals
the life time is drastically reduced. Rats, shrimps, and rats only live
one to three years in optimal conditions. Dogs and domestic cats can reach twenty
and thirty years, respectively. Biologists use two measurements for the possible lifetime of
any animal. There is a maximum life time the outer limit of longevity in
a given species and a half- life expectancy the time that members of a
species normally live in a wild environment. There is often a huge divergence between
these two figures. Nature is extravagant with births and equally extravagant with death,
for it allows many more beasts to be born than they will survive until the
age of procreation. Every year at least half of the small animals and birds
die, whatever their species. Beings as diverse as the praying amantis and the
shiny tropical fish of the great reef barrier will breed neers of thousands of young
for each surviving one. The jib whale theoretically has a maximum life span exceeding
seventy years, but in today' s polluted seas, newborns seem to have
a life expectancy that barely reaches two or three years. This dreadful shortening of
life is tragic, because if there are not enough whales to reach the age
of procreation, the species will decline to extinction even without man' s destructive
intervention. Getting to old age is one of nature' s great improbability.
The only feasible way to measure the maximum life time of an animal and the
data will only be approximate is to observe it in a zoo that serves as
a kind of museum of longevity. Zoo animals are kept well, fed and
protected from predators until they die of old age. Thus we have discovered how
peculiar longevity can be in general. The smaller an animal is, the shorter
its life. That' s why elephants live 35 times more than shrimp.
Having established this fact we immediately became entangled in complications. Some small animals,
especially if cold- blooded, survive a long time. Fresh water mussels and
sea anemones can live a century. Despite their high heart rate and rapid metabolism,
birds do not wear out quickly. Eagles, condors, you and parrots
can live between fifty and seventy years. Something in flying life gives them durability,
as even bats live three to four times more than a mouse of the
same size. The man, for his part, is much smaller than an
elephant, but lives longer. All these anomalies indicate that nature has few fixed
rules for determining the duration of life. Human beings have the ability to think
about immortality, but the greatest approximation of DNA has been in primitive organisms,
planton amoebas algae and micros, to name just a few whose existence is too
simple to allow aging. Any meba that floats today in a ditch on the
side of the road sprang from the first amoeba that appeared in the world.
Instead of aging and dying, that ancestral meba indefinitely prolonged its existence, dividing
itself into decaled copies of itself over and over again. Immortality was the first
survival strategy to learn DNA hundreds of millions of years before complex plants and animals
appeared, bringing with it the complicated aging syndromes. A coral reef never gets
cancer. Streptococcus are immune to Alzheimer' s disease. Fifty years ago,
it still seemed possible that human cells were potentially immortal that could be divided indefinitely
if given a chance. The most convincing support came from a famous experiment initiated
in nineteen hundred and twelve by the Rockefeller Institute. Dr. Lecs cral eminent
surgeon Francis laureated with the Nobel Prize, took a sample of fibrobla cells found
in connective tissues, such as the cartilage of the heart of chicken embryos,
and began to cultivate them in a nutritious solution. The cells thrived, divided,
and split again. Blas favors were divided with so much enthusiasm that they
overflowed the flasks. Then Carrel withdrew the excess and completed the nutritious solution with
fresh broth. Under this regime, cells multiplied unbridledly for thirty- four years
to stop only when the project was abandoned two years after Carrell' s death.
The experimenter had a tendency to theatricality. As the fame of these chicken
cells spread, he conferred on them supernatural qualities. Attending the cells looked a
lot like a religious rite. Remember Uberwelsen Faud. Actually, everything that went
into Carrell' s lab took on a ceremonial air as it grew. His
celebrity became his technicians performing their solemn functions wearing broad black robes with hoods.
Carrel died convinced of having solved a crucial part of the riddle of aging.
Cells could live forever as long as they were provided with the right environment.
Unfortunately, it was discovered that he had made a serious technical error by adding
new amounts of nutritional means that were also derived from chickens. I was accidentally
introducing new embryo cells. It was those cells that continued to divide once dead
to the previous generation of fibro blast. The last hope that human cells were
immortal and shattered by chance in the late 1950s. When Heafleck, a young
researcher from Philadelphia, was launched, he could not get a number of human
embryonic cells to multiply beyond a certain limit. As carefully as I put it
in the culture, the cells died after about fifty divisions. However, the
false experiment is that of Iflix, it became a discovery when he realized that
he had found the limit of cellular longevity was born what would be known as
the Iphlik limit. In addition to ruining the results of Carrell, Ithlick also
observed that, as it approached its fiftieth division, the cells split more slowly
and began to appear older, accumulating yellowish debris. Other experiments revealed that the
aiflikera limit appears to be part of the programmed memory of DNA, since non
- vitro cultured cells, i e in test tubes under laboratory conditions, seemed
to recall the proximity of the limit. If a cell culture freezes, after
twenty divisions, for example, after thawing, it will reproduce thirty times more
to then die. This implies that a fixed plan is followed. The IPFLICK
limit, therefore, is a strong endorsement of the idea that aging is controlled
by a biological clock i FLICK, which is now an old spokesman for the
theories of the clock of aging, believes that humans have a maximum lifetime fixed,
using the simple logic that if our cells have a fixed life limit.
Ours can' t give them up. In support of this theory. When
cells extracted from older people are grown in the laboratory, they die many times
less than younger cells, revealing that they were already close to the IFLIC limit.
If you are provided with a new environment with perfectly controlled nutrients, your
life does not prolong. Similarly, the skin of old mice grafted into younger
specimens, continues to age and die according to the donor' s life cycle.
However, the limit of ipflick does not appear to be the same for
all cells. Roy Balford of the University of California conducted further experiments to show
that white blood cells can reach only a limit of fifteen to twenty divisions.
Lower limits have been seen in short- lived animal cells, such as rats
and mice. In order to exceed the iflic limit, researchers have had to
resort to artificial conditions unknown in nature. The bone marrow can be removed from
an old mouse and implanted into a young mouse. When it gets older,
c ex brings the marrow and retransplants it. Thus, marrow cells have survived
four or five generations of mice implanted far beyond the limit of ifric. It
has been pointed out as a challenge that growing cells under glass is an art
that has not yet been perfected. It is assumed that, when better conditions
are developed for tissue culture, the cells could be divided more than fifty times
the guide and the destination. How the limit affects our chances of living beyond
a certain age. Although this limit is often considered the most significant experimental finding
on aging, its importance for real life is unknown. In the lab.
Each generation of cells is the offspring of a limited number of stem cells.
On the other hand, babies are not born with a complete complement of cells
throughout life, new ones are being produced. The bone marrow, for example,
generates immature blood cells that grow to maturity at various stages of first development
and sometimes throughout life. Each organ contains a mixture of primitive, partially mature
and mature cells. Mature ones are the ones that have been differentiated by choosing
to become heart cells and not stomach cells, brain cells, if not kidney
cells. Within all cells there is the same adén, but by differentiation,
it expresses certain characteristics and represses others. Some theorists would exceed the limit of
Ifrica, claiming that a cell does not start its career from fifty divisions,
but after having differentiated at various stages of our life, some primitive cells are
divided and matured, while others remain primitive. Thus, the body is equipped
with reserve resources. Even if each cell must respect the iflic limit it is
not necessary to obey it all together. If this escape clause is to be
accepted, it depends on understanding how cells decide to differentiate themselves in the first
place, and geneticists are still far from knowing. A whole class of cells
the cancerous ones are devoid of growth limits. Released from genetic restriction, cancer
cells are wildly divided until the body that hosts them dies. If they are
grown in vitro, they are lost to that limit. Almost all malignant cells
grown in laboratories around the world are descendants of tissues taken from a few individuals
long ago. One of the undisputed victories of Aifliques, which led aging to
the cellular plane. His method of aging under glass, as he once called
it, is accepted as a norm by biologists. I Flick stated that the
primary cause of changes caused by aging can no longer be considered as the result
of events occurring in the supercellular plane, i e in cell hierarchies corresponding to
the plane of tissues or higher. It is in the cell where the gerontological
action is found. According to this logic, it matters much less to study
how organisms live than to observe how their cells live. This logic dominates the
current biology of aging, but it seems to me pure reductionism. The logic
I have followed throughout this book is that the whole is much more important than
the parts. A person' s life determines the activity of his cells,
not the other way around. However, these approaches are not irreconcilable, as
no one can live longer than their cells. At least that' s safe.
Biologists, such as AIPFLIC, tend to regard DNA as almighty and far
removed from everyday life, as a kind of biochemical jeovah whose dictates cannot be
dismissed. It' s like the DNA wasn' t used to keep working,
it was complaining to uber Wrossenthaud. However, this is just a point
of view. If you look at life with the eyes of a geneticist.
Nothing means that a very old person has a strong will to live or to
enjoy the simple pleasures of life. And indeed, that may be insignificant for
the original DNA programming, but as a result of a well- used life,
it is of enormous importance. It' s actually the most important thing
outside of the test tubes and the flasks of biologists. DNA is influenced by
all your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Stress hormones that play such a
critical role in aging. NS are regulated by the RNA, which is a
copy of the DNA. Although DNA may remain quiet in your vault, your
active twin is constantly changing your instructions. When you change your lifestyle to reduce
stress, the arn of your cells responds by producing fewer stress hormones. The
limit of ihli takes away meaning from the whole aging process becomes a mechanism that
can be manipulated, in a laboratory devoid of breath, movement, heat,
experience, memory, love, hope, courage, sacrifice, will, curiosity
and everything that makes life worthy of being lived. Unfortunately, manipulating cells is
still the dominant activity of gerontology and it is the one that causes the greatest
enthusiasm. In nineteen hundred and ninety, the media announced that researchers at the
University of Wescomsen had injected synthetic human growth hormones into a small group of men
whose ages ranged from sixty- one to eighty- one. The result was
a sudden rejuvenation that reversed biological aging in up to twenty years. In the
course of six months of testing, they recovered muscle mass and strength. Coupledly,
fat disappeared without diets, improved memory and other brain functions. Renewed vigor
and resistance. This artificially recovered youth was welcomed by the public with tremendous enthusiasm.
Popular stories compared this to the fanciful rejuvenation of the film Cocon. The
subjects, for their part, were deeply affected. I began to feel the
changes. After three months, I felt much stronger. I mean, I
never felt so strong in my life. He reminded a retired man that he
had been a worker in a Baukegan factory. The experiment only included men whose
natural growth hormone levels were extremely depleted. For the most part, the elderly
have them at the level of adequate, but reduced, soundness. Those who
do not have enough growth hormones age faster and more severely than normal. When
these subjects started the experiment, they had excessive biological aging. Therefore, restoring
your hormone levels created a dramatic difference. For the first time in years,
many of them could travel, take long walks or work in the garden,
but the improvement was not permanent. When those extremely expensive treatments were interrupted about
$ 14, 000 a year, the ravages of age gradually returned, the
muscles reappeared, the fat reappeared, the strength diminished, and the men were
left with no more lasting benefit than some sign of improvement in memory. While
it lasted, it was great. Maybe someday I can try again. One
melancholy said when he was told that the next experiment would include women, he
said with approval. I think they should be given the opportunity to feel what
we feel. I am concerned about those words taken from a praiseworthy journalistic report.
It is not possible to assume that injecting growth hormones does not have long
- term side effects. This may not happen among the elderly, whose natural
hormone levels are abnormally low, but in normal people it is useless to add
growth hormones to rejuvenate. To intervene rudely in the functioning of the body does
not actually alter the source of the problem. Supplying a drug even the one
produced by the same body can effectively push physiology to one side or the other.
But the body remembers what it wants to do. As long as that
memory is not changed, there will always be imbalance. Who should fight with
the diabete knows how many metabolic imbalances insulin dependent patients suffer and the careful juggling,
which must be done with doses to avoid insulin shock and coma. The
replacement hormone is the life molecule, but it lacks the slow innate intelligence needed
to use that molecule. Diabetes, hypothyroidism, and aging itself are not due
to the exhaustion of molecules, but rather to the loss of intelligence. Inevitably,
every miracle of rejuvenation achieved with chemical elements will mess up the intelligence of
the body. When growth hormones were provided to children with developmental retardation, the
experimenters encountered severe side effects and several lows. The argument that aging is due
to an abnormal production of hormones is convincing to me, but the function of
hormones is to carry messages, and those messages, ultimately, are controlled by
consciousness. By increasing inner intelligence, encouraging your happiness and satisfaction, you can
defeat aging in a lasting and meaningful way. No chemical elements of possible side
effects. The responsibility to change that consciousness lies with each individual. The aging
gene. In addition to hormonal treatments, genetic engineering concentrates much of the hopes
of defeating aging. Forty years ago, after Watsen and Crick decoded the chemical
structure of DNA, the aging gene hunt became inevitable. By discovering s gene
Scientists could possess the key to command to have immortal cells. Even if nature
had failed in the task. At several American universities, researchers have been announcing
great advances in the location of genes that regulate aging, in yeast, fruit
flies and, finally, in humans. Michael West, a molecular biologist at
the University of Texas, working with human cells grown in tissues, isolated two
mortality genes, the effect of which is to accelerate the aging process. In
these cells. These two protulated genes M one and M two can be activated
or deactivated chemically, driving the aging process forwards or backwards will. In abnormal
aging, both MG one and M two appear to be activated. By deactivating
the genem one west can return youth to a cell and double its total life
time calculated according to the number of divisions it performs. Apparently, or it
' s discovered how to exceed the limit of efflica will. The results are
even more dramatic. When m two, the second gene of mortality, is
deactivated, cells continue to divide indefinitely and remain forever young. West found that
if he reactivated the ml the cells resumed normal aging. This may be the
only gene of aging, although other researchers offer contenders. According to the general
opinion, aging appears to be polygenetic, involving the collaboration of several genes at
the same time, perhaps many. Moreover, the discovery of these switches does
not mean that there is, as it makes them work. It may be
unknown brain mechanisms that control genetic switches, and it is almost certain that these
mechanisms vary according to the life and experience of each individual. It is not
disputed that the body can record the passage of time. Those who propose the
existence of a biological clock have traced the origins of the internal biorhythms of the
body to a small group of neurons located in the hypothalamus, known as the
suprachiasmatic nucleus. This mass of tissue no larger than the end of a pencil
regulates the body' s sense of time, but finding the body' s
biological clock does not solve the mystery of aging, because the hypothalamus is connected
to the rest of the brain. The endocrine system and the immune system give
two and any of them could be involved, because they possess formidable intelligence of
their own. Our body is intelligent everywhere Brain chemical elements are not only secreted
in the head. They are also produced by the skin, stomach, intestines,
and heart. The white blood cells that float through the immune system are
equipped with identical receptors for the neucrotransmitters. They form a sort of floating brain.
The skin is added more endocrine hormones than the endocrine system itself m one
and m two. They are fascinating fragments of this vast intelligence network Macoba has
formed a company to see if you can find a drug that manipulates these genes.
But just as it was discovered that the use of interferon to fight cancer
caused horrendous side effects, high costs and few results, wuz efforts have a
long way to go before achieving any benefit for cells outside glass tubes. Genetic
engineering to this day includes highly hazardous procedures, such as marrow transplantation. I
mean, it' s a drastic operation. Until now. Among the organisms
that have been prolonged their lives by the manipulation of ethical geneara, the most
advanced are fruit flies, yeasts and nematodes. I believe that the application of
this technology to humans is unlikely. However, this branch of gerontology is imbued
with optimism that drips into popular journalism. If we developed ways to repair the
aging tissues with embryo cells in the next decade, we could add 30 healthy
years to human life. Said a virgin medicine professor echoed by a colleague from
Texas. Possibly, in thirty years we will have dominated the main genes that
determine longevity and we will be able to double, triple and even quadruple our
maximum lifetime. Some of the people currently in existence may still be alive within
400 years. A more moderate Louisiana researcher said, we can discover that it
is possible to prolong life considerably more, perhaps up to one hundred percent,
which would give us a hundred or one hundred and twenty years a day.
Other gerontologists do not dare to give specific figures, but they lack nothing in
terms of enthusiasm. I think it is very possible that we prolong human life
far beyond what has ever been dreamed of. A red- colored researcher said
he had succeeded with a nematode, a clear worm the size of a coma.
Under the surface of these fantastic predictions of geneticists regarding aging, something disturbing
is hidden. Americans like to imagine that technical ingenuity solves any problems, such
as IBM engineers who modify computers to make them faster and more efficient. Gerontologists
try to improve the human machine. The theory is that with a few small
biochemical retouchings it is possible to give the body more efficiency, less propensity to
breakdowns and longer duration against wear. If there is a field dedicated to seeing
the body as something foolish and intrinsically defective, that field is genetics. Like
other reductionist models, the genetic life of aging pays no attention to life as
a whole. Unlike the salmon of the Pacific, humans are not puppets of
biological destiny. Right now, there are populations that have largely exceeded high blood
pressure, arterial diseases and childhood infections, which have a low proportion of major
cancers, etc. The problem is that no single culture combines all these favorable
characteristics. When we try to achieve longevity that fully meets a person' s
wishes, we will discover that DNA can change to fit our highest expectations.
The intelligence of the body consists precisely in adapting to new conditions. If you
were a research biologist and you were in the stone age with a perfect map
of human DNA, you could use it to predict the emergence of civilization.
You would pre- announce Mozart Einstein the Parthenon, the New Testament. You
could see that by the year two thousand, the best living conditions would add
six decades to the life expectancy of primitive man. The wonder of DNA is
not that it governs my life, but that it can unfold previously unknown possibilities,
as they arise in my heart and mind. In other words, the
AVEN serves my purposes, rather than the reverse. There are societies that place
a lot of value on longevity. It is there, in the real-
life environment, that we have found our best laboratory. Instead of relying on
isolated individuals who reach extreme longevity, we can study an entire population to which
this ambition was inculcated since childhood. The results have been remarkable, despite the
lack of scientific participation, secrets from long- lived ones. Remote Abkhazia,
a mountainous region of southern Russia is a land of almost mythical old age.
I don' t know any other place where there' s a certain word
to designate the father of the great- grandfather applicable only to the living.
The region’ s legendary longevity caught the world’ s attention in the late
1960s, when Western visitors were invited to meet Russia’ s super centennials.
They were villagers, rural, almost all illiterate farmers, reputed to have reached
incredible ages one hundred and twenty, one thousand and one hundred and thirty and
over one hundred and seventy years outside the Soviet Union. Those claims had little
credibility. Gerontologists widely recognized that the upper limit of human life was between one
hundred and fifteen and one hundred and twenty years. Even that was a theoretical
limit, for until then no one who had a birth certificate worthy of faith
had passed the one hundred and thirteen years. But in Russia, the oldest
of the super centennials, a man named Sidalli my Limov, was known to
have been born in one thousand eight hundred and five, seven years before Napoleon
marched over Moscow, Mislimo lived in a remote village in the state of Azerbaijan,
west of the Caspian Sea, where he died in one thousand nine hundred
and seventy- three at the incredible age of one hundred and sixty- eight.
Thus, the end had isolated him from the visitors because of his poor
health. But if Westerners could not visit the oldest man of all who lived,
it was possible to interview the oldest of all time. He was faf
Lazuria, a native of Abkhazia and claimed to be approximately one hundred and forty
years old. With a mixture of fascination and skepticism. Foreign visitors, including
doctors and journalists, began to arrive. From the very beginning, Abkhazia turned
out to be a charming place for those who came from the crowded cities of
Europe and the United States. The countryside was green and idyllic. The Abkhaz
people, for the most part, lived at altitudes of between two hundred and
three hundred meters above sea level, in neat two- storey houses, often
built of walnut, with large galleries and antique rooms. The climate of the
hills near the Black Sea was mild throughout the year, although somewhat cold,
with an average temperature of ten to thirteen degrees. But the Abkhaz tanned enjoyed
that somewhat icy air, assuring that it contributed throughout their lives except for the
kitchen. The houses in general were not heated, although the region had suffered
epidemics of malaria and typhouses until in the 1930s Soviet engineers dried up the marshes
of the lowlands. Abkhazia boasted of having five times more centenarians than any other
area of the world, and eighty percent of the long- lived never had
the old word applied to them. They were active and vigorous, both for
men and women. The usual thing was to work on the te plantations for
several decades after the official age of 60 for the Soviet retreat. The collection
champions were given certificates when they were 100 years old. When a group of
curious American journalists appeared at the door of Banacha Temur, one hundred and ten
years old, he came out of his garden alive to greet them. Banacha
was always called by his name Pila. He saw a baby among the visitors
smiling with pleasure. He insisted that a cow be milked to provide him with
a snack. He offered the adult apple baskets from his best trees and distributed
large glasses of the regional apple spirit. Before consenting to speak of himself,
he expressed himself with simple conviction about the need for world pass and harmony between
the United States and the former Soviet Union. Needless to say, your visitors
were completely delighted. Strange thing among long- lived Abkhazs. Banacha had a
baptism certificate. A rarity in a region where records are kept to a minimum.
At best, according to the date of his document, Banacha was one
hundred and six years old, but he explained that his parents had waited four
years to baptize him because they were too poor to pay the priest. The
vigor of Banacha still at the age of one hundred and six was incredible.
He wrote one of the visitors was a man of five feet of sparkling stature,
blue eyes and elegant white mustache. The personification of the kind and playful
grandfather. He attributed the slender and fibrous body to light food, horseback riding,
agricultural work and walks through the Anhanacha mountains. Himer was considered one of
the healthiest among the long- lived. An American doctor took his blood pressure
that had a youthful rate of 120 diagonal eighty- four. It was not
an atypical case. In a detailed study of all Abkhaz over the age of
ninety, it was found that eighty- five percent enjoyed good mental health and
lively character. Only ten percent were hard- eared and four percent had bad
eyesight. Both men and women in that culture shared a passion for race horses.
It was a matter of self- respect that the centennials took part in
the village parades. In the United States, the concept of maintaining an extreme
activity already advanced to old age was only beginning to receive credit among doctors,
but in Abkhazia sedentary retirement was not known, except in cases of disability.
Typically, older workers abbreviated their hours in the fields as they approached the 1980s
and 1990s. Instead of working between ten and fifteen hours, they left after
three, four or five hours. However, that effort was not imposed on
them. Among the Abkhaz. The love of hard work was deeply rooted.
Records showed that one summer a hundred and nine- year- old woman was
paid for forty- nine full- days in the tea options plant The entire
Caucasus mountain range has been famous for centuries as a longevity belt in the area
bordering the Black Sea by the west and the Caspian by the east. Three
different Russian States proclaimed to have super centennial g Georgia, which s s stino
the State of Abkhazia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. A mixture of breeds inhabits the
barely industrialized area. The region moves from the Muslim religion to Christianity according to
where it goes, and the climate varies widely. From the high mountain.
The Caucasus is the highest mountain range in Europe, with a maximum of five
four zero zero meters to the subtropical These details were important for gerontologists, because
with such diversity of cultures, races and climates, there was no isolated genetic
heritage that justified the longevity of that region. Nor was there a favored geographical
place, a kind of blood and Russian. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, the epidemic of heart attacks that followed World War II reached its peak.
Cancer rates did not show significant changes since the 1930s. The same can
be said today, after three more decades of research with generous funding. The
long- lived had avoided both pests to a remarkable degree. In addition to
the frequent exercise much of the merit corresponded to the diet the favored population with
a rich soil and a climate suitable for corn, tomatoes and all kinds of
vegetables. It fed on vegetables from its own orchards and smaller farm produce,
quantities of nuts, cereals and meat to round the menu. Yogurt, a
basic element of your diet, has long been known to prolong your life to
capitalize on that. An American yogurt factory published a series of delicious advertisements in
which a eighty- nine- year- old Abkhaz was seen testing the product
while there was a mother of one hundred and seventeen. He was pinching his
cheek. Although almost all long- lived people consumed cheese, milk, and
yogurt. Every day. Total consumption of fats and calories was strikingly low for
Western customs, between one, five, zero, and two calories a day.
In order to eat so rough or, n o n o n ns
Americans would have to take between five hundred and two thousand calories away from their
diets. Among the Abkhaz, daily fat consumption was 60 grams, exactly half
of the US average. Although they liked to drink the local spirit, only
a few supercentenaries smoked. Among them were rare women, who traditionally regarded this
practice as the prerogative of male life. Most of them were married since they
were 20 years old. As the region has few paved routes, they had
the habit of walking up to thirty kilometers a day. One of the first
Americans to enter this amazing health culture was Dr Alexandre Leaf, an enlightened professor
of medicine at Harvard, who was one of the first advocates of prevention.
To support his belief that exercise and diet were the basal stones of good health
throughout his life, he made a pilgrimage to all places in the world where
longevity was legendary. Abkhazia awoke him with great enthusiasm. Agilief saw with his
own eyes people who survived with good greetings of unprecedented ages. On his visit
of nineteen hundred and seventy- two to Abkhazia, Liff endeavored to keep up
with Gaville Chapnian, a short, fibrous old man who at the age of
one hundred and seventeen easily climbed a steep hill to reach his hundred and four
- year- old Marthy Tar Hill orchard. He would still rise at dawn
and dive into an icy stream to bathe. Matinal Liff wrote marty attributes his
long life to God, the mountains and a good diet, and recommends not
to eat without pepper. His best age was at eighteen. But he agrees
with Manacha that he considered himself young until he was sixty. I still feel
young. I feel good on horseback, like I swim well every day,
so I still feel young, though not as strong as I used to be
in the West. When we get older, the body loses muscle mass and
replaces it with fat at sixty- five years of age. It is n
n NS, almost half the weight of men and women corresponds to fat twice
as much as at the age of 20. By comparison, almost all long
- lived Abkhaz were upright- backed and firm muscles. Long after retirement,
the older ones flourished outdoors in the summer, marching to the high pastures and
digging potatoes into their orchards, even in those cases where coronary arteries were blocked
or some other damage to the heart muscle. The walks and the climbing of
those who all participated seemed to nullify the physical limitations. Quando Leaf brought photographs
of the long- lived for the Nahonal Jaker piache Key in nineteen hundred and
seventy- two million readers saw a face of old age that in his country
had never been seen and rarely imagined. Twenty years later, we are faced
with a huge increase in all age groups over sixty- five and long-
lived Abkhaz people are increasingly fascinated by their culture. The new old age has
existed for many generations. By tradition they lead a life in which all the
ingredients necessary for a conscious and consenting longevity are gathered, not only the longevity
of the survivor, but that of the youth in old age, title chosen
by LEAFH for his book. The Abkhaz succeeded in redefining youth in such a
way that it was not the opposite of long survival. Some could be chronologically
old, but young according to their measurement patterns. Writing down his impressions of
a ninety- eight- year- old man named Thit ganba Lif wrote tiget.
He had a blood pressure of 104 diagonal seventy- two and a regular
pulse of eighty- four beats per minute. He looked like a very placid
individual with a lot of reserve mileage in the presence of two centennials. They
still had him for a young man, the supercentenary scam. Why, given
this idyllic situation, we have not all heard of Abkhazia. One pound.
The reason is that the first reports brought by Westerners soon became tarnished with confusion
and mistrust. What made Abkhazia so interesting In the mid- 1970s it was
not her lifestyle, but the phenomenon of the super centennials. The Soviet government
then wanted to reap good propaganda, ensuring that its elders survived above all that
was known in the non- communist world. Tremendous attention was focused on individuals
such as Jafflazuria, the most celebrated of the long- lived. It was
reported that Faff Lazuria was the oldest woman of all who had ever lived.
He died in a thousand nine hundred and seventy- five, claiming to be
one hundred and forty years old, which meant that he had been born in
one thousand eight hundred and thirty- five, during the reign of Sar Nicholas,
at the time when Andrew Jackson was President of the United States. In
life, Faflazuria was a tiny woman of five feet tall. Though fragile,
she moved with agility n s la ons I was always eager to receive visitors.
He could thread a needle without glasses and narrate with vivacity. She liked
to smoke a rare thing among the women of Abkhazia and claimed to have acquired
the habit at the age of 100, as she was too old to be
considered a woman. I used to joke the same thing, I used to
act like men. Among his picturesque tales face included his first memories of the
Great Northern War, which Lieff took as the Crimea War of the period one
thousand eight hundred and fifty- three to one thousand eight hundred and fifty-
six. At that time she was kidnapped by the Turks and did not return
home, but ten years later, about for the days that Menken was murdered.
Even more remarkable that the super longevity of Faff La Azuria was perhaps the
fact that his immediate family could exhibit grandparents, parents, brothers and cousins who
had come to fulfill it. One hundred that made them loosely into the century
- old family of all time. Enchanted Lif fully accepted these accounts. That
is why he suffered a severe blow when great contradictions began to emerge. As
seen, Faff Lazuria had told each visitor a somewhat different story about herself,
freely changing her age, the number of husbands she had had and the age
of her parents. Indeed, few details remained unchanged, and lith can be
forgiven for ignoring what fortuitous visitors cannot know, that one of Abkhazia' s
favorite customs is to lie to outsiders. Western visitors who stayed there long enough
to familiarize themselves with the area discovered that the Abkhaz people had a legendary love
for exaggerations, especially if it was a matter of weaving fables for foreigners.
When the region’ s gerontologists sent by the Soviet government back then were consulted
about the age they might actually be, the long- lived estimated that some
of them were very old, by the way, and that they had exceeded
one hundred and fifteen years old, but among those who claimed to be one
hundred and twenty years old, much less one hundred and forty or one hundred
and sixty- eight, none could produce reliable documents. In fact, about
ninety percent of the local churches had been destroyed by the Soviets during Stalin'
s government. The old birth, communion or marriage records virtually did not exist
in Abkhazia. The final blow came in the early 1970s, when sors med
Bedeb, one of the most respected Soviet geneticists, defected to the West.
Med Bedeb had traveled all over the Caucasus and knew intimately the methods of gerontologists
working there. In London he revealed weaknesses in all the alleged cases of his
perlongevity. Up to ninety- eight per cent of the elders of Abkhazia were
illiterate and many did not even know their date of birth. It was difficult
for them to keep track of time, especially since Christian and Muslim calendars overlapped
in the region. The Muslim calendar is based on a ten- month year.
There were no Soviet records prior to one thousand nine hundred and thirty and
there was suspicion of deliberate fraud when med Bedetk pointed out that Stalin was born
in Georgia. Jealous attempts to convince him that they would live a long time,
something the most absolute despots are extremely eager to believe. They had added
political fuel to the traditional pride of the Abkhaz people in achieving extreme old age.
The bubble burst very soon in the cold daylight. There was indeed no
convincing evidence that certain families in the Caucasus had produced several generations of centennials.
When the American factory in Yogurt conceived that advertising campaign of the mother who pinched
her son' s cheek, they wanted to find a mother with a centennial
son. This seemed possible in a society where women were married around the age
of twenty, but this proved impossible. No one could find a family in
which fathers and offspring were centennials. Almost all researchers came to the conclusion that
super- centennials or Organians were products of a traditional culture in which being as
old as you could had always been a cause of great social respect. Why
we need Abkhazia, despite the contradictions of its findings. Dr. Liff did
not fail to defend the principles of prevention of ageing that he saw applied in
the Caucasus. His work was very important in guiding Americans towards a better diet
and more exercise, especially to prevent heart attacks, but growing skepticism forced him
to withdraw his support for super longevity. However, Abkhazia should not be ruled
out in a world where the vast majority of societies condition their people to expect
a short life and condemn the elders to a marginal existence. This unique society
fostered an ideal conscious of old age as the most profitable phase of life and
profit was open to all who wished to attain it. In my view,
Abkhazia is the place where the traditional concept of old never took root. The
word was deleted and r in place. The long- lived ones wore an
ageless lifestyle, galloped on horseback, worked in the sun and sang in choirs
in which the youngest member was seventy years old and the oldest one hundred and
ten years old. Although Soviet propaganda boasted that the minimum age was ninety,
Abkhazia showed that old age can be an era of improvement. The Abkhazs offered
with these words that lived as much as Moses and venerated the long- lived
for being people who were reaching an ideal. The greatest advantage enjoyed by the
long- lived ones was to rely loosely on their way of life. Western
visitors noticed in the Abkhaz people a remarkable harmony with the rhythms of life.
Exactly what we' ve lost in America. It is worth quoting in detail.
Adnd Yo Gakis, an American writer, who traveled to Abkhazia when the
bubble had already burst, but who still found many things worthy of admiration.
In his book Domethus le Facters, georg Jackis wrote to the Abkhaz people that
they are in such a hurry. They hate the deadline and never work until
they run out in the same way. They consider it very rude to eat
quickly or in excess. Its routine has a longer connection with biological rhythms than
with the run- down patterns prevailing in almost all developed countries. One receives
the image of a people, who have achieved a natural balance. Instead of
struggling to get rid of unhealthy habits, their culture has woven good health into
a total view of life. Seventy percent of its food was based on vegetables
and farm produce. Another prominent aspect of the traditional diet was its insistence on
freshness. Vegetables were harvested just before cooking or serving. If the meat was
part of the menu, the animal was shown to the guests before sacrificing it,
whatever the food was served. All works were discarded, as they were
considered harmful to health. This interest in curing fres ensured that there was a
minimal loss of nutrients between the orchard and the table. Almost all foods were
consumed raw or boiled never fried. Light food and intense exercise allowed the Abkhaz
people to retain the thin silhouette, which their culture, like ours, considered
more pleasant. But in this there was a deeper meaning than he of vanity.
The Abkhaz people are among the few people in the world so aware of
the bad effects of fat that even children and babies remain thin. Traditional love
for horses added another rhythm to that integrated lifestyle that already included work and diet.
As early as possible, at the age of two or three, children
were taught to ride. The horses provided the main sport and the ability to
do equestrian testing. It was a sign of individual value that horses were never
used as work animals, only for recreation and sport. In all societies the
expectation prevails over the result in the one the cul ra, where the highest
goal is wealth. The whole of society concentrates on making fortune, prestige consecrates
those who earn the most and the poor are regarded as failures. Longevity was
given great value in Abkhazia. Therefore, the whole of society felt motivated to
achieve that ideal. The opposite is true of the United States. Old age
is not appreciated, much less exalted. This helps to explain the glaring way
in which our society wastes the last years of life. Its borderline this aspect
is a very pessimistic study done by an official body, the Center for Disease
Control to investigate people' s health at the end of life. The researchers
evaluated seven points, five, zero, zero individuals who died in one thousand
nine hundred and eighty- six. Families were asked. Yes, in his
last year of life, the deceased could still perform five minimum daily activities.
Dress, walk, eat go to the bathroom and bathe on average. Only
12 percent of those who died after sixty- five years could be considered fully
functional according to these minimum standards. At the opposite end, during the last
six months of life, ten percent of the subjects needed help to perform three
or more of these daily activities These people were classified as severely limited. Most
American elders fall between these two extremes in a diffuse area between self- sufficiency
and dependence. It is rather distressing to see that only one in seven people
can meet the simplest needs of life, but the numbers get worse the more
they are carefully examined. In the category of minor. Between sixty- five
and seventy- four years old, only one fifth of people could be classified
as fully functional. About fifteen percent. He showed confusion when asked where 13
percent was. I had difficulty remembering the current year. Ten percent did not
fully recognize family and friends among those who died of heart attacks. The percentage
of fully functional people was higher than those who died of cancer. Only forty
- nine percent of heart attack victims were able to perform all five activities during
the year before death against only four percent cancerous. Women, in addition to
suffering more years of disability, were the most affected. For the last year
of life. The inability to take care of oneself was 40 per cent higher
than among men and they were seventy per cent more likely to fall into the
category of severely limited. Another factor that increased the chances of disability was that
he was not married. The researchers considered the study to be very important,
because few had so closely observed the health status of the elderly in the critical
period of the last year of life. We must be careful not to take
the findings too far, since the elderly' s shantry and mourning are not
in their final year. They are far less likely to be severely limited.
But the daughters of the CS call us to reflect on how much the new
old age between North American and Abkhaz cultures still has to advance. It would
be necessary to go back to a thousand nine hundred and twenty to find a
time when most Americans lived in rural areas, eat little, and develop considerable
physical activity throughout their lives. These are things that we must consciously learn again,
but looking at those ingredients would lead us to ignore the spirit of Abkhazia,
which, in my view, represents a much more inspiring motivation to survive
until the age of 100. I recently received a letter from a concerned woman
named Mary en sou inviting me to a conference on aging. Conscious. It
ended with this eloquent statement. If we insist on succumbing to the stereotyped vision
that modern America has of aging, in fearing changes in the body, in
resisting the natural transitions of life and avoiding the unknown territory of death, we
will deprive and deprive the whole civilization of the gifts of old age, a
loving perspective, a settled creativity and spiritual vision. Every day, when I
talk to older patients, I find out the truth about this. One of
them, retired manager, once commented melancholy. I always wanted to live a
long time, but I never wanted to grow old. He said it ironically.
There was no need to add that I couldn' t have one thing
without the other, but why not. He was quite healthy and active,
but unfortunately he considered himself old. That in the United States means entering no
one' s land, lost dignity and uncertain personal value. In nineteen hundred
and seventy- two, alex Hndre Lief returned from visiting the Longevs with the
feeling that living until the age of one hundred was very natural. And simple.
It took a brief period again in Bustin to make that sensation his only
other exotic memory. This country has recently experienced a rise of centennials that have
no parallels. Currently it is estimated that there are thirty- five points,
eight zero zero Americans who have turned 100 or older. They are twice as
many as ten years ago and the figure is expected to double again in the
near future. This figure comes from the census office, which accepts the age
declared by people without verification. In a detailed investigation of those people subsidized by
the State who reported to be centenarians, it was discovered that he, ninety
- five percent, exaggerated. This is easy to understand, since being ninety
- seven or ninety- eight years old is much less mystical than being a
hundred still, assuming a certain number of interviewees have exaggerated their age to cross
the magical limit of the century. Statisticians agree that at least one in ten
thousand Americans is a hundred years old or older. It is a historical number,
but it is only an average. Some regions of the country already exhibit
incredibly high rates of longevity in water, where life expectancy is the highest in
the nation. One person in three, nine, six, one is over
a hundred years old. It follows him from the south with one in four,
one, six, eight. By contrast, some areas are well below
the national average. As for centenarians, the last two states on the list
of the office descent are me, as it only presents one centenarian every nineteen,
three, five eight people and Alaska with one every thirty- six,
six, seven zero. However, even these low figures are staggering compared to
historical averages. What they imply is that we have won the fight for longevity.
Now we face the challenge of becoming a country where the long- lived
remain young, senility, the darkest fear of almost all. It would be
easier for us to endure physical disorders of old age than mental ones. In
the s s s s s ss. I did where I grew up,
it still equates old age with wisdom. Rural villages are governed by the Panchayat
Council of five elders who have earned respect and authority because of their venerable age
in the West. The longer a person lives the more suspicions of mental incompetence
awakens, the more likely it is that Alheimer’ s disease has surpassed cancer.
In the dubious honor of being the most feared disease in the United States,
they are dexagenarians who obsessively read any article about that evil and feel terror
every time they forget a friend' s phone number. They are so convinced
that contracting it is only a matter of time. Said in the crudest terms,
he wrote antenis meth en do var and the body. The advances of
medicine allow us to become more and more the ones that reach senility. It
' s too gloomy a point of view. Only ten percent of those over
the age of sixty- five have any symptoms of Alzheimer’ s disease,
but there is no doubt that this number increases with age. After seventy-
five to fifty percent of the elderly can show evidence of the disease. A
gloomy legacy of old age is the belief that senility is a normal and inevitable
aspect of old age. Paradoxically, the most important factor to launch for war.
This myth was that same ailment. The disease was discovered already in nineteen
hundred and six by Alois Alzeimer, an eminent researcher and doctor in Munich,
when performing the autopsy on a fifty- five- year- old woman who
had deteriorated mentally in the three years prior to her death, found visible damage
to her brain that could not be explained by abnormal aging, twisted and entangled
nerves and hardened deposits of chemical plates. Until then no one had linked senility
to a specific disease. Discovering the one that received his name, Dr Alcheimer
gave a decisive blow to the theory of normal senility. However, social attitudes
tend to last much longer than they should. It was seventy years before the
importance of Alcheimer' s discovery was fully grasped. In recent decades, the
identification of this disease has dramatically increased, realizing that it affects more than one
million Americans between fifty and sixty percent of those suffering from dementia. Senil dementia
is the medical term that designates a series of symptoms linked to the term senility,
bad memory, confusion, disorientation, irritability, short- sightedness and reduced
intelligence. Luis Thomas nicknamed Alcheimer' s evil the disease of the century by
eloquently calling it the worst of all diseases, not only for what it does
to the victim, but for its devastating effects on family and friends. It
begins with the loss of learned skills. Arithmetic and typing, for example,
progresses inexorably to the total annulment of the mind. In his mercies. It
is not lethal for patients to continue to live essentially brainless, but otherwise healthy
until they reach an advanced age, unless they are lucky enough to be rescued
by pneumonia. Alzheimer' s patients have periods of lucidity in the early stages
of that hard test in their methr Zenewd book and the myth of senility.
Dr. Sgfriek Cras de jale cites the case of a colleague' s wife.
After having made a happy career as a doctor and story writer for children
around the age of fifty- five, she had to retire affected by Alzheimer
' s disease. At first he still had periods of lucidity, especially between
three and five in the morning. It was then that he expressed the dark
transformation that was taking place within it. I could only utter phrases that were
so much more pathetic in terms of how much I had loved words and how
well I used them. I have a neurological problem. Who needs it.
Nobody liked it, nobody, I don' t even like myself. I
was a doctor, driving cars. What do I want. I don'
t want to be here. I' m afraid of everything. I'
m nothing but garbage. It should be in the trash can. You need
another wife. This one' s no good to you anymore. Nobody knows
my name anymore, because I' m nothing. I' ve lost all
the health service, typing and writing. I don' t have any skills
anymore. I do nothing but eat. I have to go. I can
' t read what I write myself. I have lost a kingdom I no
longer sing. I' ll probably never sing again about the origin of this
terrible disease. Many assumptions have been made about a rare slow virus that takes
decades to mature, a defect of the immune system, by which the victim
' s own antibodies attack the brain a growing accumulation of aluminum in neurons.
None of these causes have been proven, although high rates of aluminium have been
found in the brains of those attacked by Alcheimer' s disease, there are
no high rates of metal in the blood. Some popular books have sounded the
alarm against aluminum from silver paper, pans and deodorants based on aluminum salts,
but millions of people use these products without contracting evil. There is more likely
to be some physiological abnormality. Perhaps the blood barrier that normally prevents aluminum from
entering the brain fails, allowing metal deposits to accumulate. Another reason to suspect
that the failure is in the brain itself is that Alzheimer' s patients have
a critical neurotransmitter deficiency, at least acetylcholine, which makes it difficult for brain
cells to communicate with each other. Today, Alcheimer' s evil is incurable.
There is no viable prevention, although researchers believe they have found genetic markers
that predispose to the disease in some families. Once the disease is declared,
medical care is limited to providing tranquilizers or sedatives This does not affect the outcome,
but helps reduce the psychological stress that affects both patients and family members.
There are high hopes in cases of dementia that are not the result of Alzheimer
' s disease, as once the myth of normal senility was overcome, it
became evident that there were more than a hundred treatable disorders, all of which
could mimic symptoms of senile dementia including hypothyroidism, brain thrombosis and syphilis as the
brain resists aging. Aging the brain is not enough to cause Alzheimer' s
disease or any of these disorders. It is known that over time, the
structure of the brain undergoes some changes, becomes lighter, for example, and
decreases slightly in size. One of the clichés of neurology is that the human
brain loses as it ages about a million neurons a year. This provides a
convenient justification for considering that the appearance of senility is the result of brain decay.
However, the error of this explanation is that many people do not finish
zeniles, although presumably they have lost the same amount of neurons. This remains
open to conjecture, as reliable neuron counts cannot be made in living people.
At present it is not known why an old brain remains alert and creative.
Just think of Michelangelo, who designed the chapel of Saint Peter when he was
close to ninety years old, or Picasso, who painted at the same age
and Arther Rubinstein, who played the piano in hornegiy Holm, while another begins
to deteriorate. One theory based on animal research is that our brain develops new
connections as we age. In some individuals. These connections can compensate for the
loss of a greater number of dead neurons. There aren' t two brain
cells that ever touch each other. Physically, they extend one to another through
a vacuum called synapses, using hundreds or thousands of hair- like filaments we
call dendrites. The effect is like that of two trees, whose twigs will
almost interweave into the wind. The word endrite is derived from the Greek word,
meaning tree. At the point where two filaments almost touch between one neuron
and another, a chemical signal can pass. The basic chemical elements involved are
well known. One of them is sethylcholine, which Alzheimer' s patients don
' t have enough. Another is dopamine, whose deficiency leads to Parkinson'
s disease. No one knows exactly why some neurons develop fifty dendrites to send
messages, while others present ten zero. However, an encouraging finding indicates that
by maintaining mental activity, older people can develop new dendrites constantly. This reported
novelty was discovered by sea and Enhamen in his research at Berkeley. She showed
that the brains of rats grew or were reduced according to the type of experiences
to which they were exposed. Rats confined to small and private cages of social
interaction with other animals of their species and began to present a reduction in the
bark and number of dendrites. On the contrary, if an old rat was
put in partnership with others and given many stimuli, his brain expanded and developed
new dendrites. This helped provide a physiological explanation for something we have all observed.
Lonely and isolated elders are far more likely to be confused, disoriented,
apathetic and empty than those who have an active relationship with family and friends.
Because of our materialistic prejudice. The fact that new dendrites develop sounds very scientific
and comforting. In reality, the situation turns out to be more complex.
Having more than a drita isn' t the same as having a more developed
brain. Babies are born with many more dendrites than adults have. The maturation
process consists of pruning the excess by reducing the bark to its most useful connections.
Still, it is encouraging to know that old brains are able to replace
lost dendrites as they become necessary. For a long time it was thought that
we were born with a fixed number of brain cells that never split to form
new ones but recently it has been discovered that the DNA of neurons is active
and this could lead to new conclusions. Some neurologists doubt themselves that the brain
actually loses a million neurons a year. Robert Tery, a neuroscientist at the
University of California in San Diego, determined that there is no significant decrease in
neural density in three major areas of the brain. The number of large neurons
decreases, but is compensated by an increase in minor neurons. In addition,
the large neurons do not seem to die, but to shrink in size.
Two other scientific neuros, Semio Wise and Bran Brunolts of the University of Calgar
And in Alberta, discovered that they could stimulate brain cells in latent state,
putting them into active life. They cultivated in the mouse neurons lab and gave
them a chemical element called epidermal growth factor, causing some immature and inactive cells
to divide to form mature cells. It is almost certain that the human brain
accumulates those sleeping cells perhaps as reserve. It is also encouraging to know that
the brain has its own natural mechanisms to activate. In old age after eighty
years of age, new dendrites lengthen and develop new branches. The neurons,
when shrinking, create new synapses that in turn stimulate more electrochemical activity. In
the brain there are natural substances that stimulate growth and repair, especially the nerve
growth factor fc EN protect that belongs to the type that we call trophic factors.
The FCN appears to perform important functions at the Johan Hopkins Center. The
FCN prevented the degeneration of old neurons in rats and monkeys injected into the brain
of old rats significantly improved spatial memory. It is hoped that Alzheimer' s
patients will be able to recover functionality using chemical elements that induce neuronal activity.
Nervous growth factors have already been tested with some success in Sweden. All this
good news about brain aging raises our expectation that it will be completely normal to
keep the faculties intact. Older people may not be as quick on timed tests.
The neuroscientist Barberthry commented, but they do not lose their judgment, orientation,
and vocabulary. People such as Picasso, El Violonchelista, Pablo Casais,
somarthe Gream could in no way have been able to continue to have so much
success with half- brained the preservation of intelligence in old age to document whether
the deterioration of intelligence was a natural part of aging. The Doral de Sillave
research of Colombia carried out certain studies on twins starting at one thousand nine hundred
and forty- seven. The subjects had no significant decreases in the intellectual ratio
between sixty- five and seventy- five years. Often there is a marked
decrease in intelligence in the year preceding death, but there are many variations between
one individual and another and also between different tests. It is not possible simply
to group all the elderly. The difference is in individuals, not in old
age itself. As corroborating evidence, we can resort to a long- term
study conducted at Duke University, which did not find a general deterioration of intelligence
in subjects aged between sixty- five and seventy- five years, unless they
suffered from high blood pressure. It is well known that mild thrombosis, often
scarcely detectable, is linked to hypertension and this could be treated in these cases.
Whatever it is, the specific cause is disease and not aging. In
itself what seems to cause the decline in mental functioning. Therefore, time associated
with senectud. Although the neurological picture is not yet clear, it is very
realistic to expect us to survive with intact memory and intelligence. The theme of
aging and the intellectual quotient provides a perfect example of the erroneous interpretation that linear
thinking makes of the complex changes brought by time. It is not enough to
say that aging is better or worse than being young. The human mind develops
with experience along various lines. Brain studies help to point out that organic changes
remain at the same level as the mind in its expansion journey, but it
is also important to rely on the process itself to understand that the mind wishes
to expand. Psychologists begin to verify whether human development is already prolonged into old
age through higher states of consciousness, such as wisdom. Paul Baltés, an
eminent German researcher, supports the idea that any decline in the physical structure of
the brain related to age is compensated by new mental achievements as the individual ages.
Certain types of memory task require more time. For example, when Baltés
asked his subjects to attach words and places, e g car and Eiffel Tower
Table and Wall of Berlin, Keys and Golden Gate, he discovered that older
people did not achieve the speed of memory displayed by the younger ones. However,
the situation changes completely when we look at the type of knowledge that is
transmitted from generation to generation through the culture wrote baltés in a test presented to
its subjects a hypothetical situation, such as the following. What would you do
if a friend called to announce that he was going to commit suicide, or
if a 15- year- old girl told him that she was going to
marry immediately said valtés. The answers given to these and other dilemmas vary widely.
Over the years, we have developed a scale of wisdom to classify the
answers. Let' s take the quinceañera problem. A participant can respond.
A 15- year- old girl wants to get married, not at all
getting married at that age would be a real mistake. Even after more information
on possible mitigating circumstances, this person continues to insist that the problem is simple
and has only one answer. She can' t possibly get married. Another
response could reflect a deeper knowledge of the human condition. Well, Superficially,
this seems like a simple problem. In general, it' s not good
for a girl to get married when she' s 15. On the other
hand, thinking about getting married is not the same as doing it. I
think a lot of girls think that they don' t end up getting married.
In addition, there are situations in which it generally has no application.
Perhaps in this case the child has a deadly illness or is completely alone in
the world. Thinking for the best, this girl may not be from this
country. She may live in another culture or in a historical period when girls
marry at an early age. On the wisdom scale, Valtés discovered that older
people performed well over half the answers. Wiser came from subjects over 60 years
of age. Not all elders are wise, but in general they perform better
than younger ones, reversing the results obtained in memory tests. Baltés considers wisdom
to be an achievement of software that culture uses to circumvent biological boundaries. The
great pianist Arter Rubenssan continued to give concerts. When asked how he could maintain
such a demanding activity, he cited three wise strategies to play fewer pieces,
practice each piece more often to compensate for per loss of speed and manual dexterity,
slow down the tempo a few seconds before the music entered an especially fast
passage. That way, execution seems faster than it really is. These discoveries
of Baltéz point to mysteries that cannot be tested, for wisdom is more than
simple experience. Socrates maintained that wisdom cannot be taught, but know directly.
Although it is perceived in the atmosphere surrounding a person. Sagacity cannot be weighed,
measured or defined easily. I the salk said of wisdom is something that
you recognize when you see it you can recognize it you can experience. I
have defined wisdom as the ability to pronounce faults that, seen over time,
seem prudent. But what does wisdom confer, since it is impossible to teach.
It' s only acquired by education. An ancient Indian saying holds this
is not the kind of knowledge that is acquired, but the one that needs
to come. Having spent hours with Marissi, whom I consider deeply wise,
I do not think I have absorbed his wisdom, but I know that this
virtue, to be authentic, must be as intimate to a person as breathing.
Wisdom is not in what you do, but in what you are.
As the new old age erases prejudice against the elderly, I think we will
witness a flourishing of the visionary qualities that years can bring to its best expression.
Vision is the hidden bond that unites youth and old age in middle age.
We compromise with our ideals to achieve success and security. Wisdom is not
something we have a lot of time for. Young people are still impetuously idealistic,
but elders can balance and accomplish that by wisdom. Perhaps the greatest gift
offered by the cycle of human life in its mature years. The limits of
medicine, medical discoveries about the aging of the brain allow us to be the
gap between the low expectations we have of old age and the rich possibilities that
actually exist. However, they also lead to confusion. Almost all assume that
medicine has been primarily responsible for improving the health of the elderly and prolonging the
life span. Therefore, they expect doctors to cover cancer, heart disorders,
Alzheimer' s disease, and other generative diseases common to older ones. This
is ignoring that aging with happiness is much more than avoiding disease. Even if
this is important, it requires a lifelong commitment to oneself every day. The
doctor can help you make this commitment, but the medicine doesn' t replace
it. The role of modern medicine in prolonging life is weakened with every decade.
In the great age of microbial hunters, which began at about 1,
800 and lasted almost a century, medicine made undeniable progress by eliminating infectious diseases
of all kinds. This success happens sado. It is one of the reasons
why the United States is willing to bear the overwhelming cost of caring for the
health of this country, which has already passed seven hundred billion dollars and is
on its way to a billion in the coming decade. We take as an
article of faith that this enormous sum will serve to buy more life, just
as the investment in penicillin and salt vaccine research served But the general contribution of
past, present and future medicine may be greatly exaggerated. Since 1900, the
average American’ s life has increased by fifty percent, but much of that
increase does not affect those who have already survived, childhood and childhood. If
you look at the chart on page one hundred and thirty- eight, you
will see the few additional years that recent generations have won in adulthood. Two
graphs have overlapped here. The lower one indicates the life expectancy calculated from birth.
This is the case when we speak of the tremendous increase of twenty-
six years in life expectancy producing between one thousand nine hundred and nine hundred and
ninety But the top chart indicates the life expectancy calculated since the fifty years of
age, although it also grows in a stable way. The increase of between
nine hundred and nine hundred and ninety is modest. Today, a fifty-
year- old man has the potential to live only eight years longer than his
equivalent of nine hundred. The fact is that medicine in this century has taken
remarkable steps in eliminating infant mortality, mainly by reducing deaths at birth and from
communicable diseases, such as polio, smallpox, measles, pneumonia and influenza.
By contrast, the impact on adult mortality has been much less dramatic. There
is convincing evidence to show that medical research still does not deliver the expected benefits
to society. Cancer death rates by age have not changed in 50 years.
Early detection gives us the illusion that cancer patients live longer than in the past,
but modern treatments do not seem to prolong life in general. Otherwise,
cancer deaths would be occurring at more advanced ages than in the past, but
they are not. They occur more or less at the same age as in
the times of our grandparents, and the mortality rate. Twenty percent of deaths
are due to cancer has remained constant since the late 1940s. Indeed, the
increasing frequency of lung cancer among blacks and women, which is linked to the
increased consumption of cigarettes in these groups, has slightly increased the number of deaths
from cancer from heart disease. I' ve already analyzed the ambiguous state of
things about heart attacks. Mortality rates are falling at a slow rate of one
percent or two percent per year, but the underlying cause, coronary artery disease,
is far from eradication. Despite major prevention campaigns. Damaged arteries are appearing
in up to ten- year- olds and are common in half of the
20- year- old population. The two main surgical operations performed on heart
patients, vaypaz grafting and balloon engeoplasty, often, are effective in relieving the
pain of angina pectoris. However, repeated studies have failed to demonstrate that any
of these costly and traumatic operations actually prolong the patient' s life expectancy for
generative disorders. We still lack effective treatments for many chronic diseases, such as
arthritis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and osteoporosis. Modern medicine can sometimes help
by using drugs, calming the pain, or delay the progress of these diseases,
but we cannot cure patients or even explain why they became ill. To
begin with, drugs are mainly used for omnifers and tranquilizers. It' s
still on the rise. It has been estimated that the average American who is
more than seventy years old and in good health. Take three five types of
drugs, both over- the- counter and under- prescription. If you
are ill, you can take 10 drugs or more. A study conducted in
California in nineteen hundred and eighty- eight concluded that overmedications are the main risk
of disease for the elderly. Some of these drugs exist only to alleviate the
side effects of previous drugs. There is also a huge problem with its application,
as many patients do not take life medication or misuse it. At least
one in two elderly patients does not comply with instructions for glaucoma medication, the
leading cause of blindness in the United States. Other millions do not know how
to use antihypertensive drugs correctly. They mix them with tranquilizers, alcohol, cigarettes,
and sleeping pills. The results are inconstant, cases of diseases and unnecessary
deaths addictions. After focusing public attention on addictions over twenty years in the United
States, addicts increase year by year. Instead of decreasing. No effective treatments
for alcoholism have been found. Cash means they can cure at least fifty percent
of patients. Drug use has reached primary school. Smoking is on the rise
among workers, young women and racial minorities. Twenty- five years after the
general surgeon reported on the dangers of smoking a. One. Fifty- eight
million adults smoke almost a third of the population. Seventy- five percent of
them say they' re trying to quit, but they can' t afford
medical expenses. The cost of health care continues to reach levels never seen before,
resulting in prolonged hospitalization in the hospital being catastrophically costly. For most of
them. A hospital bed costs between$ 500 and$ 2 per day or
more, depending on whether intensive care is needed or not. Invoices that yield
$ 100 for the treatment of a single disease at risk of death are common.
One quarter of all these costs are incurred in the last year of life
when costly efforts to avoid dangerous diseases are common. Inevitably, the last one
the doctor can' t cure is the most expensive, unless there is an
unexpected twist. The spiral rise of health insurance could eliminate the profits of many
frontline companies. Before the year two thousand social consciousness, medical research has been
well advanced to the understanding of the common person. Most Americans do not know
how to properly describe the role of cholesterol in the body, the function of
genes, or that is the immune system. Very few can list the main
carcinogens in order of danger. Many think that any n NS element can cause
cancer. Given these horrible trends, it is highly unlikely that we are entering
a golden age of longevity spurred by medicine. It has been estimated that the
cure of heart ailments and cancer would increase life expectancy in less than ten years.
The logic is that, as you love in diseases, they attack mainly
after the age of sixty- five. Those who die of heart attacks or
cancer are already approaching the end of their life expectancy and are deprived of them
for a few years. However, the current medical crisis has a positive side.
It highlights the need for personal initiative. Longevity remains an individual achievement.
They get it above all those with high expectations enough to look for it.
The United States could become a country where no one would weaken until disability as
they age. But for plaster to happen, we must see the entire cycle
of human life as an ascending curve. Fortunately, today there are few normal
signs of aging that have not been challenged. Important studies show that we expect
too little of the elderly body, which contains a great potential for improvement at
very advanced ages, older, not better. In nineteen hundred and fifty-
eight a single project was initiated in Bauthm in which eight hundred men and women
aged between twenty and one hundred and three volunteered to be examined. As you
grow old. They all returned every twelve or twenty- four months to undergo
an extensive series of tests. The longitudinal study of aging Bauthmore, as is
officially known, became the most famous of its specialty. Its basic purpose was
to determine how the different organs of the body change over time. Hundreds of
individual discoveries have emerged. In general, they fully support the optimism of the
new age. Here are some of the main discoveries. When people get older,
their physical condition varies widely among different individuals. By the age of eighty
or ninety, the differences have become tremendous. While physical performance always deteriorates with
the time measured in a group, that does not always apply to each of
the people who make it up. Some manage to retain lung capacity when all
the others are losing it. There are those who improve kidney function or the
amount of blood the heart pumps with each beat. In almost all of these
cases, the person has maintained the use of the organ in question. The
key is what is not used is the loss of mental function. It is
also maintained with use. For example, those who make a living by solving
problems tend to retain that ability as they age. Although coan function in the
group, in general, the most complex organs, such as muscles, are
the first to deteriorate. Loss of muscle tissue is the main reason why many
cannot do the same work. As you grow old. It seems that moderate
overweight in mature age does not shorten life expectations. However, this depends on
avoiding the harmful side effects of overweight, such as diabetes, hypertension, and
congestive cardiac arrest. Sexual activity maintained in the years of youth and maturity provides
the best opportunity to remain sexually active in old age again between one person and
another There are tremendous variations. There are married men between the ages of sixty
and eighty who can perform the sexual act just three times a year or at
least once a week. For the most part, subjects believed that regular sexual
activity was good for health when they were asked to perform lymphian or moderate exercises.
Exagenary men were as efficient as those of twenty to thirty, but those
were to use a greater proportion of their total physical capacity. TAFFS researchers found
that the elderly body benefits as much as the young one with exercise. The
increase in muscle mass in two weeks of lifting weights was the same among exagenaries
as in much younger subjects. The elderly metabolize alcohol as well as when they
were young, but with more potent effects. After drinking a drink, the
older person will have a slower reaction time, less memory, and less decision
- making ability than a younger person. High cholesterol levels do not continue to
rise over the years, but reach a peak of about fifty- five years,
somewhat earlier in men and later in women. Although sugar tolerance declines with
age, only in some people does this lead to type two diabetes others do
not contract the disease, despite the change in body ability to use blood glucose.
This represents only a fraction of what Bauthmore researchers discovered. But enough to
confirm one of the main points I started with over the years. We are
different from everyone else, and that difference includes the possibility of improvement in any
aspect. Out of six hundred and fifty men, only twelve managed to improve
their renal functions, while the vast majority suffered a deterioration in their functioning or
remained the same. But that little handful is enough to give us a glimpse
of untapped possibilities. The new paradigm tells us that we are constantly making and
undoing the body on the quantum plane. That means that we unceasingly deploy a
hidden potential. Part of this potential is negative, part positive. The field
assumes a neutral attitude, what each one wants and expects. Give yourself governs
the answer you get If we look for a way to improve physical and mental
functioning. Every day for the rest of life, three values emerge that must
be part of everyone' s intention. One, longevity itself, for life
is a primary good. Two the creative experience that makes life interesting and leads
us to desire more of it three wisdom, which is the collective reward of
a long life. It is impossible to set limits to be reached in each
aspect. Creativity and wisdom inspired Picasso Show, Michelangelo Tolstoy and other long-
lived geniuses. Until the day they died. Verdi wrote one of his best
Falstaff operas at the age of 80. The German naturalist Alexander bon Humboldt completed
at eighty- nine the largest of his cosmos works. In these autumnal achievements
there is immense beauty and dignity. The dome of San Pedro seems even more
magisterial by the fact that Michelangelo designed it in his ninth decade. Psychologists studying
creativity say that artists and writers often produce more new ideas at the age of
sixty or seventy than at the age of twenty. An interesting variable is that
the later a creative activity starts, the more likely it is to continue to
be practiced until an advanced age. Eliot Potter, one of the leading landscape
photographers in North America, did not publish his first photograph until the late fifties.
Julia Chao came on TV when she was already a mature woman. In
both cases, success increased steadily over the next three decades. Creative experience can
improve the structure of the brain itself. Chinese studies of the elderly in Shanghai
indicate that dementia and Alzheimer’ s disease are more common among the less educated.
This suggests that educated people, having learned to use the mind, stimulate
healthy brain activity, show an increase in blood flow to the brain during creative
periods of thought. There is a distinctive electroencephalogram of consistent rhythms in all bands
of brain activity that is associated with the experience of gaja or eureka, which
characterizes art and creativity in general. In addition, it is a myth to
think that too much mental work damages the brain as long as concentrated mental activity
is joyful to give rise to patterns of saphatypic waves of rest on alert.
It is a state of relaxation, but conscious that certain desirable neurotransmitters, such
as serotonin, are also found in meditation, also increase during pleasurable creative activities.
Again, the same change is associated with the rest on the alert of
meditation. The neurological picture is still the subject of debate, but the results
in real life, more years of satisfactory existence are not. Therefore, it
seems that wanting as much life, creativity and wisdom as possible is a very
convenient thing. If you have few expectations in these areas, it is unlikely
that eedas, on the other hand, setting very high goals makes every decade
worth being desired. I have a predilection for a few words from Lord Barren
who instilled me in India as a child. Man' s aspirations should exceed
his reach otherwise, so that there will be a heaven. The feeling of
active dominance is the state of the self that is most obviously linked to longevity.
David Capmen, a researcher at the University of Mechigen, wrote. This
conclusion came after studying long- liveds of many diverse cultures and historical periods.
Active domain means having autonomy in one' s life and circumstances, not power
over others. Beyond all the evidence about aging and how to avoid it,
the most important factor in itself is to make existence something creative. The renowned
religious writer Housgns Meth once declared in order to live, man must believe in
that for which he lives. When the core of what people thought disappeared,
people languished and died. The most important thing for what we can live for
is to reach our full potential. At any given age, the body and
mind you experience are only a tiny fraction of the possibilities that open up to
you There are always infinite abilities, new discoveries and deep lives to reach later.
These latent potentials are closed for the vast majority of people who barely have
the skills to fill sixty- five years of existence. Therefore, it is
of the utmost importance to begin to develop your skills conscientiously, freeing you from
social expectations and proposing you as a goal to become a teacher. The underlying
reason why elders feel marginal in our society, apart from the mainstream of social
activity and values, is that they themselves do not have a positive ideal of
the stage of life in which they find themselves. To help you carve your
own ideal life, I have made a list of ten keys to achieve an
active domain. Summary, much of what we have discovered so far about aging
and consciousness are also meant to serve as practical ideals to which you can aspire
in everyday action. In the next section of hela practice we will detail that
type of action. Ten keys to an active domain. One hears the wisdom
of your body, which is expressed by signs of comfort and discomfort. When
choosing certain behavior ask your body that feels about it, if your body sends
a sign of physical or emotional restlessness, be careful, if your body sends
a sign of comfort and longing proceed two live in the present, which is
the only moment you have. Keep your attention on what exists here and now
seek fulfillment at all times, accept what comes to you completely and completely so
that you can appreciate it and learn from it. Then let it go.
The present is as it should be, it reflects infinite laws of nature that
have brought you to this exact thought. This precise physical reaction to this moment
is as it is, because the universe is as it is. Don'
t fight the infinite scheme of things. On the contrary, join him three.
Give time to silence to meditate to silence the inner dialogue in moments of
silence, become aware that you are retacting with your source of pure consciousness.
Pay attention to your inner life so that you can be guided by intuition,
rather than by interpretations imposed from outside on what suits you or does not suit
you. Four, give up your need for external approval. Only you are
the judge of your worth. Your goal is to discover the infinite value of
yourself without giving importance to what others think. By understanding this, great freedom
is achieved. Five, when you discover yourself reacting with anger or opposition to
any person or circumstance, remember that you are only fighting yourself. Presenting resistance
is the reaction of defenses created by old sufferings. When I saw that anger,
you' ll heal and cooperate with the flow of the universe. Six,
remember that the world out there reflects your reality. From here inside the
people before whom your reaction is stronger, whether of love or hatred, are
projections of your inner world. What you hate the most is what you deny
the most in yourself, what you love the most is what you want the
most within you. I am the mirror of relationships to guide your evolution.
The goal is a total knowledge of oneself. When you get it, what
I want the most will automatically be there what most upset you will disappear seven.
Free yourself from the burden of judgment, you will feel much lighter in
judging impose good and bad situations that are simply everything you can understand and forgive,
but when you judge that, you move away from understanding and nullify the
process of learning to love by judging others you reflect, your lack of self
- acceptance remember that every person you forgive increases your love You yourself eight do
not contaminate your body with toxins, either by food, drink or by toxic
emotions. Your body is not just a life- sustaining system, it is
the vehicle that will take you on the day journey of your evolution. The
health of each cell contributes directly to your welfare state, because each cell is
a point of consciousness within the field of consciousness that is you nine replaces the
behavior that motivates fear by the behavior that motivates love. Fear is a product
of memory that dwells in the past. Remembering what made us suffer before,
we devote our energies to making sure that the old suffering is not repeated.
But trying to impose the past on the present will never end the threat of
suffering. That only happens when you find the security in your own being that
is love motivated by the inner truth, you can face any threat because your
inner strength is invulnerable to fear. Ten understands that the physical world is only
the mirror of a deeper intelligence. Intelligence is the invisible organizer of all matter
and all energy. As part of this intelligence resides in you, you participate
in the organizing power of the cosmos. As you are inseparably linked to the
whole, you cannot afford to pollute the air and water of the planet,
but on a deeper plane, you cannot afford to live with a toxic mind,
because every thought creates an impression in the total field of intelligence. Living
in balance and purity is the highest good for you and the earth. Life
is a creative enterprise. There are many planes of creation and, therefore,
many planes of dominion. It is possible to love completely, not to judge
and accept oneself, an exalted goal, but the important thing is to operate
from a concept of totality. As our society does not see the end of
the route, the eminent psychiatrist Eer Kersen laments. Our civilization does not really
harbor a concept of the whole of life. The new paradigm provides us with
that concept by weaving body mind and spirit into one unity. Advanced years should
be the time when life is integrated, the circle is closed and the purpose
of existence is fulfilled. In that regard, active dominance is not only a
means of surviving to a very advanced age. It is the path to freedom
in practice breath of life. In its most complete sense, the active domain
is to handle the whole of life. It is a process of integration,
since usually many aspects of the mind are well separated from the body and out
of harmony with it. Both in turn are separated from the spirit. If
you sit quietly and become aware of yourself, you will notice that your perception
is occupied by mental noise, fortuitous thoughts, emotions memories and occasional physical sensations
that may or may not relate to what happens in your mind. Usually,
the perception of the spirit is completely lost or ignored. Even in moments of
silent observation. These welcome pauses in which one departs from the common whirlwind of
mental events. Most people do not recognize that they are opposed to their essential
being. Returning unity to all these ingredients is not possible on the mental or
physical plane, on its own. By paying attention to one we automatically tend
to exclude the other. Unity can be achieved in very deep planes of consciousness
through meditation when the duality of mind and body is transcended. But meditation is
restricted to the times we devote especially to integrating the remaining hours of our daily
active life. Thousands of years ago, ancient Indian sages gave an answer in
the form of prana, the most useful form of biological energy. Prana is
present in all mental and physical events. It flows directly from the pure spirit
or consciousness to bring intelligence and consciousness to all aspects of life. Prana is
sometimes defined as life force or energy of life. But more important than the
definition is to know it through experience. If you can experience prano, you
can start nourishing it and keeping it. Many cultural traditions have recognized the critical
importance of vital energy. The Chinese call it chi and control its flow through
acupuncture, meditation and special exercises, such as tai chi. The breath of
life appears with other names in Sufism, mystic Christianity and the teachings of ancient
Egypt. What is universally agreed is that the more prana you have, the
more vital the mental and bodily processes will be. The balanced prana gives origin
to the following qualities results of balanced prana, correct mental vivacity, tissue formation,
sensitive nervous system, good motor coordination, balanced body rhythms, hunger thirst
sleep, digestion, elimination, etcetera. Deep dream was immunity from disease,
enthusiasm, physical vitality, spiritual satisfaction, sense of exaltation. These are natural
qualities of human life. When it' s balanced and whole. Prana exhaustion
is directly linked to aging and death. In the absence of prana, nothing
can remain alive, because prana is intelligence and consciousness, the two vital ingredients
that animate physical matter. Prana can be experienced in many ways. When you
feel invaded by a sudden energy, when you experience a torrent of sudden vivacity
and clarity, you simply perceive that you are inspired your attention has been focused
on prana. Some people experience it as a buzzing or torrential energy in the
body. We tend to attribute these feelings to something else. Ear ringing tingling
nerves greater blood circulation, but that' s just a reflection of how we
' ve been taught to perceive the body. In India the body is perceived
primarily as a product of consciousness and only secondaryly as a material object. The
preservation of prana is considered of the utmost importance. The old teachings provide the
following basic rules to ensure a balanced and vital pran in the body. At
all ages. Diet eats fresh produce, preferably grown in a domestic garden.
The highest prana is the one in the foods that are eaten freshly collected.
Stale food quickly loses its prana. In reality, everything rancid and molded indicates
the absence of vital energy and must also be avoided in processed foods. The
prana is very scarce. The water to drink must be pure. The best
is the natural fountain or mountain water that comes from the skies. Contaminated water
is deficient in prana exercise. Physical activity increases prana by providing energy to the
body unless it runs until exhaustion. Exhaustion and fatigue are critical signs that prana
has been exhausted in Western medicine. We also recognize this change when you take
exercise beyond the body' s oxygen reserves. It must obtain energies by metabolizing
its own tissues. See the analysis of catabolic and anabolic metabolism on pages eighty
- seven and eighty- eight breaths. The main source of prana of the
body is the breathing that, in a crude plane provides oxygen I saw in
a subtle plane, provides vital energy. Therefore, prana has been literally identified
with the breath of life. The ancient sages considered that a person’ s
quality of life was reflected in the quality of his breath. When breathing is
refined, slow and regular, prana circulation is reaching all planes of body and
mind, facilitating a state of complete balance conduct. Actions can damage or nourish
the prana of the body. A tense and conflictive behavior, what we call
stress behavior today, disturbs the flow of prana. The refined behavior that comes
from a feeling of tranquility and self- acceptance facilitates balanced prana. At the
root of all life- friendly behavior, one finds the attitude of the boyfriend
plencia imsa emotions. There are four negative emotions that leave the prana unbalanced and
must be avoided. Fear, anger, greed and envy. Positive emotions,
especially love, increase prana. Love is considered the most basic emotion that human
consciousness can feel. Therefore, it is the closest to the source of life.
That burst of well- being we feel when we fall in love is
because we unconsciously open the channels of consciousness that allow for a greater flow of
prana. Emotions that are repressed by shame and guilt cause these channels to be
reduced when prevented, so prana fluya accumulate pockets of inertia and stagnation, facilitating
the appearance of diseases over time. Depression is a state of near- complete
lack of flow and is linked to chronic diseases, premature aging, and early
death. Therefore, a healthy life evaluated by prana conservation requires the following:
fresh food, clean water and air, sunlight, moderate exercise, balanced and
refined breathing, non- violent behavior and reverence for life, positive and loving
emotions. Free expression of emotions think about how different are a fresh salad made
with freshly picked vegetables from your orchard and another made with the same vegetables bought
on the market. Compare an outdoor snack in the mountains, with a lunch
consumed standing next to a burger stand or the taste of fresh well water with
the liquid coming out of the taps. In the big cities. The freshness
points to the presence of prana, the rancid points to its absence. The
least understood factor in our culture is balanced breathing, which in India is considered
the most important. The word breathing means more than the physical act of putting
air into the lungs and exhaling it again. Breathing is the point where you
find mind body and spirit. Any change of mental state is reflected in breathing
and then in the body. Certain home signs, such as clear body posture
and sensations, are directly related to our breathing mode. Changes in feeling are
immediately recorded in the respiratory rhythm. Anger produces superficial aspirations and strong gasping exhalations.
Fear creates rapid, superficial, and difficult breathing. The weigh a spasmodic
breath cut, like the one that arises when I am masters. On the
contrary, positive emotions, such as joy, induce a more regular breathing,
as the chest cavity relaxes. At times when the mind stops dazzled by beauty
or revelation, breathing also stops. That is what we mean by saying that
a spectacle left us breathless on a more useful plane, entering into the yes
silence of deep meditation retards the breath that spiritual masters call God' s envelopment.
The direct contemplation of the spirit is reflected in little or no breath.
This phenomenon also works the other way around. Altering respiratory patterns also alters emotions.
In my time as a young intern, when I was on duty in
the emergency room, I was taught to calm the agitated patients by just sitting
next to them and asking them to breathe deeply and regularly with me. When
we recorded a relaxed breathing rhythm, the body also relaxed spontaneously and the agitated
emotions calmed down. The grain of page one hundred and forty- six contains
some examples of the common experience of how the link between breathing, body,
and emotions operates. As you can see when joy, love, and compassion
operate, breathing is more spontaneous and relaxed than ever before. The various Indian
yoga systems teach many types of highly controlled breathing exercises, known as prana flames
that serve to balance breathing, but their real goal is not to cause controlled
or disciplined breathing in ordinary circumstances. Rather, paying attention to breath is a
vehicle to release stress and allow the body to find its own balance. Once
balanced, the yovic breath is spontaneous and refined, so that the refined emotions
of love and devotion can be carried to the whole body on all planes.
When your cells experience the fullness of prana, they are receiving the physical equivalent
of these emotions. The next two exercises are to balance your breathing. They
are not true pranallamas, for they must be performed together with meditation and yoga
postures, but they are done properly. They will provide the prana experience as
a luminous and sparkling sensation that runs through the body. Usually, muscles become
remarkably warm and relaxed. Mentally. Balanced breathing is reflected in a feeling of
calmness, lack of tension and stillness. According to the static of unceasing thought,
it gives way to exercise silence. One breath from the body. Sit
quietly in a chair listening to music, soft or outdoors, listening to the
wind among the trees. As you listen, gently let your attention burst through
your ears. As long as you exhale effortlessly. Repeat for a minute then
do the same with your eyes, letting your attention come out with your breath
slowly and gently repeat this through the nostrils and through your mouth. Then remain
silent, simply listening to the music with your whole body. Now let your
attention sink into your chest, feel where the center of the heart is,
where the ribs and sternum are joined, and exhale through it, letting your
attention go with your breath. Continue gently one more minute then remain silent conscious
of your body. This exercise takes about two minutes, but can be prolonged
by repeating the cycle once or twice. This exercise links the breathing with the
nervous system to consciousness, helping to favor a smooth integration. It is delicious
to do it outdoors sitting next to a stream of water or under a tree,
when the wind sways the leaves. By feeling your consciousness, when it
flows with the breath, you will experience a powerful feeling of being in harmony
with nature. Prana llama is an important part of the traditional Ayurbedic procedures that
I use in the practice of medicine. The interested reader can consult my previous
book, La Perfecta Salud Buenos Aires, Javier Vergara, Editor, one thousand
nine hundred ninety- one that details the complete program of the Marisi yurbeda,
a renewal of the most powerful knowledge contained in the ancient science of life of
India. Emotion, feeling, body breathing, posture, pain, grief loss,
fear and anxiety, hollow and empty sensation, especially in the stomach mouth.
The body feels heavy, restless and weak. Tight muscles, heart,
accelerated, dry mouth, increased sweat, palpitations in the head, spasmodic breathing,
sighing and superficial, as in sobs, fast, hollow, disordered and
irregular. The posture conveys the impression of tightness, contracted, bent, neck
and back, rigid, angry body tense, feeling of pressure, especially in
the chest area, sometimes tight fists, widening of the nostrils, guilt,
feeling of carrying a great weight, being pushed down, shallow aspiration, strong
and gasping exhalation, limited breathing, feeling of drowning, inability to fully breathe
the breath of life. Joy, love, compassion, frank posture, relaxed
muscles, feeling of warmth, especially in the heart, open palms, feeling
of energy in the body deep, regular, spontaneous, soft and easy.
The posture conveys an impression of open, relaxed serenity. Extended shoulders, back,
upright and comfortable. The neck easily floats on the spine exercise two the
expanding light of foot, wearing stockings with closed eyes and arms fallen to the
sides vividly revives the sensation of your last exhilarating experience. Recapture the feeling of
being happy, vibrant and carefree. You can use a visual image, a
loving memory, a moment of triumph lived in the past. Anything that gives
you back the feeling of rejoicing, don' t worry if it' s
just mild enough the intention to be with it. As you do, breathe
slowly through your nose and begin to stretch your arms out without haste. As
you vacuum, imagine that your breath expands from the center of your chest.
It' s an expanding light that lifts your arms up as if they float
effortlessly opening up As the light expands, your happy and joyful feeling expands.
You can also visualize it if you want it as a glowing ball of bluish
white light or just as a sensation. Let the light grow as slowly or
as quickly as she wants to expand from the center of your heart to reach
the tip of your fingers, hands, feet, to your head. You
' ll be smiling. Let that also grow at the point of maximum extension.
Start slowly exhaling through your nose and lower your arms to your sides.
Do it slowly, taking more time to exhale than to vacuum. Bring the
expansive diagonal beam light back to the inside of the chest, until it is
small and again located in your heart, when your arms reach the sides of
the body, let your head fall forward. Now repeat the exercise with the
next breath, expanding the sensation again. Pay no attention to your physical movements,
but to the sensation. It must be opened and closed like a flower
with every breath. When you continue, you can start to open up even
more by pulling your head back, with your chest expanded and tiptoeing in the
movement outwards. When exhaling in corbate like a rag doll, bending the knees
and waist, do not accelerate the movements. You must proceed slowly and rhythmically.
You will notice that this is a very pleasant exercise, because when you
open up, the body is filled with breath, consciousness and joy all.
At the same time, the sensation is light, hot, tingling. When
you close, the body relaxes and bends under its own weight, becoming more
grounded and still. You are exploring a variety of sensations that allows subtle breathing
to penetrate into all channels. The connection coats as we age the natural tendency
is for prana to decrease. This must be countered in order to preserve youth.
In India longevity was traditionally assigned to a branch of it learning called ayurbeda,
which is derived from two anascribed roots aylos life and closed science or knowledge.
This ancient science of life is generally considered the traditional medicine of India,
but the yurbeda has a deeper neo- spiritual basis. The most famous verse
of the ancient Ayorbedic texts says ayorbeda agritana. Mayurbeda is for immortality. The
meaning is twofold. Ayorbeda is to foster unlimited longevity, and it does so
from the belief that life is essentially immortal. According to layorbeda, life energy
or prana is channeled through the body by a wind called a robe. The
robe is one of three metabolic principles, doses that shape everything living, be
it mosquito, elephant, human being, planet, star or cosmos is found
out. The robe is responsible for the movement of any kind. In the
human body. It is divided into five parts. Grana, coat regulates the
nervous system udanda. Bata regulates cognitive skills speech and memory. Samana. Bata
regulates the digestion of the road. Bata regulates apane circulation. Bata regulates excretion.
The five aspects of the robe are under the center of the first and
most important, the pranabata, since this dosa, as its name indicates,
contributes the prana the vital force that is then distributed by the rest of the
body. When the prana bata becomes unbalanced, there is a general disturbance throughout
the body. Crying maintains that old age is a time especially sensitive to these
imbalances. The robe is higher in old age by nature, and if the
individual has not taken care to keep the prana robe in balance, the following
symptoms will result. Symptoms of imbalance of the gown, Physical symptoms mental or
behavioral symptoms, dry or rough skin, wrinkles, insomnia, chronically low weight,
loss of muscle mass, weak kidneys, lack of bladder control, concern,
anxiety of constipation, heart rhythm, weak or irregular, constipated depression,
fatigue, common arthritis, confusion, thoughts, restless, non- specific pains,
without stress tolerance, weakened immunity, susceptibility to colds, pneumonia and other
infections, cold intolerance. You will immediately notice the resemblance between these disorders of
the unbalanced robe and aging as the wind of the body. The robe is
cold, dry and penetrating. When the robe gets worse, it' s
as if a scorching wind starts shaking inside. Generally, the aggravated robe begins
by traveling to the joints, initiating a variety of joint problems that begin with
deaf and mild pains. This causes problems, especially during the winter, the
worst season for robe disturbances and ends in a generative arthritis. If the aggravation
persists. As all cells contain the two coats, the effects of their aggravation
are not limited to the joints. The whole body begins to shrink and dry.
The intestines become dry, tense and constipated. The individual languishes beset by
insomnia and worries in the grip of growing pains. Disconcerted doctors prescribe millions of
tranquilizers and sleeping pills without being able to explain why older patients begin to have
these symptoms, since there is usually no organic anomaly. According to organuco medical
terminology it means that a physical organ has signs of disease or dysfunction. Doctors
tend to discard symptoms lacking organic cause by unexplained psychosomatics or idiopathics. Elders rarely
suffer from a single symptom of unbalance in the robe. Many suffer on a
large scale. If multiple drugs are prescribed for each symptom, the new imbalances
accumulate, because the body can only react with imbalances to the painkillers, diuretics,
tranquilizers, sleeping pills, vetablo that before and all the medications usually prescribed
to the elderly like a symptom or not. It' s something the body
wants to express. It' s a message and drugs suppress that expression.
The speed with which you age is linked to the speed and intensity of the
aggravation of the robe. Some people are very prone to the imbalance of the
robe, others are not. Some may have an aggravated robe on their fingers,
leading to arthritis. Others have it in their intestines, causing chronic constipation.
What can lead to the imbalance of the Ayurbeda robe follows the principles of
complementarity. The similar speaks to the similar. This means that any quality possessed
by the two abatas will be stimulated by the same quality existing outside your body.
These qualities are the following qualities of the Dasha of dry, cold,
changing, rough moving, light, subtle, fast, guide the other doses.
Everything in your environment that contains the listed features. It will increase the
robe, for example, the weather will be echo foods, biscuits, cereals,
chips, etcetera. The cold climate, the cold drinks and the cold
foods, the changing, the sudden, life changes, a death in the
family, the loss of work, mood changes, seasonal changes, sudden,
etcetera. Rough tissues in contact with the skin, harsh words or behaviors,
moving, traveling, falling, exercise or physical work, exposure to air currents
or wind, light meals that have a high air content, especially raw fruits
and vegetables, subtle mood changes, subtle breezes as quickly as any physical or
mental activity that requires rapidity is forced to hurry. Let me explain how to
interact with these Sanskrit qualities called gunas. If my kidneys detect a shortage of
fluids in my bloodstream, a specific chemical messenger is added, the angiotensin two
is taken to the hypothalamus in the brain and turned into a mental fact.
I' m thirsty this feeling then urges me to act by drinking a glass
of water. In Ayorbedic terms, what has happened is an even flow of
a bata intelligence impulse, which simultaneously records the need for fifty billion cells.
The robe has the quality of being dry and increases under any dryness. Dry
biscuits, desert heat, dry air conditioning and even dry responses serve to increase
the robe. Dryness makes us thirsty because the body detects this increase in the
robe and the signal will persist until something moist like a sip of water,
puts in play the opposite quality and the robe recovers the line. The robe
is the dosa that most easily loses balance, but also the one that recovers
it more easily, like the prana abata. The most important aspect of this
two regulate the nervous system. It varies with the least thought or feeling by
doing the things necessary to keep the pranavata balanced. We have a complete system
to preserve prana and defeat the aging process in a highly subtle plane. This
means that every day we should pay a little attention to the robe, which
is actually an easy and natural thing to do. The robe can be pacified,
i e kept in balance by various lifestyle measures. To pacify the robe,
to keep the two coats in balance, you need to consider the following
qualities. Regular, regular eating habits and bedtime work planning. Hot, hot
and well- cooked meals, sun avoid cold foods and drinks. The nutritious
foods rich, nutritious and even heavy, when the climate is cold, feed
the emotions the relaxing, take time for the proper rest, avoid situations that
produce tension, excitement and excessive efforts. Stable, stable relationships and work,
home life, stable, tranquilizing, a quiet and orderly work environment, gentle
massage, especially with hot sesame oil, uninterrupted, not to stop providing food
and water to the body, not skipping meals or leaving the stomach empty.
A dosa is pacified by the qualities it lacks. As the robe tends to
give people erratic, irregular and contradictory behavior. It is useful to counter it
with the opposite firmness and regularity details as small as not skipping meals and lying
down at a certain hour pay large dividends when it comes to appeasing the robe.
Prolonged exposure to stress causes severe imbalances in the robe, so special efforts
must be made to create a calm and deep working environment. A cheerful environment
alleviates the gown' s tendency to uncertainty and insecurity. When you are under
the influence of the robe, you seek warmth by instinct, stay warm in
winter and take sunbathing in the other seasons of the year. Calm down to
this dosa, your diet should be based on nutritious and well- cooked foods
in layorbeda, you might think that even heavy and oily foods are good for
the robe. Therefore, in winter we are so attracted to soups and long
cooking stews. It is also advisable to avoid in cold seasons, salads,
frozen drinks, alcohol and dry or raw foods, thus correcting the tendency of
the body to aggravate the robe. On such occasions, stimulants of any kind,
including coffee, tobacco and alcohol, cause an imbalance in the robe.
When it is unbalanced, the robe leads to a light and interrupted sleep.
This is countered by lying down early and avoiding reading or watching television until late
at night. The body also wants some periods of calm, relaxation and peace
every day. Transcendental meditation is ideal, as exposure of the nervous system to
deep silence allows it to harmonize all synchronized bodily rhythms. That the robe regulates
a family life, peaceful and loving. It is an ideal that many consider
lost in recent decades, but it is vital from the point of view of
the two abata. The robe has a special affinity with hot oils. The
daily massage with hot sesame oil in the hands and lower abdomen is one of
the best measures to relieve the deep tensions of the nervous system. The oil
should be applied slowly and gently before the morning bath and again before bedtime.
Special attention should be paid to the balance of the robe when recovering from illness
or in situations of emotional stress, when the effects of an airplane trip are
experienced through the hourly uses, when you feel depressed fatigue, chronic fatigue and
exhaustion, or if you have received a physical wound. All these conditions cause
a serious disturbance of the robe If you detect chronic symptoms of imbalance of the
robe, they will be useful. The following specific measures include flavors, sweets,
sour and salty in your meals are to balance the robe. This Idasha
requires more food, sour and salty than any other. Avoid bitter, astringent
and spicy flavors In the ayorbeda the astringent is counted as flavor. You will
find dry- flavored foods that frustrate your mouth, beans, lentils, pomegranates,
tea if you. It is uncomfortable to live in a dry cold and
windy climate, studying the possibility of moving to a warm place, which is
more suitable for the balance of the robe. Anyone living in a cold climate
would do well, according to the ayorbeda, to make sure that their home
and workplace have warm and humidified air. In the winter it edits the air
currents and prolonged outdoor exercises eating hot foods and their stantios at regular intervals.
It is a good measure against the robe in cold climates. As far as
possible, he always eats sitting and in a peaceful, quiet and cordial atmosphere.
The snacks eaten to the race disturb the robe avoid all kinds of diet
or fasting and spend a lot of time on an empty stomach. If bumpy
is irregular. Common disorder when the gown is unbalanced, try to make several
light meals during the day. The last one should be when you put yourself
on alone at least a couple of hours before you go to bed. Avoid
long journeys without rest between one flight and another or driving for many hours.
When you are affected by a flight through hourly uses, take the right time
to rest and diagonal bar or sleep as soon as you arrive at destination.
Drink plenty of fluids during the trip. An infusion of herbs and even some
hot water are useful on the plane. Liquor and cold drinks tend to aggravate
the derangement effect on the two gowns. The aroma therapy or hot baths with
a few drops of perfumed oil help to calm down, the robe chooses warm
earthly and soothing essences, such as gauster oil, sandalwood, camphor, cinnamon,
basil, rose geranium and clove. When you cook. Herbs and spices
should be of sweet quality and bar, diagonal or spicy, ginger, black
pepper, turmeric, cinnamon, mustard, mint, callana, radish, spicy,
cumin, nutmeg, cardamom, green coriander, fennel, basil, oregano,
rosemary, sage and thyme. Fifth part, break the spell of mortality
by your art spirit defeats the overwhelming death r I g Veda. The ultimate
limit of human life is death. We' ve been trying to travel beyond
that border for thousands of years. Despite the obvious mortality of our body.
Moments arise in which a clear perception of immortality shines forth. The poet Tennison
described experiences lived in his youth in which his individual being seemed to dissolve and
merge into an unlimited being. This radical departure from the vulgar experience was not
a confused state, he recalled, but the clearest of the clear, the
surest, the surest totally beyond words, when death was an almost irreducible impossibility.
Since these immortal feelings are completely subjective, they have no place in the
vision that science has of the world and, therefore, we tend to label
them as religious. But thousands of people have had the privilege of taking a
look at the reality that spans space and time. Cou like a vast multidimensional
bubble. Some people seem to have made contact with this timeless realm through experiences
of quack and death. But it is also accessible in everyday life. As
we cast a friendship under the mask of matter, we have a certain feeling,
a certain nostalgia that we did not express in words. It is a
longing, a desire for something greater or higher within ourselves. With these words,
the philosopher jeckeb Nidomen pointed out what he called our second world, to
which we can all arrive under special conditions our first world, as Edleman wrote,
is the world in which we live every day, this world of action,
activity and doing governed by everyday thoughts and emotions. But there are moments,
like flashes of a spiritual lightning in which the second world makes itself known
full of peace and joy with a clear and unforgettable sense of who we are
really divided moments of being present in oneself, as Needleman called them. If
the second world is within us, so is the first, for ultimately,
there is nothing verifiable out there that can be seen, felt and touched.
In the flood it is only cognible as shooting neural signals into the brain.
It' s all happening there. Whoever you are depends on the world you
see yourself living in. The first to be ruled by change, contains disease,
aging and death as an inevitable part of the landscape. In the second,
where there is only being pure. That' s all missing. Therefore,
finding that world within yourself and experiencing it even for a moment could have
a profound effect on the process of disease and aging, but on death itself.
In the East, this possibility has always been accepted, as in India
and China. It is believed that some spiritual teachers have lived hundreds of years
for having attained a state of temporal consciousness. This is considered to be one
of the options open to the spirit that has achieved liberation moxa, although there
are not many teachers who choose to extend their time of life in the West.
These powers arouse extreme skepticism, but the new paradigm assures us that there
is a plane of nature where time dissolves or to express it in the reverse
way, where time is created. This plane is extremely enigmatic, even in
quantum terms, because it existed before the creation of space and time. The
rational mind cannot conceive such a state, for to say that something existed before
time began is a contradiction of logic. However, the ancient sages believed that
direct knowledge of reality is possible on a temporary basis. All generations have affirmed
this assertion. Einstein himself experienced episodes of complete liberation from the limits of space
and time. At such moments, one imagines standing somewhere on a small planet,
beholding with amazement the cold, but deeply moving beauty of the eternal and
the unfathomable. Life and death merge into one thing and there is no evolution
or eternity, only being It has taken three generations for the new paradigm to
show us that being is a very real state, that exists beyond change and
death, a place where the laws of nature that govern change fall to the
ground. Ultimately, death is just another transforms anointing from one to another configuration
of matter and energy. But unless you can get out of the sand of
change, death represents an end point, an extinction. To escape death means,
in short, to escape from the vision of the world that gives death
its terrible sense of closure and definitive end. I' m so afraid of
death. A certain Indian disciple answered his guru. It afflicts me since I
was a child, why I was born. What will happen to me when
the guru dies? He thoughtfully analyzed the issue and said why you think you
were born. I don' t understand your question. I tartamude the disciple
why you think you' re born. He repeated the guru. It'
s not just something your parents have told you and you' ve taken it
for granted. You have truly had the experience of being born, of coming
into existence from a state of non- existence. Or did it happen that
one day in childhood you asked where you came from. If your parents told
you you were born, how did you accept that answer? The idea of
death scares you, but rest easy. There is no birth without death are
two poles of the same concept. Perhaps you have always been alive and always
will be, but by accepting your parents' belief system, you entered into
an agreement that fears death, as you consider it an end. Maybe there
' s no end to it. That is the most worthy possibility to be
explored. Naturally, the disciple was impressed, for, like all of us,
he did not see death as a belief that he would have accepted.
What the gurus pointed out was that birth and death are made of time space,
but existence is not. If we look within ourselves, we will find
a vague memory, but surely we have always been around to express it differently.
No one remembers the fact that these metaphysical issues have emerged as a demonstration
of the unique character of human beings. For us, death is not only
a brutal fact, but a mystery, and it must be unraveled so that
it can be solved. The mystery of aging is the process that leads to
death. The deeper questions about who we are and what life means are involved
in the nature of existence. When the spell of mortality is broken, it
is possible to free oneself from the fear that gives power to death. The
fear of death goes into life much more than our conscious mind. She'
s willing to recognize. As David Wesker wrote, when you say you fear
death, you' re actually saying you' re afraid you haven' t
lived your true life. This fear covers the flood of silent suffering. However,
by not letting you be fooled by fear, you can turn it into
a positive force. Let your fear of death inspire you to examine your true
worth and conceive a dream for your own life. I was encouraging Biscott.
Let me help you to appreciate the moment, to act in it and to
live in it. I want to go even further by suggesting that when you
see yourself in terms of being, timeless and deathless, each cell awakens to
a new existence. True immortality can be experienced here and now, in this
living body, comes when you impregnate from being everything you think and what you
do. This is the experience of timeless mind and ageless body that the new
paradigm has been preparing for us the metabolism of time. One of Einstein'
s brilliant contributions to modern physics was his intuition that linear time, along with
everything that happens in it, is superficial. Time seems to run and move.
Clocks are ticking seconds, minutes and hours, millennia of stories unfold and
disappear. But ultimately, as Einstein maintained, this vast all relative activities,
which means it has no absolute value. John Willer, eminent physician, wrote
the very idea of time space is false. By failing that idea, it
also fails before and after. This can be said so simply, it is
a very difficult lesson to gain control in the world. A proof that control
has not yet been achieved is that people continue to age in a linear process
as faithfully as if it really existed. However, if Einstein was right,
aging is an illusion. It depends on fronts and after, two concepts that
have been in crisis for almost a century. The mystic Sufi poet Rum understood
this truth centuries ago when he wrote Es. The unconditioned spirit, trapped in
conditions the sun in eclipse, time and space are conditions when we are bound
by them, we have lost contact with the reality of entering into a fiction.
Einstein replaced linear time with something much more fluid, a time that can
contract or ex- expand to slow or accelerate its passage. He often compared
it to subjective time, noting that spending a minute sitting on a cooker seemed
like an hour, while spending an hour with a beautiful girl seemed like a
minute. What I meant by this is that time depends on the observer'
s situation. For physicists, the notion of time expanding and contracting allowed better
calculations of various phenomena occurring near the speed of light, which was Einstein'
s absolute, the universal rod, which could not be changed or yielded.
Time had to contract and expand in order to keep the speed of light constant.
We all have the feeling that time expands and contracts seems to crawl at
times and fly at other times, but what is our constant, our absolute.
I think it' s the self, our central sense of being to
use Einstein' s example. If two men are sitting with the same beautiful
girl, time can pass to crawl for one of them through her sister'
s arch, while flying for the other if she is in love with her.
This means that each of us has a personal mastery over his sense of
time. Let us analyze all the subjective qualities we attribute to time. We
say things like I don' t have time for that. It' s
time. You' re running out of time, how time flies. Time
never passes. I love you so much that time stops. These statements say
nothing about the time measured by the clock. The clock does not lie about
the linear time that has passed out there, but subjective time, which exists
only in here, is something else. All the quoted phrases reflect a state
of self. If you' re bored, time never passes. If you
' re desperate, you' re running out of time. If you'
re full of enthusiasm, time flies When you fall in love, time stops.
In other words, every time you take an attitude toward time, you
actually express something about yourself. Time in a subjective sense is a mirror.
In medicine we know that those who don' t have enough time will probably
end up with heart disorders. The discovery of type A behavior, for example,
revealed that heart attacks were linked to the feeling that there is never enough
time for a type A. The next expiration date is always a threat.
Their struggle over time contributes to the entrenchment of frustration and hostility. Hostility then
sends a message to the heart that constricts the blood vessels, raises blood pressure
and cholesterol rates, and generates various types of arrhythmias or irregular heartbeat. This
doesn' t just happen to type A people. When it comes to the
due date for filing income tax returns, it has been observed that specialist accountants
suffer passing increases in cholesterol and blood pressure, which disappear after the deadline.
Their subjective sense of time is sufficient to endanger the body. This points to
a deeper lesson. Let' s ask someone to pripe an omelet. An
experienced cook can do it in two minutes. Now let' s slightly alter
the situation by saying prepare an tortilla, but you have only two minutes to
do it. Often, this makes even the most expert cook feel tense and
harassed. Time pressure causes the body to receive stretch hormones It in turn raises
the heart rate. If the individual fights against this reaction, it only makes
the situation worse. Now the heart must endure the pressure of time and frustration.
When heart patients must perform a difficult task in a fixed term. A
significant proportion of them are shaken so much that the heart muscle becomes ischemic or
silent. In this case silence, that means that damage is occurring without any
feeling of pain. Time pressure also alters physiological behaviors, attitudes and reactions.
Such a subjective time can be an incredibly powerful force. It is not by
chance that the expression expiration date includes the idea of overcoming. Expiration holds a
threat. If you don' t meet the deadline you' re defeated,
this threat can be subtle or blatant, but it' s almost always there.
Otherwise, we wouldn' t get nervous under the pressure of time.
Sometimes we express more clearly the threat with phrases such as the time has come,
which may seem neutral, if we forget that it also applies to those
who are going to die. Some people are much more sensitive than others to
the pressure of time. A nervous cook can get so upset at the two
- minute limit that he drops the eggs, burns and cannot fulfill a task
in which he stands out. If you should not think about the time,
another will act like never before the challenge and finish the tortilla even before the
indicated. One feels the pressure of time as a threat, the other as
a challenge. You feel out of control. The other impelled approve his domain
and improve it. However, we all feel the pressure of a serious and
threatening expiration date over which we have no control. Death itself. If you
think your existence has been assigned a fixed period, the deadline for death,
it will impose the same tension that the nervous cook suffers by ruining the tortilla.
The better it is to feel no pressure of time to fully develop even
though death exists. You can achieve the attitude that life is not a career,
but a flowering, but you can' t achieve it if you think
you' re running out of time. Ultimately, sending that message to your
body' s cells amounts to programming them to age and die. However,
the truth is that linear time advances inexorably and to overcome it we must find
a place where we can experience and internalize a different time or the absence of
time the quantum mechanical body for a skeptic. This proposition will sound purely subjective,
but within our cell there are constantly quantum events that defy linear time.
DNA intelligence operates simultaneously in the past, in the present and in the future.
Past, it takes the plane of life, applying to the present only
the tiniest part of the information necessary for cellular functioning, perhaps one billionth of
its total database and reserve for the future. The information you will apply in
many years. Double propeller is the quantum deposit of your future. There'
s the compressed time and locked up until it takes. The moment you were
conceived, your genes gained control of a lifetime of events that would unfold in
exact sequence. For example, your hands emerged in the belly as amorphous lumps
of cells at the beginning, then as knotty lumps that became fins similar to
those of the fish ten amphibians, animal paws and finally in human hands.
Those brumos, lumps, fins, feet and paws are still present as data
archived in your genes, as are the hands of your childhood, childhood,
adulthood and old age in the quantum plane you live all those ages. At
the same time, as humans we are both physical and quantum. We live
multidimensional existences. Right now you' re in two places at the same time.
One is the visible and sensory world, where your body is subject to
all the forces of nature. From there outside the wind, you get irritated
by the skin, the sun, the burning in winter. You' d
die frozen if you didn' t have a roof. The attack of germs
and viruses makes your cells sick but you also occupy the quantum world, where
all that changes. If you dip in the tub, your conscience won'
t get wet. The limitations of physical life have much less importance in the
quantum unclean. Often none. The cold of winter doesn' t numb your
memories. The heat of a night' s walk doesn' t make you
sweat in your dreams. Gather all the quantum events in your cells. The
total sum is your quantum mechanical body, which operates according to its own invisible
physiology. Your quantum mechanical body is consciousness in motion and part of the eternal
field of consciousness that exists at the source of creation. The intelligence within us
radiates as light across the border between the quantum world and the physical world,
unifying both in a constant subatomic dialogue. Your physical body and your quantum mechanical
body deserve the name of home equally. They' re like parallel universes,
between which he travels without even thinking about it. According to all appearances,
the physical body occupies a few cubic decimeters of space. It serves as a
fragile life- sustaining system for seven or eight decades, after which it must
be discarded. The quantum mechanical body, on the other hand, does not
occupy any well- defined space and never wears out what size packaging you would
need for the dream you had last night or for your desire to be loved.
Although all the genetic material of a person who easily opened in a tea
spoon the most important of the genes, their intelligence does not occupy physical space.
On the quantum mechanical body plane, every aspect of an experience is reduced
to a point beyond the three- dimensional world. The photograph of a bride
gives us a literal record of her appearance. A recorded tape can capture your
voice, but these are very rough fragments of the experience. Unless the bride
retains some memories, the texture of her costume and the flavor of the cake
seem lost forever, but in s or quantum sopo everything is there. At
the same time, by the simple act of remembering the newlywed, she can
recover a whole world by some miracle. Any other experience you' ve had
will be dyed with that new addition to your memory. Being married becomes part
of your brain' s vision of your whole life. From that moment on,
the images recorded in your quantum mechanical body are as complex as you are.
In short, those images are you leading to life, the images you
have accumulated by making your own version of time and, in the process programs
the type of body required by your version of time. Let me give a
concrete example of how this works. In his fascinating book of psychiatric cases Labs
Executioner The executioner of love or see and Adon tells the story of Betty,
a 27- year- old single woman who turned to him for therapy.
Betty was from the beginning a very difficult case of rough, haughty and whiny
manners. She recited a constant litany of complaints, claiming that no one loved
her or accepted her. He worked in public relations for a large shop and
included in his diatribe every disdain he received from clients, bosses and coworkers.
When Ayalom heard her, she was struck by a strange fact. In his
untiring description of distress, Betti never mentioned anything as obvious as his weight.
Although only a half a meter fifty- five tall, Betty weighed 130 kilos.
He knew, like everyone else, that his appearance was disturbing, but
he had turned his entire existence into a complicated game to disguise that fact.
Not to mention it was a shield of silence that covered the deepest pain he
could not face. Yalón understood that it would be too difficult for Betty to
deal with her obesity without first settling her psychological problem. She spent whole months
trying to get through her defenses and with the neal of time, they began
to dissolve one day, Betty dramatically announced that she was going to lose weight.
He followed a remarkably disciplined and well- organized attack plan with great seriousness,
threw himself on a diet, joined a support group, and religiously avoided
any temptation to eat. He enrolled in a weekly session of traditional dances and
installed a fixed bike in front of his TV, as the kilos quickly disappeared
and Yalom made a remarkable observation. As she lost weight, Betty began to
have lived dreams and sudden memories of painful incidents of her past, The underlying
traumas that had already loma had barely been able to banish in therapy were disappearing.
Along with fat, Betty began to experience pronounced mood swings that at first
seemed fortuitous. Then Yalon realized that they followed a coherent pattern. The woman
was reviving various traumas she had suffered when she weighed the particular kilos. She
discovered that Betty had gained weight at a steady and uninterrupted pace since she was
fifteen years old. For example, when he weighed ninety- five kilos.
At twenty- one he decided to move to New York. She had been
raised on a Texan farm, small and poor only daughter tied to a depressive
widowed mother. The day the diet took her back to 90 pounds, Betty
had a vivid memory of how much it had cost her to leave home.
Literally time was locked in it, melted into its cells. Thus, the
descent from her hundred and thirteen kilos led her back in spiral time through the
emotionally charged events of her life, the move from Texas to New York,
ninety- five kilos, her college graduation eighty- six kilos, her decision
to drop out of the course of medical admission and the dream of discovering the
cure for cancer that had killed her father, eighty- one kilos, her
loneliness at high school graduation, her envy at seeing others with her parents,
her inability to get a companion for prom seventy- five kilos, the basic
cycle diploma, and how much she had missed her father at that graduation seventy
kilos. Yaon was excited to see him tangible and alive that he could make
a memory, what a wonderful proof of the realm of the unconscious. Betty
' s body remembered what her mind had long forgotten. I would go even
further by saying that his body was itself a kind of mind, a reservoir
of memories that had taken physical form in fat cells. Betty' s experience
had become Betty. Instead of metabolizing only hamburgers, pizzas and milk shakes,
he had metabolized all sad emotions, longings, frustrated hopes, bitter disappointments associated
with every bite of food. Losing weight was his way of freeing himself from
the past. As the old body disappeared, a new Betty quickly gained a
psychological knowledge of herself. He discovered deep desires, buried and shed tears for
sufferings he had hidden from himself for many years. The contours of his body
began to emerge, first a waist, then breasts a chin, cheekbones with
their new silhouette wore courage to venture into social life. Her obesity had turned
her into a homeless woman since the beginning of her adolescence. Finally, he
had his first date with a man. Her fellow offices were drawn to her,
who no longer drove them away. With his defensive armor. In the
end, metamorphosis did not succeed at all. The most traumatic event of his
life had occurred just before his adolescence, when the father suffered a long and
slow death from life to cancer. At that time she weighed 68 kilos,
a weight she had never achieved again. When he arrived in the seventies,
his diet became a gloomy struggle. His body refused to let go of a
single gram or more despite everything, and his memories became more difficult to cope
with. Soon we found ourselves devoting whole sessions to talking about his father.
The time had come to dig him up. Everything. He plunged her into
reminiscences, encouraging her to express everything she could remember about her illness. Death,
the way he looked at the hospital. The last time she saw him,
the details of the funeral, the clothes she put on, the priest
' s speech those who attended, she felt the loss more than ever for
a period of two weeks she wept almost continuously. Those moments were very difficult,
both for the doctor and for his patient. Beset by a nightmare about
her father' s death, Betty said she died three times a night.
I still felt intense guilt for dragging her. At a time when she had
not only lost her father, but also her dream of happiness, Betty resisted
discovering any other hidden feelings. It was clear that his mind could not cross
that last threshold too threatening. Nor were her body too many sorrows and frustrated
hopes that had become Betty. At that time he abandoned both diet and therapy.
The barrier of 70 kilos remained corporealizing the loss of a father who would
never return to her. He still regretted that his was only a partial cure,
but he also had to admit his relief. The test had deeply moved
both of them. Like Betty, we all become our past, but we
also have the power to reverse that process, to free up petrified time and
let go of accumulated memories that are no longer useful. If you keep us
from being happy, you constantly make and destroy your body on the quantum plane.
It is necessary to talk about undoing, because not all life is creation,
it is necessary to review old and repeated experiences as new ones arise.
Sometimes a person feels compelled to try to destroy the whole body of experiences he
has created over the years. Often, those who suddenly change jobs or throw
themselves into divorce without provocations so motivated by the inability to review their inner world,
may project blame outward, toward an inadequate job or a wife they do
not love. What is truly intolerable, however, is internalized experience. Inside
that person. Toxic memories have accumulated to such an extent that perfectly neutral situations,
such as meeting the boss next to the ice water pump or seeing the
wife when she washes her teeth arouse deeply settled negative emotions. Fleeing is an
attempt to relieve these emotions, but tactics rarely work, because what we want
to flee from has become part of ourselves. Conscience linked to time versus temporal
consciousness. Throughout this book I have argued that your way of aging depends on
how your experience gets into válix and, in final analysis, your way of
metabolizing. Time is the most important aspect of this process, because time is
the most fundamental experience. One of the key lessons in the spiritual teachings of
j Chrisnamorti is this. Time is man' s psychological enemy. This means
that we are psychologically undermined and deprived of our true self by the feeling that
time is an absolute over which we have no control whatsoever. Somehow we forget
that we can choose between steel not time our enemy. It is possible to
really experience temporality. When that happens, there is a shift from consciousness linked
with time to temporal consciousness. The consciousness linked to time is characterized by external
objectives, approval of the other material possessions, salary climb the ladder of professional
success, peak dates and time pressures, image of oneself built with past experiences,
lessons learned from their past us and failures, fear of change, fear
of death, distraction from the past and the future, worries, regrets,
expectations, fantasies of security that are never definitively satisfied. Selfishness, limited point
of view. Typical motivation. What do I get from this? The temporal
consciousness is characterized by internal objectives, happiness, self- acceptance, creativity,
conviction of having done the best possible in each opportunity, freedom from the pressures
of time, feeling that time is abundant and open, little, attention to
the image of oneself, activity centered in the present moment, confidence in intuition
and leaps of imagination, objectivity in terms of change and confusion, lack of
fear of death, positive experiences of being generosity, altruism, sense of shared
humanity. Typical motivation, I can help, sense of personal immortality, although
I have described them as opposites. There is actually a whole range of experiences
ranging from one consciousness totally linked with time to another completely timeless. The person
who is afraid of his or her mortality is consumed by success and fixed deadlines
and depends only on external motivations. It would be linked to time in an
almost pathological way. However, we all find in ourselves some of these traits.
On the other hand, the Holy One, who lives only for God
and who has of being a constant and secure experience, represents the extreme freedom
of temporality. Most do not manifest either extreme, but in many ways,
our deeper traits and attitudes are based on our way of relating to time and
metabolizing it to find out where you are within the scale of consciousness linked to
time versus temporal consciousness, answers the following questionnaire. Questionnaire how you metabolize the
time of the following sentences and mark the sentences applied. Your case. Quite
often or they agree with your opinion. Some of the claims of part one
seem to contradict others of part two, but that doesn' t matter.
Even if you have seemingly opposing traits and opinions, respond to each assertion alone
part one. The day is barely enough for everything I have to do.
Twice I lay down so exhausted I can' t sleep three. I have
had to abandon several important goals I had set myself when I was younger,
four I am less idealistic than I used to five. It bothers me to
leave a bill without paying six. Now I' m more cautious when it
comes to making new friends or establishing serious relationships. Seven I' ve learned
a lot from the beatings I' ve received. Eight I dedicate more time
and attention to my career than to my friends and family. Nine I could
be much more prudent to spend my money. Ten. Life is a balance
of profits and losses. I try to make the profits more than the losses.
Eleven in a loving relationship, one might expect the other person to meet
my needs. Twelve. Sometimes it makes me suffer to remember the people I
' ve failed. Thirteen. Being loved is one of the most important things
that I can think of fourteen. I don' t like authority figures fifteen.
For me, one of the scariest perspectives of old age is the loneliness
score of the part. One, part two. One. I do what
I like and I like what I do. Two. It is important to
have a higher purpose in life than family and career. Three of me feel
unique. Four The experiences of quads and deaths are very real. Five.
I often forget what day it is. Six would classify me as a deproscuris
person or seven. Sexual issues should be brought to light, even if they
disturb eight jobs. For myself nine. It doesn' t bother me to
stop reading the diary or not seeing the news. At nightfall ten I love
eleven. I have spent time on therapy and diagonal bar or other self-
development practices. Twelve. I don' t believe everything about the new era,
but I' m intrigued by thirteen. I think it' s possible
to know God. Fourteen I take things easier than most. Fifteen. I
consider myself a spiritual person and put effort into that aspect of my life.
Score of the part. Two. Evaluation of the score. Although we usually
all scored some answers from both sections, at least your score is likely to
be higher in one section than in the other. If you get more points
in the part and tend to be tied to time for you the time is
linear. You often find it scarce and sooner or later it will end up
as you rely on external approval, motivation and love. You haven' t
mastered your inner world as much as the outside. You probably give more value
to enthusiasm and positive emotions than to inner peace and detachment perhaps you long too
much will be loved by others and thus you lose the opportunity to find self
- acceptance. If your score was higher in the part, two tend to
be temporary in your consciousness, your sense of love and being loved is based
on a certain relationship. With you yourself you value detachment more than possession.
Your motivations tend to be internal rather than external. At some point in your
life you' ve had the feeling of being bigger than your limited physical person.
Your life may have been shaped by decisive experiences of God or your higher
self. While others fear loneliness. You thank her. Loneliness. He'
s developed your ability to know who you are. For the most part,
people have very little idea of the effort they spend badly on staying trapped in
the consciousness, linked with time, in their natural state. Both body and
mind try to discharge negative energies as they experience them. The baby cries when
he is hungry, pa talia, when he is irritated and falls asleep when
he comes to exhaustion. However, when we reach adulthood, the spontaneous expression
has been mostly suffocated in favor of socially acceptable safe conduct, calculated to achieve
what is desired or simply habitual. This loss of spontaneity is a result of
not living in the present, which I have analyzed before. But there'
s another result I haven' t analyzed. The loss of temporality. When
the human organism effectively discharges its negative experiences, the mind remains empty of interest
for the past or the future. There are no worries expectations or regrets.
This means that the mind is open to being the simplest state of consciousness to
support the mind. In this open condition, the body should be relaxed and
flexible. Without the accumulated tension, the aging process does not find hold.
Therefore, the most natural and easy experience you can have is that of the
timeless mind and the ageless body, unfortunately, normal life. So far from
that state, we all find ourselves bound up with time only on very rare
occasions, usually when we least expect it we manage to break into a conscious
experience of our true nature and into a world hungry for spiritual contact that is
so desperately lacking. One aftertaste from mad to temporary is enough to cause an
earthquake in a person' s consciousness. I would like to offer an example
of someone whose life completely changed thanks to one of those experiences. The spiritual
teacher and writer to Don Watts, of Young Watts, wished to find the
right attitude towards meditation. He knew that they were practiced in great spiritual traditions
so that the individual could escape the limits of daily existence, but his meditations
were uncomfortable and boring. They were of little use except to remind him of
his own limitations. Whats had noticed that many Eastern methods are contradictory and mutually
exclusive. Some teachers say that the mind must be watched, others that the
mind is absolutely forbidden to be watched. Some say that the mind should be
dominated as a wild elephant tied to a stake, others that it should be
allowed to wander freely. Totally upset, Wats decided to reject everyone one day,
adopted no particular attitude, and found that this renunciation of all expectation had
been enough to free him. In the force provoked by discarding them, I
wrote Watts, seemed to have discarded me myself, as suddenly the weight of
my own body disappeared. I felt like I didn' t own anything,
not even me, and I didn' t own anything. The monmeter became
as transparent and unobstructed as my own. Mind. The problem of life simply
ceased to exist for eighteen hours. Me and all that surrounded me were like
the wind dragging the leaves down a meadow on an autumn day. Here is
a wonderfully evocative painting of what it feels like to get beyond time and space.
The sense of freedom to detach from the old baggage arises automatically when the
individual ceases to refer only to his limited. I what is this thing you
call me. A reference point built with memories, as well as the newlywed
has a specific reference point to which she can turn to relive the day of
her wedding. The content of you. Mind consists of similar reference points,
holograph packages, old experiences that you use to define who you are. I
am the one who was born in one thousand nine hundred forty- six.
He studied at a Catholic school. I was afraid to tell my mother that
I had wet the bed. At the age of eight he received a cloth
elephant for Christmas, married too young, left college and so on without end,
the memory building accumulates until a rigid structure has been kneaded. That'
s the image you have of yourself. In moments of deep consciousness, we
fully transcend that self- image. Paradoxically, spiritual masters say that it is
then that the self is truly experienced, for the total absence of self-
image exposes you to pure selfhood compared to the rigidity of our usual sense of
self. The self is a living and fluid entity that never runs out.
It is a state beyond change, whether you experience it as a baby child,
adult, young or old. Alan Wats had an unrivalled experience of self
that is available to all. You don' t have to do anything to
find the me. We need to stop doing anything. You must stop identifying
with your self- image and its context of memories and linear time. I
use memory. An Indian teacher once commented. I don' t let memory
use me It' s a crucial point. Memory is only petrified time to
the time- based mind. It is impossible for him to see it temporally,
for what we call time is only lumps quantified of immortality. Reality is
an ocean, but we take it in teacups When Wats fell into reality the
ocean of timelessness, its perception changed instead of feeling tied and suffocated, as
we all feel, even if we do not know how to express it.
He had an oceanic sensation, a phrase coined by Freud to indicate the feeling
of melting with him. All existence based on time is not complete, nor
can it ever be, because by definition it is made of fragments tearing down
linear time. Juan O Anzan burst the bubble of the illusion of space.
Time didn' t just happen in his mind something very real happened. One
of nature' s absolutes suddenly disappeared when linear time was withdrawn. Einstein also
removed the three- dimensional space, because our perception of space from the air,
where we see that the track lights are separated by three meters, changes
completely. When the observer changes location from a higher altitude, the track lights
are getting closer and closer to each other. When we finally get to outer
space, the lights disappear. Ainstein is won, at the core of the
reality of linear time, evaporates completely, overflowing like a stream that overcomes its
banks. In physics before Einstein it was thought that if a particle passed by
the observer, it followed a straight line path, like that of arrows and
bullets once fired. Ab Here are two separate points in time. The arrow
represents the most basic event in the universe the passage of time from point A
to point B. The reason you can move through time is that particles and
energy do so, forming the basis of past, present and future. Some
of your good particle now travels to B and in due course will get there.
But Einstein, with great mathematical precision and helped by a pioneering generation of
great physicists, showed that reality is more like a pond of rings. In
expansion. See the following illustration. Time becomes waves of probability and space is
filled with ambiguous and hazy regions, where a fragment of matter may have ever
passed or might appear at some point. It is known that our two points
there b are somewhere within these expanding rings, but there is no definite past
present or future, only position possibilities. A particle can be here or there
when the position is determined. With this, the AIB time scale emerges.
They could be in the middle together or further out. Linear time deceives us
into thinking that one minute follows the other at equal distance, but we change
the reference to subjective time. Two seconds sitting on a hot plate are much
more separated than two seconds with a pretty girl. Einstein showed that the separation
between any two events is totally arbitrary. Actually, there' s only the
possibility of intervals tearing down linear time didn' t make Einstein very happy.
I personally preferred to believe that three- dimensional things and facts were real.
For science, however, a supreme act of liberation was achieved. The youngest
physicists were in glory. After Einstein' s wake, we now have superspace,
a realm that bursts out of new dimensions, new geometries, and any
kind of time one can imagine. In superspace, stars are no longer separated
by an empty black. Through that void, an infinite energy is palpitated that
unfolds by invisible strands and curves. Time can be absorbed by black holes and
spat by singularities. Compressed seeds of space time that retract an infinite duration in
zero space in the superspace. Time doesn' t have a fixed address.
It can go as easily as it can go back. A particle that departs
from can appear in b before it has departed, defying our linear expectations.
This may seem impossible to understand, but let' s imagine a propulsion plane
that took off at night for the passenger sitting inside the plane. The track
lights run fast in row, following a sequence in time. However, once
in the air he looks down and sees that the lights do not move at
all. They exist in a pattern that we experience as time in motion.
Linear time always seems to be moving, but when you move away from the
three- dimensional point of view, it is possible to look down, analyze
the larger picture, and understand that time itself does not move the usual image
of nature, backed by most physicists. It has two layers that we can
grasp by the senses or by scientific theory, physical creation. Quantum field.
The physical world arose from the quantum field, which is the source of all
matter and all energy. But that leads to the obvious question of where the
quantum field came from. Quantum reality is already at the very limit of time
and space beyond where and when. Therefore, the source of the quantum field
must be nowhere and everywhere and its date of birth was no and no.
In other words, the question has no answer that makes sense within our usual
time space framework. Again, it was Einstein who offered the solution. Having
completed his work on the general theory of relativity, which some physicists consider to
be the deepest act of thought attained by any human being alone. Einstein went
on to postulate a unified field theory that would unite all the laws of nature
by giving them a common foundation. His beautiful fa theorem and equal to two
had shown that matter can be converted into energy in the terminology of physics.
Einstein had unified at two. He now intended to unify space and time as
well. In essence, it would replace the two- layer model of the
cosmos with a three- layer model. Physical creation quantum field, unified field.
As I had already shown that time space is an illusion. This new
layer of the unified field should be the hidden reality behind illusion, the totality,
beyond all dimensions. Unfortunately, Einstein died before he could find a mathematical
expression for his unified field theory. Thirty years after his death, younger colleagues
such as John Willer and David Pome took up the task. Despite the extreme
skepticism of almost all physicists, it seemed impossible to offer a true unified field
theory, as it should be nothing less than the theory of the whole.
Scepticism has now become a waiter. There are notable thinkers like Stephen Hawking and
Vager Canmels, who consider the theory of the whole as a viable objective.
However, it is not necessary to wait until the theory of the whole is
demonstrated to understand that the unified field is identical to the lello of Allan Watts
' temporal experience, the perfectly ordered totality, which includes all the events of
time space in a seamless plot. When spiritual masters declare I am that,
they are asserting the most complete sense of correspondence, they understand that the unified
field exists in them, around and through them. However, to share this
experience, we must overcome an imposing obstacle, the fear of death for the
vast majority, death represents the point of separation where life ends and the unknown
begins. But the universe after Einstein has no beginning, no end, no
limits in time and space to incorporate us into this greater reality. Each of
us must redefine where he begins and where he ends his own life or whether
he has, after all, a beginning and an end. The spell of
mortality to overcome the illusion of death, the unified field is within us,
walking to the temporal world with every breath, every thought, every act.
Some people are much more aware of this connection than others. For them,
death has become much less threatening in their youth, at the peaks of poor
health and depression Einstein wrote to an intimate friend. I feel to such an
extent part of my whole life that I am not at all concerned about the
beginning or the end of the concrete existence of any person, particularly within this
river. Without end, this feeling of being one with things provides security and
absence of threat. If harboring a threat within us is what gives rise to
aging, we cannot afford to live with our current fear of death. In
reality, death is not the almighty force that presents our fear. In nature,
death is part of a broader cycle of birth and renewal. This year
' s seeds sprout, grow, bloom, and give rise to next year
' s seeds. The cycles of incessant renewal are not beyond death, incorporating
it into use for a higher purpose. The same thing happens inside our body.
Many cells cope with aging and death by choice, not because the shadowy
scythe character has forced them to extinction until it is assumed to exist. Death.
It is a half truth, for in aunt there are many planes that
know nothing of extinction. Your atoms are billions of years old and they have
so much left to live in the remote future. When they decompose into smaller
particles, they will not die, but will transform into another energy configuration.
The atoms are not to begin anything other than in him transformed. However,
we do not say that the primordial energy soup died by locking itself in orderly
models of hydrogen, helium and other elements. Gravity and its allied ubatomic forces
that hold your body together will never die, although in some unknowable future they
may return to the greater force fields that gave rise to the great explosion.
Since we are composed of immortal ingredients, why not see ourselves under the same
light in the fist of illusion to free you from the fist of death.
You must understand that it is based on a very selective view of reality that
was instilled in you before you could consciously choose. Go back mentally to that
moment of your first years when you discovered that death existed. These first clashes
are generally very impressive. A four- year- old is shocked to wake
up one morning and find that the canary, cat or dog have simply ceased
to be alive. What happened, where my pet went. Rarely can parents
give a good answer to those questions. They say something like your pet has
gone to heaven to be with God. This doesn' t usually fix things.
To say that a dear little animal went to heaven transmits what the parents
would want to be the truth. But inside they fear death as much as
children and understand it equally little. Young children have good antennas to perceive the
doubts and escapes of their parents. Tears cease and pain calms, but in
a deeper plane a vague suspicion is born. This might happen to me later.
When the child is between four and six years old. Parents confirm that
fearsome insinuation is true. Grandma died and went to heaven. Someday you'
ll die, too, and Mom and Dad may not remember that moment.
Many children prefer to deny it and swear to be like Peter Pian, young
forever, but it matters little whether you remember it or not. Some psychologists
argue that the moment you faced death, you acquired an idea that holds mankind
captive. For centuries, your belief in death as extinction, condemns your body
to decay, age and die, just as so many others did before you.
In the same way, it is not death that makes us suffer,
but the fear of its inevitability. We all feel a deaf pain, a
hole in the open heart There when the first loved one died in our lives.
There remained a void that filled the fear, as nothing else has ever
since filled it. We haven' t been able to face death yet.
Loss is the most powerful cause of concern and also the most difficult to deal
with in adulthood. Aging makes us think of loss. That' s why
it forces us to look into that void that opened in childhood. Freeing from
death is the goal of all religions. O death, where is your sting,
O grave, where is your victory? Paul in his epistle asks a
small group of Christians in Corinth. Then it provides the answer. The sting
of death is sin referring to error and loss of grace. In other words,
death is the result of man' s separation from the divine that lacks
death by implication. Immortality is our true life. But what about the canary,
the cat or the dog that died in our childhood. The animal perished
without having any of those theological beliefs. However, to say that an animal
has died is to put things in human terms. Let' s look at
the tree in front of the window, it' s alive or dead,
both at once. Their old leaves are dead. Just like the seed from
which it sprang. The wood inside the trunk is dead, except for the
thin ring of change of just a millimeter and a half that feeds the leaves,
in turn composed mostly of non- living cellulose fibers. When they fall
apart in the fall, their dead skeletons will fall to the ground, but
until then they are part of the living tree. Even more so the food,
air and water that circulate through the tree are no longer alive than when
they existed locked in rocks and raindrops. The soil that sustains the tree is
only ground stone and decomposed matter from previous trees. What we call a living
tree is a compound of life and death. Any division between one and the
other is mainly in our head. Any plant, any animal is only a
stage in the constant cyclar and recycle elements that develops eternally. All that cycle
is life and variation is the living. The fact that we try to freeze
the cycle in a snapshot saying now this tree is alive, now this tree
is dead, represents the way our Mind works as we are afraid of decay
and disintegration, we label it as death, when in truth it is only
change. Like the tree, the canary is only one stage of life.
At a previous time, the canary was an egg, before, a fertilized
cell. Earlier still seeds of alpiste meals by his mother, who turned the
food into the egg to put. After the Canary dies, its elements will
decompose, nourish the plants and the plants will give seeds to feed other birds.
What part of this incessant round is death, if any, and how
much of it is only our vision of things, including that of ourselves.
You may think that death is a horrible fact that awaits you in the future,
when in truth there are parts of your body that die every second,
the lining of your stomach dies partially every time you digest a meal, just
to be replaced by another new tissue. The same can be said of skin,
hair, nails, blood cells, and any other tissue. Maybe you
assume death is your enemy, but all those cells die to keep you alive.
If your stomach lining didn' t die to be replaced over and over
again the gastric games that would open a hole in your stomach within a few
hours, then you' d all die. The boundary between the living and
the dead becomes very diffuse. The more you look, there are parts of
your body that are much more alive than others. Muscles have a faster metabolism
than fat. The cells of the brain, heart, and liver rarely double
after birth, if any, while those of the stomach, skin, and
blood are replaced in a matter of days, weeks, or months. A
strange fact of human anatomy is that, if we could somehow remove all the
cells from our body. The remaining form would still look a lot like a
person. Our structural parts resemble a coral reef standing alone, composed of mineral
bone and exado plus ligaments, tissue tendons of conjunctive uers and water, with
all the cells tucked into it, just as coral polyps are tucked into the
calcified reef that they have segregated, just like the reef that carries the surrounding
ocean within. We are brine in two thirds, but these dead parts of
us freely trade their atoms with the medium. When they are injured, they
heal if pressure is applied to them, they slowly change shape to relieve tension
Being so, how much of my body is alive and how much dead.
Until I say my body implies a division that does not necessarily exist. The
air in my lungs is part of my body. In that case, what
to say about the air I' m going to vacuum or the air I
just exhale. The world out there is composed of billions of atoms that were
in a time or will soon be. I myself and to stay alive I
need the whole package of matter and energy we call Earth. I might as
well say that I' m just a cell in this larger body, since
I need the whole planet to flaunt me. Everything on Earth is part of
my body. If this is true, we cannot regard the rotting carrion as
dead at all, the worms and the men who feed on it and even
the bones of my ancestors are trapped in the same wave of life that carries
me on its crest. Some people grieve at both talking about death, refusing
to have any interest in it. They say that they do not fear death
or, in any case, that they do not afflict them or have the
power that I have described over them. Why delaying on such a morbid subject
is not healthier simply to accept the inevitable and live for today. The answer
to this objection is that unconscious forces operate in us. Even if we all
recognize that we are going to die, except in those moments when we see
a dead or a dying man, we keep the fear well wrapped up.
It' s almost a biological necessity. I can' t imagine how I
could go forward if the idea of my own death emerged to the surface of
the brig more than once or twice a year. Being a doctor, I
am forced to see death much more often, but closing the eyes of a
cancer patient does not automatically bring my own mentality to my head. I may
feel sad, but I don' t see myself closing my own eyes.
The fact that we all protect ourselves from fear does not mean that we have
him dominated from the bottom of his dark well. Fear still exercises control over
us. To begin with, the very fact that we can' t bear
to imagine our own death is instilled in tremendous power, as if death was
surrounded by an electrified fence with about ten million volts and a huge sign.
We don' t touch her We don' t touch her. And since
death is surrounded within death, we don' t know much about it.
Fear of death should change its name and be called ignorance of death. I
am certain that nothing ages people as much as fear. The grief follows him
closely. All doctors have witnessed the horrific deterioration that can affect widowers. But
in this competition fear is the absolute victor. A patient who is diagnosed with
terminal cancer may wither very quickly almost before our eyes. Of course it doesn
' t always happen that way. There are inner qualities that overcome fear,
such as courage and faith in God, and some people can bring them out
in times of horrible crisis, but if fear succeeds in emerging, it will
surely do its work. I do not mean that death is a fiction,
but that our belief in death creates limitations where the usefulness of death must not
exist. Among other things, we all tend to assume that death is somehow
unnatural, therefore bad. I disagree. Nature is very tolerant and flexible about
the use or non- use it gives to death. In a broader picture
the questions of the NS either right or wrong, tend to seem quite arbitrary.
If we analyze how life operates on the genetic plane. DNA long ago
discovered the secret of creating ageless cells in the form of amoebas, bacterial algae,
etc. Whose generations extend backward without interruption. The appearance and disappearance of
any meva alone is of no importance, as life continues to produce amoebas of
the same genes. Nature also went on to assemble more complex ageless creatures.
Hydra, for example, is a primitive aquatic animal that can develop new cells
as quickly as it gets rid of old ones, composed of one foot,
a fine stem, and a set of tiny tentacles that look like a flower.
He spends time growing at one end and dying at the other, thereby
renewing his entire body every two weeks. Their cells exist in perfect flow,
as the new ones constantly advance to fill the site of the dying ones.
This is creation and destruction in perfect balance, with no place for death.
Therefore, time cannot reach the one- way. He only dies by accident,
lack of food, drought or some other external cause. The secret of
eternal youth is, therefore, a balanced metabolism, a constant chemical flow that
processes food, air and water in perfect balance without yielding a millimeter to entropy.
The Herian managed to dominate this balancing act hundreds of millions of years ago.
In that sense, death is a later development in the evolutionary chain,
but even among higher organisms, DNA exerts considerable command over death. The common
bee, for example, can change given its craving. Every hive needs young
workers, whose function is to stay inside, caring for and feeding the new
larvae. After three weeks, these workers grow and become mature explorers the bees
that come out of the hive to collect pollen or flowers. However, at
any time, given that there may be too many young workers or too many
old explorers in the spring, so many new larvae may be brewing that the
hive lacks mature explorers and requires more urgently. When that happens, some of
the young workers get older to become explorers in a week instead of the usual
three, and go out for food. Similarly, if a swarm is divided
into a new hive, it is likely to consist mainly of old explorers.
When they perceive the lack of young workers, some of these explorers reverse their
age and rejuvenate, regenerate the hormones of the young workers and even grow the
withered glands needed to produce food for the larvae. Bee scholars were amazed to
discover this behavior. They then realized that aging is not a one- way
process dictated by an unmovable plan for the bee. Aging is plastic, capable
of moving forward and backwards, delaying or accelerating. The true mystery lies in
why this does not occur in the forms of higher lives. I would argue
that aging is always plastic, but that we have invented it in its place
by our belief in death the inevitable end point of the fixed aging plan.
Bee colonies are rhythmic entities that must face constant changes in population and structure,
availability of food, predators and climate. He wrote to researcher Jim Ravensen.
With slight changes, one could adopt this model for the human body. It
is a hive cycle of fifty billion cells that age or stay young according to
what the entire colony needs at a given moment in the internal harassment of each
cell floats a self- destructive mechanism in the form of sealed packages of corrosive
enzymes. These enzymes may or may not be responsible for normal aging, but
they undoubtedly perform special functions. When a white cell, attacker or macrophage has
ingested a large number of bacteria or viruses, for example, it eliminates it
by unleashing these digestive enzymes. In the process, the macrophage also dies.
This is not an act of fortuitous violence, but a very conscious decision.
For the general good of the body, the cell destroys itself. The same
deliberate self- sacrifice occurs millions of times a day In our largest organ the
skin as a physical object. A living cell of very fragile skins, too
tender to withstand the elements. That' s why our outer layer of skin.
The epidermis is made up of dead cells hard enough to withstand the blows,
frictions and jolts that touch us. These cells do not perish from exposure
to air. Rather, when a young cell is produced in the dermis the
inner layer of the skin, it is pushed to the surface by the pressure
of the new cells that grow from below duns During this time, the cell
begins to accumulate within itself a protein called kratin. That e- mail substance
that' s in the nails and the hair. Keratin replaces the soft part
of the cell, making it harder and harder. When it finally reaches the
air, each skin cell contains that Latina enough to protect the body from wind,
sun and rain. Then the cell dies to complete its mission without leaving
any trace behind it. When sacrificed to make way for the next wave of
growing cells, such as the epithelial cell, it knows when dying helps ensure
the survival of the entire body. At the opposite end, a cancer cell
endangers the whole body because it does not know how to die. Basically,
a cancer cell is an embroidered immortalist. He tries to survive according to his
own conditions, without paying attention to the fate of the others for insanity that
his behavior may seem. Even so, it represents an interwoven choice in the
plan of nature the bird in that of any cell is equipped with special genes
called are cogenes that seem to be put into operation before the cancer is activated.
According to another recent hypothesis, there are in the first chromosome of human
DNA genes that, if activated, would allow each cell to divide indefinitely.
Scientists have not yet found the reason for cells to seek their own immortality.
Perhaps this mechanism is a remnant of our ancient evolutionary past or latent power that
we have not yet learned to take advantage of. We exercise much more power
over aging and death than we are willing to recognize, although we consider ourselves
victims of old age and death. The stark truth is that for many of
us aging and dying are the only escape from an unsatisfactory life. These escapists
play an important role, I believe, in the phenomenon of premature retirement death,
which we discussed in the first part. Another variant of this topic is
the death of an anniversary, for which a person dies on the same date
that he widowed or lost a beloved son. Studies of Chinese and Jewish communities
have revealed that the mortality rate drops dramatically just before important religious dates, only
to rise immediately after people expect to celebrate a new year plus another Easter before
letting themselves go. No study is needed to indicate that people cling to life
when something dear is at stake. The most recent example I have seen occurred
between an elderly victim of several severe thrombosis and his grandson. The man,
finally disabled, was placed in a hospital with little hope of returning home.
He remained in a weak state. Semiconscient. When he regained some lucidity and
could speak, he pointed to his grandson' s picture murmuring Where is he?
Where is he? The dying boy' s children called the grandson who
rushed to Boston. When he came to the pine trees, such an elder
experienced a change he smiled caressing the young man who meant so much to him.
Hand in hand, they spoke quietly alone and together for most of the
day. When the grandson left with the intention of returning in the morning.
Everyone told him that his grandfather seemed to be much better. Two hours later,
the old man died in his sleep. When I think about this incident,
I wonder what the researchers hope to quantify the forces that sustain life.
While there' s a hope or a love to wait for from the outside.
We cannot know with certainty that a person' s body responds. The
whole thing is too personal. Several years ago, when Fano gave the last
manual exit on suicide, it became a sales success. Its main audience consisted
of people affected by incurable disease or chronic, physical or emotional pain. The
slow way nature offers to commit suicide from aging did not seem to him fast
enough. As horrifying as this may seem. A whole life of pain and
disease would be even more hideous without any liberation if it were not for death,
said One guru to his disciples, we would all condemn ourselves to eternal
senility. Even without senility, life can end I simply look forward to death,
Berenhach said Retired from Porte Angeles, Washington. For all the things I
' ve done and I can' t do anymore. I' m not
afraid of death at all. If I had to die right now, I
' d be fine with it any minute now I' m willing. These
words express resignation, serenity, apathy, courage defeat. We can' t
really know. Wrenhach made this statement upon his 100th birthday and was still alive
at the age of one hundred and four. Despite his words, his deepest
self seemed to have more to live for. All these examples show that life
does not have a single value, whether positive or negative. Dying is a
form of change and as such must be seen within the broader framework of non
- change. People have the wrong idea of death. Marissi once told me
that she sees it as an end, but it' s actually a beginning.
You can take this as an article of faith, but for me it
is the realistic expression of a fact in the flow of life. Destruction never
gets the last word every time. Creation takes a phoenix out of the ashes.
Every cell knows how to divide to form two cells. Every shattered atom
can regroup into new atoms. Each thought is inspired by a new inspiration.
How, then, can we learn to live within this continuity that is the
whole of life. What about the emotional devastation of a father, when he
loses a son, a wife, when his husband dies. These feelings are
natural of your position. There is pain in the loss of any loved one,
but pain does not have to be deep and lasting if we have absorbed
the reality of life as an eternal flow in which there are no losses or
gains, only transformation. Shakespeare wrote in one of his sonnets. I'
m crying for what I' m afraid of losing. Such is the inevitable
result of attachment to time- bound consciousness. The new paradigm holds that consciousness
is the source of reality. Two completely different types of reality arise from consciousness
linked to time and time. Results of consciousness linked to time aging, entropy,
confusion, fatigue, repression, feeling of being a victim, anxiety of
separation, conflict, sorrow, sadness, locking in self and body, fear,
death, results of temporal consciousness, freedom, autonomy, youth, knowledge
of reality, unlimited energy, liberated emotions, expansion beyond body and self,
pa, power, harmony, joy. We all experience aspects of both realities,
because our consciousness is fluid. It can bring us devastating moments of sorrow
and fear and wonderful moments of peace and power. You can choose between identifying
with the limitations of a physical body and a selfish self or freeing yourself in
transcendence and expansion. This flexibility is the true genius of human consciousness, for
it leaves all possibilities open. However, there are obviously great advantages in living
permanently in the temporal consciousness. The spiritual masters of India believe that the human
spirit has a natural tendency to seek limitless freedom and satisfaction, such as the
Gulf current that invisibly opens its way across the Atlantic. The human mind contains
hidden currents that drive our thoughts and emotions toward a higher reality. In India,
this is called Daharma, an ancient Sanskrit word that can be translated in
various ways if the law means order of seeing and correct conduct. A person
' s dharma is his job or profession. It is also the responsibility towards
your family, the higher purpose of your life, and the spiritual ideal to
which you are committed. The daharma root is a verb that means to hold
in its broadest sense. Dharma is what sustains the individual, the guiding force
that puts order in chaos. Therefore, the ultimate way to avoid entropy,
aging, and death is to live in the weapon. The universe evolves because
it guides it. The daharma current is the invisible intelligence that weaves the fabric
of life. Human consciousness is able to directly touch the dharma, to connect
with it and thus guide its own evolution. This, finally, is what
makes us human. Not only do we evolve, but we guide our own
evolution. Da arma is not a set of religious teachings, but a true
force that can be discovered and used in the next section. In practice we
will see how this can be achieved, for with orientation our inner intelligence can
create a permanent state of body, ageless and timeless mind. We all experience
moments when peace, power and love arise spontaneously only to disappear. Far from
being fortuitous, you are centered and out of reality reflect the ability of the
mind to keep its course, for if you follow the weapon without ceasing,
peace, love and power have no end. They are the natural results of
the most natural time of consciousness, temporality. The great joy of writing this
book was for me to take a theme full of fear, aging and turn
it into a vehicle of fullness. Human beings are not trapped in time,
squeezed into the volume of a body and the duration of a life. We
are travelers in the infinite river of life. That is what Christ meant by
counsel he gave in to the world, but not to him. That'
s what Carlos Castañeda learned from Don Juan when he wrote. His sense of
detachment had disappeared, which was what had given him the power to love without
that detachment. He only had worldly needs, despair and hopelessness the distinctive features
of the everyday world. Although we often identify love with clinging and possession,
there is a deep truth here. Losing the power of detachment amounts to losing
the ability to love detachment. It is not cold, disinterested or lack of
feeling. It' s a free sense of self. Without the hindrance of
boundaries, our journey does not begin or end in the physical world. The
Earth is a beautiful jewel, green and blue that hangs on the tapestry of
eternity for a long time that we remain here to drink pure water and aspirate
the life- giving air. Our home is rather eternity. We are of
temporal essence, we were born in the bottomless pond that fires bubbles of time
and space. A bubble is a moment, now a millennium, but the
pond itself is pure spirit. No matter how many stars and galaxies arise from
it to explode on the surface. As fragile foam, nothing has been removed
or added. The being is deep, clear, permanent always the same as
amazement to think that our daily existence springs from that infinitely renewable source. But
life has no other basis. Intelligence, power, and limitless freedom are inherent
in the unified field that Einstein and the ancient sages shared in their vision.
Immortality dawns when you understand that you deserve your place in the eternal flow.
When you know, you can claim your immortality here and now at every second,
for time is nothing but quantified immortality. Nature waits to pour generously upon
you this supreme gift. After having nourished us for millions of years, the
sea, air and sun still sing the song that we must begin to appreciate
once again, what nature says around us, in the space between our atoms
permeating each thought the same breath, the same silent whisper circulates through each cell.
It is the rhythm of life itself that calls each of us with gentle
insistence. I cherish a few verses from the ancient Begbeth that articulates this eternal
song. Although my spirit may wander through the four corners of the earth,
let it come to me again so that I can live and travel here?
Though my spirit may go far over the sea. Let him come back to
me again so that I can live and travel here, even if my spirit
can go far to the bright rays of light? Let him come back to
me again so that I can live and travel here, even if my spirit
can go far to visit the sun and dawn? Let him come to me
again so that I can live and travel here, even though I am spirited
I can wander through the steep mountains? Let him come to me again so
that I can live and travel here, even though my spirit can go far
in all the ways that live and move? Let him come to me again
so that I can live and travel here, even if my spirit can go
far to distant realms? Let him come back to me again so that I
can live and travel here, even if my spirit can go far to all
that is and is to be? Let him come to me again so that
I can live and travel here, even though my spirit may wander through the
valley of death? Let him come to me again so that I can live
and travel here, even if my spirit ambulates the corners of the earth?
Let him come to me again so I can live and walk here? Even
if my spirit ambulates at great distance over the sea? Let him come to
me again so I can live and walk here? Even if my spirit ambulates
into lightnings of light? Let him come to me again so I can live
and walk here? Although my spirit of ambulation to visit the sun and the
dawn, let it come to me again so that here I will live and
walk? Even though my spirit wanders through the steep mountains, let it come
to me again so that I will live and walk here? Even though my
spirit of ambulation, with every living and mobile form, let it come to
me again so that here I will live and walk? Even if my spirit
ambulates for very distant realms, let it come to me again so that I
will live and walk here? Though my spirit of ambulation for what is and
will be, let it come to me again so that I may live and
walk here? Even though my spirit wanders through the valley of death, let
it come to me again so that I may live and walk here? Read
it out twice. Then stay silent with your body for five minutes, directing
your consciousness to each part of your body, knowing that this consciousness is spirit.
Spirit is healing energy, the flow of life and intelligence in each cell.
When we re- intonate with the innate joy and delight of our bodies,
the signs of the deep- durated sage will appear, creating healing from
within. An ancient Chinese poem by Chantsu says that which fills the universe I
consider my body and that which directs the universe I see as my own nature.
I hear silent music. In these words they remind me that cosmic breath
is my next breath and cosmic dance is the next beat of my heart.
In practice timeless mode. The deepest reality you have awareness of is that from
which you draw your power. For those who are only aware of the material
world, power is limited to material forces, but on a deeper plane there
is a creative power that molds and body the power of evolution or gives weapon.
To get in touch with the core of life, you must get in
touch with the creative power of the universe. That power is expressed through your
personal creativity. When you' re in the field of creativity, you lose
track of time. They' re just the flow. There are three forces
that permeate all life, creation, maintenance and destruction. All three are present
in the lifetime of cells, stars, trees, planets, and galaxies.
Since every form must become sustained and disappear even when each period of life develops
in a sequence over time. The three forces themselves exist simultaneously the genes of
each species. They include the code to create new cells, keep each one
for some time, and destroy it to make room for another generation of tissues.
This intelligence three in one is what you' re trying to simulate.
When you consciously shape your life it is up to you to choose what aspect
will be the most dominant creation, maintenance or destruction, since you have the
power to vary the balance of forces you are above and beyond them. As
long as creation dominates your existence, you will continue to grow and develop evolution
mocks entropy, decadence and aging. The most creative people in any field resort
intuitively to that knowledge. They grow with full awareness of being the source of
their own power, whatever their field. They generally share certain traits. One
is able to establish contact with silence and enjoy it. Two connect with nature
and enjoy it. Three trust their feelings. Four can remain centered and functioning
in the midst of confusion and chaos. Five are like kids, enjoy fantasy
and play. Six themselves are their point of reference, place the highest confidence
in their own consciousness. Seven do not adhere rigidly to any point of view.
Although passionately dedicated to their creativity, they remain open to new possibilities.
These seven points provide us with a practical pattern to assess how much creativity our
life unfolds. The following exercise shows how to develop and strengthen these aspects.
Exercise a creative action plan. Everyone has a fixed routine that dominates their day.
Almost everyone fills our waking hours with the same activities, seeing the same
family and friends, working with the same companions, walking the same streets and
even having the same thoughts. It has been estimated that ninety percent of the
thoughts a person has in a day are a literal repetition of those he had
the day before. This routine leaves little room for real creativity, unless you
decide to make room for it. However, in quantum terms, there is
infinite space for creativity, because every second is full of unlimited choices and unseen
possibilities. Once you begin to open up space for the new and the unknown,
you open the way for deeper powers to emerge. From the voids of
daily existence, the most extraordinary historical events occurred in ordinary days. The most
extraordinary thoughts arose in minds that conceived many ordinary thoughts. The next exercise gives
you a way to open up some space in your life for growth. The
more consciously you follow it, the more limitless growth will be. Draft an
action plan for the next six months based on the seven qualities of very creative
people. According to the list on this page. There' s no need
to force all those points into every day. Enough commitment to allow these aspects
of your life to arise more fully in mind. One experiences silence. First,
take some time to experience silence. Ideally, it is a brief period
of meditation of fifteen to thirty minutes in the morning before going to work,
then a second period at sunset when you return home. It is a time
to simply exist, but its very simplicity can make it the most important period
of your life. Silence is a precious commodity, especially in the bustle of
modern society, in a world that is more than a little crazy. Finding
the core of silence is like regaining the strength of sanity and peace. The
mind is replenished in the quantum source silence of all activity. If in your
life you dominate only activity you spend more energy than you earn, the most
basic rhythm of nature, activity and rest deviates too much in one direction.
Silence is the great teacher to learn his lessons. You must pay attention to
him. There is no substitute for creative inspiration, knowledge, and stability provided
by knowing how to get in touch with the inner core of silence. The
great Sufi poet Rumi wrote only leaves the agitated waters calm, The sun and
the moon will reflect on the surface. Of your being two spending time in
nature. He plans to spend a period of time in contact with nature.
There is no healthier way to discharge the accumulated energies. When you move away
from the artificial confines of the material world and return to nature, the body
mind system spontaneously disposes of its excess energies in city environments. It is not
always easy to find a green and open place, a wide panorama of sky
and clouds of pure air with which to fill your lungs. But if you
find a piece of land where you can stand without shoes and with your arms
stretched out in the sun, take advantage of it. In the absence of
that, seek to perís mendar the nature where you live, rising early to
appreciate the sunrise or stopping a few moments at sunset to contemplate the sunset,
the moon and the stars. The cells in your body are exquisitely harmonized with
the cycles of the moon, the sun, and the stars. When you
drink nature with your senses, this invisible connection is strengthened even in the very
center of congested urban areas. It is possible to cultivate a garden on the
window forestick. Nothing to see the seeds sprout. Go out to the roof
of your building to soak up the sun. It also allows some contact with
nature. As you can, capture at least a few moments of freshness and
feel the nourishing contact of the earth, the sun and the sky. Three
to experience and trust in emotions. Start keeping a diary of your feelings.
This doesn' t have to be a complicated task. Just make a list
of some key emotions and write down an example of each as it arises on
your day. Start by noting the key words of basic positive emotions, such
as love, joy, sympathy, acceptance, happiness, cordiality, confidence with
passion. It is then a column of more abstract feelings associated with creativity and
personal development, such as psychological penetration and intuition, discovery, transcendence, faith
fusion, forgiveness, peace, revelation. Finally, he notes the primary negative
emotions, which can be anger, envy, anxiety, grief, guilt,
greed, distrust, selfishness. Look at this sheet of paper in the morning
and take it with you to serve as a reminder, although you will benefit
much more and write down your feelings in some detail, exposing them and reliving
how strong they were, what kind of circumstances caused it and how important an
emotion had for you. In particular, you can get a good result with
a silent diary, that is, take a look at the list and just
briefly remember each emotion. The objectives of keeping this diary are as follows.
One, discover how often you feel things that happen to you unnoticed. Two,
allow the spontaneous release of emotions that you would normally repress or try to
forget three, really know your emotions. Many people cannot specifically describe what it
feels like to experience compassion or psychological penetration, for example, but if you
are alert to any emotion, you will come to know them intimately. It
' s the first stage to master your emotions. Four, make your emotions
something to enjoy. The life of feelings must be rich and satisfying, but
if your emotions are unknown to you, you cannot enjoy them. Many people
have been convinced of having little, if any, emotion. However, despite
our efforts to suppress them, there is a feeling linked to each of our
thoughts. When you bring it out, you get back into the whole connection.
Mind body and totality is the most satisfying state in which you can live
in your daily inventory. Don' t skip any words on the list,
or delay in a single category, even if you' ve been angry several
times in the same day, think of a single case and go on.
In addition, it is important not to focus too much on negative emotions,
which are the easiest to experience, usually, the most advantageous for yourself.
I ask you to bring out negative emotions so that you can better understand their
origins. Being aware of the origin of an emotion allows the dissipation of negative
feelings. This always happens, although in the case of repressed or stubbornly rooted
negativity. The process takes time. Negative emotions limit the world and separate us
from it, when the object of this exercise is to awaken creative and expansive
emotions. If you take your diary seriously, you will be amazed at the
diversity of the emotions you experience during the day without realizing all that you pay
attention to grows, although you may think that words such as revelation or psychological
penetration only rarely apply to you by just looking at your list and focusing on
each feeling a few seconds will create space for real contact with emotions to develop.
It tends to be extremely difficult in the midst of work and other activities.
Emotions don' t follow a routine. If you' re prone to
get away from your feelings. The rush of modern life makes it even easier
for you to repress and escape them as they arise. However, there is
nothing more important to experience. Your feelings. They' re the most spontaneous
part of your composition. The most primary expression of your consciousness as it relates
to the world. You are the totality of all the relationships you have and
your emotions are the most accurate mirror of them. Four remain centered in the
middle of chaos. In order to stay focused and serene when everything around you
is confusion. You need to develop the ability to find your center. To
do so, identify two moments of your workday when things are more frenetic and
stressful for you the most obvious possibility. It' s time for more work
or the densest transit time when you come home. Now plan to set aside
five minutes to focus just before those two periods. Using the following technique,
find a place where you can be alone and silent as far as possible.
Sit comfortably and close your eyes, pay attention to your breathing by concentrating on
the passage of air through your nostrils. Visualize the air as slight volutes that
enter through the nose and come out again gently. After two minutes, he
begins to feel the body, that is, he repairs the inner sensations,
the skin, the weight of the limbs, etc. After one minute gently
take attention to the center of your chest and put it lightly. There it
is possible that within a few seconds you will be distracted by a thought or
a fleeting sensation Don' t resist, but when you notice that this happens,
the attention to your chest gently ends the exercise by sitting quietly without doing
anything. Although the technique is very simple, it often produces dramatic discharges of
negative energies. You may feel that your shoulders are free of a heavy burden
and that a feeling of lightness and calm permeates your whole being The most important
thing is that you will understand with experience that staying focused is the most natural
and comfortable way to face any situation by chaotic. Whether it' s focusing
is a way to go back to the self and get rid of the confusion
that surrounds you five being like a child scores two or three totally childish things
that you can do tomorrow. Think of something that makes you evoke childhood,
have an ice cream, play in the square, fantasize about the shapes of
the clouds. Start incorporating these activities into your current life. Increasingly, your
goal is to find within you that place where you are still a carefree child.
The new paradigm tells us that no fact ever disappears, only withdraws from
consciousness to return to the field. Therefore, your childhood is still there with
you ready to be evoked and integrated. Your choice of activity should be fun,
but not for adults, even if you think you' re too old
to play, jump on the rope, or for toys. Find something that
will irresistibly return you. The happiness of the child is a good idea to
prepare a comforting dessert, apple pie or bread pudding, for example. When
you do your childish activity you should be a child maybe decide to go to
the square to swing, climb the parallels or simply participate watching how they play.
Children put their minds in that innocent and carefree way that children exhibit.
The feeling you' re trying to recapture is not a return to childhood,
but something much deeper, as the brilliant writer and therapist established. H to
the more. When we observe a child write to the most, we see
that this feeling of fullness, of intrinsic liveliness, of enjoying existence is not
the result of anything else. It is valuable to simply be yourself not because
of what you do or stop doing. It is there in the beginning when
we are children, but we slowly miss what often happens with time or we
lose track of inner joy. There may be numerous sources of pleasure and success
outside of us, but they do not fit our feelings, which can remain
at very low levels of courage and satisfaction. Finally, the desire to be
young again is a symbol of the deepest desire to stay new. Babies and
children have no problems in this regard. When you put yourself back in the
most childish mental setting you can imagine, open up space to learn, as
the other person says, that we are pleasure, we are joy. We
are the deepest importance. And the highest value six is the point of reference
itself. The highest state of consciousness we can achieve is that of unity,
which erases the differentiation between observer and observed. In unity, everything that once
seemed to be out there looks like part of oneself. What prevents this experience
is a lack of sense of self built with images of past experiences. The
image of oneself is necessary to a very limited extent. You must know your
identity, your profession and other technical details. But almost everyone carries that image
of themselves with a multitude of opinions, beliefs, preferences and antipathies and other
strange lumps. To free yourself from this baggage and re- experience yourself as
a free person without hindrance, you must strive to remove the hardened patina from
the image. From yourself. Your action plan can take many different directions to
achieve this goal. You can start a new activity that is totally incongruous with
your self image. If you are a grey suit executive, dedicate yourself to
aerobic dance, if you are a housewife to lifting weights, it is to
contact people and situations that challenge you to leave behind the old customs. Work
as a volunteer with the disabled or the homeless when you see yourself in front
of very different people, you will learn to overcome innate fear and resistance and
you will end up being reflected in them, which is a powerful means of
discovering common humanity. Write your autobiography to record all the details of your life.
As candidly as possible, it will help you to get rid of entrenched
attitudes, showing you where they came from. The act of writing also forces
you to articulate things that you normally take for granted, such as what you
feel about parents and career. Be as detailed and explicit as you can concentrate
on what you felt in every period of your life. Don' t justify
your actions or paint yourself better than you are If you struggle to express yourself,
try to open up the flow of words by referring to yourself in the
third person. Instead of suffering the domination of a father who loved and feared
at the same time, it will be already dominated by a father who loved
and feared at the same time, Decide to take a step every day to
correct a behavior that does not seem to you expression of your true. I,
for example, can be one of those people who always say what others
want to hear the next time you discover yourself falling into that trap say what
you really think. The situation does not need to be dramatic or decisive.
Maybe someone will talk about the bus always arriving late not surprised face that badly
conserved is the area. Instead of pleading with the complaint, express what you
really think about the matter. Conversely, if you are usually extraverted and tend
to consider that others should listen to you and listen to them for a change.
These simple exercises can be a real challenge. You need to learn how
to lower your social facade. The more you practice, the less important.
It will seem to you to wear the mask, expand your efforts in meditation,
yoga, creative visualization, or other inner disciplines that separate you from your
limited consciousness. These practices are useful for everyone, but if you apply yourself
with dedication, you will go even more quickly along the path where self is
discovered. If seven us practice of disassociation, being detached means being free from
outside influences that tarnish your true self. This lesson is not one that teaches
our culture. Modern people attach a high value to commitment, enthusiasm, passion,
deep dedication, etc. But they do not realize that these qualities are
not the opposite of disassociation. Engaging in a relationship, for example, means
ultimately loving and understanding enough to let the other be who he wants to be.
To face the work with passion means to provide creative space to focus it
from all angles, looking for new directions and opportunities. These new opportunities can
only arise from your inner creative core, with which you will not be able
to get in touch if you are immersed in your work and overwhelmed by the
details. The paradox is that, in order to obtain the maximum passion of
life, you must be able to take a step back and be yourself passion
and dedication love and dedication, self precision and contentment. All that is born
into being are qualities of the essential self that blooms when you are free from
close bonds. For almost all of us, the person who loved us most
deeply was our mother. But we do reflect. We will see that such
love often implied child power and control. You had to do what your mother
said. Otherwise, she could withdraw her love from you. I' m
your mother and you must pay attention to me. The opposite of your master
and my greatest happiness is to see you become what you desire the first statement.
They can make love, but it is not a love that easily allows
freedom. Finding your freedom is necessary and involves getting rid of expectations, preconceived
results, and self- centered views. Imagine two mothers standing in the hallway
of a supermarket trying to control a nervous child who cries loudly and concentrates everyone
' s attention. One of them is furious and embarrassed. His primary intention
is to prevent him from making a fuss. But with young children this doesn
' t work. Of course, feelings are your world. Giving a show
at the supermarket doesn' t matter at all. Therefore, when the mother
orders well, stop crying shut up right now, the child knows that she
is not really attentive to her feelings and therefore does not allow her to exist.
The mother just wants a result, she wants things to end up in
a certain way. The second mother, on the other hand, sees that
her child is truly afflicted and does not care if others feel it. He
does not think about how it will affect her, but he cares about the
child and wants him to be happy again. He says things like what'
s wrong with you. You' re scared of something. Well, I
' m here. The words you use are not the important thing. Maybe
he' ll just pick up the kid and pet him for a moment.
The little boy' s quantum mechanical body perceives that his feelings have been understood.
Therefore, there is no threat, for your mother' s intention is
to heal, not just to end an unpleasant situation. Your quantum mechanical body
has as much sensitivity as a child' s. You can use it to
return to your true self, which exists above and beyond the distressing circumstances of
your life. Again, this involves the issue of self- image. Orient
yourself toward your true self, not towards your self- image. It is
the most basic healing attitude that can be adopted when you turn to it.
I use your feelings, your needs and your values as a point of impulse
to look for that plane of your being where feelings, needs and values are
already satisfied. This self does not exist in action, although paradoxically you can
find it through action. He will present himself as a silent witness who remains
apart from the activity, simply observing and appreciating what is happening. Combating soldiers
and adventures s a s s s NS often feel of him soon passable and
observant targets completely divorced from the frenzied activity around them. For my part,
I have discovered that the moments of disassociation are characterized by the following. I
' m present with my body. My breath becomes very refined almost null.
Mental activity has calmed down. I don' t feel any threat. There
is a certainty of being in my rightful place. I perceive my inner world
as unbounded open space. Consciousness spreads in all directions, rather than focusing on
specific thoughts. Self- acceptance flows into the middle. Things out there seem
intimate to me. An extension of myself. This experience of units also my
practical definition of love. For most, love is an emotion that comes and
goes Sometimes we feel it intensely. Others do not perceive it at all.
But the essence of love is not a feeling. It' s a state
of being. To be more accurate, it is the state in which you
are in contact with being. Who really experiences. Love feels tremendously real and
alive with no desire to do anything but exist within the satisfaction of love.
The greatest action of love is simply to be what is not action. That
is why love is a supreme state of disassociation. However, the most satisfactory
state. To make your action plan a success. You need to find an
escape for your love, a place where you can freely toast it. The
more open your love experience is, the closer you will come to finding its
essence. Love that does not flow is not love, it is only desires
and longings. The renowned mythologist Joseph who both pointed the way for the expression
of love when he said follow your happiness. Happiness is the tickling rush of
love in action the flow of being that lengthens to meet itself and bends backwards
enchanted by it contact, love wants to find itself and when the circuit is
completed, happiness flows. Ask yourself don' t find happiness. Then note
the steps you can take to increase this experience in your life. Don'
t confuse pleasure with love. There are many things that give pleasure, such
as watching television and that contain very little love. Love brings pleasure, by
the way, but in a deeper way. Bringing food to an invalid in
his home is an act of love far more pleasant than watching television, for
example, and such an act can be learned much more in terms of solidarity,
compassion and understanding. So don' t be distracted by superficial pleasures.
The deep joy and delight that exist at the core of life must be diligently
discovered. When you make your list, you will discover that many of your
most treasured moments of happiness are gone forever. For example, you can'
t repeat the brand- new feeling of falling in love with the person you
' ve married. But love has depth behind depth. When you make your
list, you will remember what you felt the day your children were born.
In that memory there is a key. Your children can still be a source
of happiness if you resolve to deepen your relationship with them even further. There
' s nothing more important than reconnecting with your happiness. Isn' t there
anything richer? There' s nothing more real exercise two being love versus being
in love. I' d like to continue exploring the state of love,
because it' s our safest way back. Being the ancient sages declared that,
ultimately, everything is made of consciousness. And when we experience pure consciousness,
without images or supposed strangers, that is love. The great poet come
Free Bendrenet Chegó declared love is not a mere impulse. It must contain the
truth, which is the law, the fusion of love, truth and reality,
is the great revelation of consciousness, of unity, the moment when a
person can truly say I am the whole and I am love in one breath.
Seen from that perspective, love is the feeling state that is always present
when a person maintains a perfect alignment with dharma the flow of evolution. Being
in love is not the same. When you fall in love, an opening
opens through which repressed feelings precipitate and fix themselves on someone else. If love
is deep enough, that other person seems ideal and perfect. This has nothing
to do with their real state, which can be quite imperfect and even destructive.
But the power of love changes reality, changing those who perceive how and
why this happens. Physiologists have measured the increase of certain key neurotransmitters, such
as serotonin, in the brain of people in love, but the chemical elements
are just crude markers. Obviously, serotonin doesn' t make people fall in
love. It is only the biochemical basis of pleasant sensations that activates being in
love. In a series of revealing experiments, David c mc Cleyan, Harver
' s psychologist, probed the physiology of love. He had a group of
subjects watch a short film by Mother Teresa, doing her daily job of caring
for the sick and abandoned children of Calcutta. The film exhibited a deep offering
of love, while the audience watched it m was discovered by Cleyan that it
increased a marker in his immune systems. It was today' s daring eg
in nantegen minicobe. Elevated SLG rates evaluated in a person' s saliva indicate
a high immune response. In fact, the high immune response is also characteristic
of those who have just fallen in love with the popular saying. If you
don' t even want to catch a cold fall in love, recognize this
link between emotions and physiology. The funny thing is, when the film ended
and the audience was asked what they thought of Mother Teresa, not everyone praised
her work. Some had objections of one kind and another based on differences in
religious beliefs. Others said it upsets them to see children hungry or attacked with
leg. However, all present experienced an increase in SLG rates. His physical
response to love seemed more powerful than rational attitude. Before this,ém se
cleylan questioned one of the most popular definitions of love offered by modern psychology,
according to which love is a reflected response that arises when two people meet each
other' s needs. According to that definition, love would depend on a
person’ s conscious assessment of the benefits of a relationship. But there were
people there whose bodies were responding on a much deeper level, deeper even than
the pleasure m is clapping. He also discovered that the positive effects on the
immune response of viewers declined and disappeared one or two hours after they had seen
the film. It remained high among those subjects who revealed a strong security of
being loved in their own existence and who maintained strong ties with family and friends.
This suggested that some people were already in a loving state, rather than
experiencing it as a passing state. They had incorporated it as a characteristic,
in other words, in these people was present, although with a lesser degree,
the affirmation of the enlightened sage. I' m love. What is
love as a characteristic before as a passing phase until the most passionate experience of
falling in love ends up cooling. Then people are horrified to discover that little
true love remains in a lasting sense. When analyzing this problem more Cleyan wondered
what had become of the experiences described in the poetry of love. These experiences
did not refer to the selfish advantages of being in love, but to devotion
to the trueistic and immortal. Shakespeare was wrong to declare love is not love
if he gets upset, when he encounters or bows down to the mover.
Oh, it' s not always a fixed mark that looks at the storm
and never gets disturbed m se Cleyan I also knew examples cited by psychological literature
in which a person had a senseless loving relationship in terms of obtaining objective benefits.
These people feel deep love and devotion, despite the fact that there is
no rational reason to feel that way. All this suggested to em it is
clear that love is a state that transcends reason, whose purpose is simply to
allow the experience of a wider shared reality. In this regard, a critical
point was a person' s reaction to the death of a loved one.
If two people were in love, only by what they could obtain that interdependence
would form the basis for loving and being loved. Therefore, the death of
the mother would cause great pain by tearing the bond. This could be seen
in real- life relationships, by the way, but MM was considered by
her personal experience to be something very different possible. The death of a beloved
companion should cause sorrow and intense suffering. According to this theory. However,
I did not react that way. When my wife died of cancer a few
years ago, we had loved each other very much. In forty- two
years of happy marriage, we raised five children until we reached a well-
adapted maturity. But when she died I didn' t feel the amount of
pain this theory requires. The experience was much more like the poet' s
vision of love. We had felt that we were part of something bigger than
the two of us, something that nourished us and sustained us a whole long
shared life and that continued to sustain me already dead to her. This describes
a step toward the realm of temporary moratoria. When two people use mutual love
as a door to that kingdom, the death of the beloved does not close
the door or deprive the other of the flow of love. Ultimately, all
love comes from within. We deceive ourselves by believing that we love someone else.
It' s a pretext that we grant ourselves permission to feel love only
you can open and close your heart. The power that love has to nourish
and sustain us depends on our dedication to it in here. It is important
to talk about love, think about it, look for it, and encourage
it to give it the form of an exercise. Think of love, take
time to remember the love you shared with your parents, the times you expressed
love to your brothers and friends. Meditate that it is the most worthy of
love in the most loving person of your life. Today he reads deeply the
poetry of love, such as that found in Shakespeare' s sonnets and what
scriptures such as The New Testament or Dick Veda' s devotional hymns say about
him. Talk about love directly express your feelings to someone you love. If
you can' t do it verbally, write him a letter or a poem.
You don' t have to send it. Exercise is for you,
to stimulate the state of love in all cells, but it is preferable for
you to send it, as you should listen to expressions of love as an
answer. Don' t let your love be taken for granted. Leave a
note for your loved one to find in his pocket or on the kitchen table.
Three look for your love. It is possible to do this in many
ways. Our society closely identifies intimacy with sexual treatment, but helping the homeless
and the sick is an act of love. So is giving a sincere compliment
or writing a note of thanks and praise. We all like to hear that
we are loved or that we are loved if you seek the opportunity to satisfy
people in this regard. His gratitude will be reflected in your physiology, as
the happiness of being loved at your turn four fosters love. Parents often tell
our children that openly showing love and affection is suitable only for the very little
ones. By teaching good manners and respect we often create an abyss that love
too sensitive and shy cannot cross. We inflicted our children this sense of separation,
because it was inflicted on us. The story of almost everyone is the
story of a love that hopes to be tempted to sprout out of affection,
which must wait silently for fear of emerging consider yourself in the duty to give
those around you permission to love. Encourage her affection by showing yours without caring
what you get. In return, true love obtains complete satisfaction simply by flowing
into what is loved. If it is reciprocated to us, joy is greater,
but that is neither a requirement nor a requirement. Love without ulterior motives
is rare. All psychological theories based on selfish love are certainly confirmed s or
s we observe around us. But even the most demanding and selfish love is
a way of loving. It' s a drop taken from the ocean.
If you encourage her, she can grow into the ocean. The education of
love begins in a moment and ends in eternity. It activates feelings of charm
and resolves in the peace that belongs to being itself. In some unforgettable verses,
the poet that Alil Gibran expressed this truth. But the temporal in You
knows the temporality of life and knows that yesterday is only today' s memory
and that tomorrow is today' s dream. And that which sings and beholds
in You still dwells among the boundaries of the moment that scattered the stars through
the sky. Use love as if it were your mirror of the temporal,
let it nourish your certainty of being beyond change, beyond yesterday' s memory
and tomorrow' s dream. There are endless ways to discover your true self
but love holds the brightest torch. If you follow science will guide you beyond
the limits of old age and death, get out of the circle of time
and find yourself in the circle of love. If you like content like this,
I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. This is Lili' s secret.