Does aging mean growing up or growing old? When we think of being young, we usually think of outer appearances: a beautiful face and a supple body. But what if being young has nothing to do with biological age? Qualities like being just oneself, at the moment, spontaneous, exhilarated and excited, can belong to any age, as long as we stay vital, creative and interested in life. So how can we cultivate these qualities in ourselves?
“If you look within can you feel the age, how old you are? If you close your eyes and look within, the emptiness within seems to be ageless, without age. Are you a child? Are you young? Are you old? The inner space seems to be non-temporal – it is! That’s why you become old through others’ eyes. You become old because of the mirror. If mirrors disappear and nobody talks about your age, and there is no calendar and no time measurement, you will remain young longer….
“If you are too concerned with the body, you become the body. If you go on looking in the mirror, you become the body. That’s why women age faster than men – the mirror. And the miracle is, basically they live longer than men, but they age faster. On average, all over the world, they live four years longer than men. They lose their beauty and their youth quickly. The mirror kills them – continuously meditating on the body.
“Meditate on the inner being, not on the body. Find a mirror which reflects you, not the body. That mirror which reflects you is meditation. The more you meditate, the more ageless you become.”
Osho, Returning to the Source, Talk #2
Is there really a secret of eternal youth?
“To be young is the greatest joy, the greatest bliss that is possible to human consciousness, and to know the secret of eternal youth is the real discovery. The alchemists in the past used to call it their search: the search of eternal life and the search for keeping people always young. They were not talking about chemistry – they have been misunderstood. They were talking about the secrets of religiousness.”
Osho, Snap Your Fingers, Slap Your Face and Wake Up, Talk #27
“Don’t waste your youthfulness on other ordinary revolutions – political, social, economic. Don’t waste your life energy on those stupid games. Put your total energy, focus your total energy, on a single point: the spiritual revolution – because that is a radical change, and other changes can follow that change.
“If your inner being changes, your whole outer life will be totally different. It will have a different fragrance, a different beauty, a different grace. And when your inner being is changed and becomes a flame of light, you will become a light unto others too. You will become a beckoning light, a great herald of a new dawn. Your very presence will trigger revolutions in other people’s lives.”
Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 8, Talk #1
Sometimes it feels as if my body is aging, but I don’t feel any different inside.
“And that is one of the greatest experiences of life: when your body becomes old, but your inner being keeps its youthfulness. That means you have not lost track of life, that you are keeping yourself in step with life.”
Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 8, Talk #1
“I have not been able to discover anybody in the whole literature of the East talking about old age. On the contrary, old age has been praised immensely, because in the East it has been thought that you are not old. If your life has simply moved on the horizontal line, you are only aged. But if your life, your consciousness, has moved vertically, upwards, then you have attained the beauty, the glory of old age. Old age in the East has been synonymous with wisdom.”
Osho, The Invitation, Talk #27
What does growing up really mean?
“Man is born to achieve life, but it all depends on him. He can miss it. He can go on breathing, he can go on eating, he can go on growing old, he can go on moving towards the grave – but this is not life. This is gradual death from the cradle to the grave, a seventy-year-long gradual death. And because millions of people around you are dying in this gradual, slow death, you also start imitating them. Children learn everything from those who are around them; and we are surrounded by the dead.
“So first we have to understand what I mean by life. It must not be simply growing old; it must be growing up. And these are two different things. Any animal is capable of growing old. Growing up is the prerogative of human beings. Only a few claim the right.
“Growing up means moving deeper into the principle of life every moment; it means going farther away from death – not towards death. The deeper you go into life, the more you understand the immortality within you. You are going away from death; a moment comes when you can see that death is nothing but changing clothes, or changing houses, changing forms – nothing dies, nothing can die; death is the greatest illusion there is.”
Osho, Beyond Enlightenment, Talk #28
“And it is right that you are feeling ageless. Meditation starts taking you beyond time because it is going to take you beyond death.
“You will be surprised to know that in Sanskrit there is only one word for both death and time. It is kal. Kal also means tomorrow – tomorrow there is only death and nothing else; life is today.
“As you become peaceful…. Your tensions are your weight. When the tensions are not there, you become weightless.
“And the consciousness which is your reality has no time-space limitation. Your body grows from childhood to youth to old age to death – these changes are happening only to the body. These are the changes of the furniture in the house… painting the house, changing its architecture. But the man who lives in the house – the master of the house – is unaffected by all these things.
“Consciousness is the master.
“Your body is only the house.
“So the moment you enter meditation you have touched within yourself something of the universal – which has no age, which has no limitation either of time or space.”
