Description
Now, let me ask you: How old do you think you are? How old is old? And when does a person get too old to enjoy life? Could it be possible that even age is something that happens to our minds rather than to our bodies? And could a person be as young at eighty as he is at eighteen?
We have a woman lecturing for us who is eighty-three. You may possibly have seen her on the television program, “Life Begins at Eighty.” I know of no one who is keener of intellect or who has more spontaneous appreciation of life. Perhaps there is something to this theory that age is really in our minds. Surely This Thing Called Life never grows old, and everything in nature seems to have something at the center of its being which perpetuates it.
We are told that every cell of the physical body is completely replaced every fourteen months. It seems funny, doesn’t it, to think that none of us is even a year and a half old, physically. Perhaps we have overlooked the meaning of This Thing Called Life as it functions in our physical bodies and haven’t quite realized that it could keep us physically young indefinitely if we knew how to cooperate with it.
We are also told by one group of psychologists that there is no reason to suppose that our minds can grow old. They tell us that the mind is as young at ninety as it was at nine; that the only thing that is added to it is experience. Most psychologists agree that we learn less rapidly as years advance, but just as certainly and just as accurately. Some of the greatest scientific minds today are telling us that while time exists, age does not; that in reality time is not a way of measuring years and months and days, but rather, time is a measurement of experience in a limitless life.
It does begin to look as though there is something wrong with the way we are putting things together in life, doesn’t it? And if it is true, in a broad sense, that neither the mind, of itself, nor the body, of itself, actually grows old, it is time for us to begin to ask what produces this aging process.