Conscious Aging with John Robinson, Ph.D.

Releasing the Power of Love in Aging
Divine consciousness is a two-edged sword. It releases me to melt into God but it also deconstructs the familiar self - the fiction of identity, time and story that drove the lifelong project of "me." As we age, the self-idea becomes an albatross, an anchor, a strait-jacket, a heavy ship we steer through the choppy waters of life. It once carried all our "problems" and goals, pushing us into a lifetime of achievement, but now it begins to fade naturally in the divine oblivion of old age. Looking back, we see that the family, social, and professional identities we constructed on the self-idea were often a heavy burden taxing us with self-doubt and achievement anxiety. Losing this idea of "me" opens the old wounds behind its original creation - years of trying to be "good enough," while hanging onto it maintains the impossible struggle to permanently reify a positive version of the self. The art of dying to the self in old age involves disengaging from all acts of self-delineation until we are free to leave the world of form and experience the unity of divinity even while we are still here. In sum, the self-idea has been a blessing and a curse, motivating achievement in the World of Man but confining the soul to the prison of thought and belief. In aging, we open the prison gates and let the soul finally have its full voice.