You Are Only As Old As You Are: The Six Noble Truths of the Zap Philosophy of Aging

The following originally appeared on ZapOracle.

You’re only as old as you feel! The
problem is that expression got old by the twentieth time I heard it, back in
1973.  And now, after hearing it an additional twenty times a week in the
ensuing years, I have come to find this particular cliché to be
very, very old.  In fact, if this cliché were as old as my feelings about
it, it would probably be able to remember a time when the Big Bang was a mere
twinkle in God’s eye.  And that’s just another way of saying that, based
on how I feel, “You’re only as old as you feel!” has become an infinitely old
cliché.

Being infinitely old must be a pretty
depressing phase in the life cycle of a cliché, whose mind consists of a
single, unchanging thought form.  Especially since this single thought
form fearfully cringes from age and seeks to diminish the horror of oldness
through the viral propagation of an old mental trick, an arthritic
sleight-of-hand, pulling the old switcheroo gimmick of substituting one word
for another, in this case “feel” for “old.”  Winston Smith, of George
Orwell’s 1984 , was very familiar with the old word-swap trick because
every time he showed up for work at the monolithic, windowless Ministry of
Truth building he saw, “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is
Strength.”  Only now the Ministry of Truth would have to add, “Old is
Feel.”

For the age phobic, this is a very
convenient little switcheroo because, unlike age, feelings are famously
variable and infinitely subjective.  So once you can reduce a feared
quality into the quivering jello mold of that which is famously variable and
infinitely subjective you can then claim the quality to be anything you
like.  Unlike the one to three digits of your age, if age equals feel,
well, who’s to say what you are feeling; you can claim you feel like anything.
With a bit of word-swap legerdemain, the mortality-denying, self-tricking ego
can pretend it has gained variable control, through cliché technology, of the
annoying and relentlessly increasing variable known as age.

So now that it is politically incorrect
for my age to be a number, now that it is a feeling, what my age is gets a lot
more confusing.  Apparently my age is based on how I feel, but how I feel
is always changing.  It has been said that the average adult has a major
mood change every ninety minutes, and for the average adolescent it’s about every
twenty minutes.

Like most people, my feelings are
extremely variable. Feed me a triple espresso and a shiny, new digital gadget
and for the first fifteen minutes I might feel like a fourteen year old on an
ultra sour candy sugar rush. But check back a couple hours later when the
espresso has worn off and I have to call tech support in India, and you’ll find
that my feeling-based age is about 91. Or as I should say, “ninety-one years
young.” But if I hang up on tech support and smoke some crack, then, for the
next five to ten minutes, I’ll be a high blood sugar fourteen year old again.
Five minutes later, however,  the crack starts to fizzle out and my
feeling-based age increases by about a decade a minute for the next ten
minutes. I could temporarily reverse that trend by smoking more crack, and so
forth. The point is that during a typical day like that I have to constantly
keep recalculating my age. This means that with every vicissitude of my
feelings I have new math homework just to know how old I am, and rather than
face an eternity of new math homework, I’d rather just accept my age, an easy
to remember two digit number that remains constant for an entire year.

So let’s take off the beer goggles of
you-create-your-own-reality, New Age wish-fulfillment thinking.  You are
as old as you are, and if you are reading this, if you know how to read, then
you are almost certainly old. Based on my calculations, people are already old,
or at least middle-aged, by the time they are eighteen.  Eighteen is the
age when people go to college and add “the freshman fifteen.” And what people
really mean by aging, as we’ll see later, is something far more serious and
tragic than age, what they really mean is:

The diminishment of hotness.

Let’s face it, by eighteen you are
already over the hill in many important areas.  By the age of eighteen
your chances of becoming the cute but bratty child star of a TV sitcom start to
diminish by about forty-five percent a year. But even if you can accept never
being the child star of a sitcom, and are willing to settle for being, say, a
world-class gymnast, then you are still forced to realize that unless you
already have at least six years of gymnast training under your belt, you are
totally past it.

The truth is we are all old. Even if
you are a fourteen year old gymnast you are still a mortal/corporeal Version
1.0, and I think for most of us the whole gravity-bound, aging, illness and
accident-prone corporeal lifestyle is getting pretty old.  And that’s why
people are lying to themselves when they say they want to be young, because
they actually want some thing much more than that.

Let’s say, for example, a man is
lamenting, “Oh, I wish I was young again,” when a genie happens to be walking
by. The genie immediately grants his wish and puts him into the body of a
random fifteen-year-old. The problem is that around 87% of the
fifteen-year-olds in our society are morbidly obese, and only when the wisher
finds that he is locked into the body of an obese and pimply fifteen-year-old
does he realize the deeper truth: what he really wanted was not merely youth;
what he really wanted was hotness.

Case in point, Galadriel, the elf queen
of Lothlorien in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Those of us who
have read the books, particularly the Simarillion, know that Galadriel
is thousands of years old. But you don’t catch Galadriel saying defensive
things like, “I’m six thousand years young.”  The reason should be
obvious: Her hotness is not in question, therefore her age doesn’t matter.

Does anybody say, “If only I were a
fruit fly?” Fruit flies are usually only a few hours old, they are younger than
almost any of us, but no one cares because of a simple reason: Fruit flies
don’t look hot; therefore their youth doesn’t matter.

This is the point of plastic surgery; it
is not merely to look young, but to look hot. That’s why you hear about people
paying thousands of dollars for liposuction but you never hear about people
paying thousands for lipoinjection. (Actually, one easy fix for a wrinkly face
would be inject it with fat, causing it to fill out and look more youthful. But
that wouldn’t be hot, and so nobody will get rich from lipoinjection.)

So now we are starting to get a more
authentic sense of one of the pillars of the age issue. It is not about
feelings; it is not about youth versus old; it is about hot versus not
hot.  Now I can formulate the First Noble Truth of my philosophy of aging,

I.
For many, aging is not about feelings, not about youth, it is about hotness.

Most people are not yearning to be
young in the sense of naïve and inexperienced. They want to continue to have
all the inner resources of age, but they would like to have the smooth skin and
radiance of youth. They do not want to be a sickly or unattractive youth; they
want to be a perfect specimen. And do they want that perfect specimen to go
through the aging process?  Hell no . .. that was the whole point, to
escape aging. An immortal perfect body comes close to satisfying what they
want, but if you think about it, immortality goes on for so long. Being in any
one body, however perfect, has got to become boring after a while. But if one
were an immortal changeling, able to match the body to the occasion, now that
starts to look like an interesting prospect.

That’s the kind of prospect I’m willing
to settle for. I’m not really interested in being young only to have to go
through all the ages all over again -enough already. I’m ready for what I feel
is my right as a citizen of this rich and abundant universe, which blossomed
out of a single point ten orders of magnitude smaller than a gnat’s toenail
into four times more stars than there are grains of sand on this earth. Is it
so unreasonable for me to expect, as someone who has endured all the gross and
petty humiliations of corporeality, to become an immortal changeling?  In
the seminal computer game World of Warcraft, people can switch their
embodied forms with mouse clicks. Does World of Reality have less
processing power than World of Warcraft?  Why should I expect less out of
life than I do out of a mere computer game?  Isn’t it only appropriate for
me to want to have a warrior body form with rippling muscles to handle conflict
situations, while still being able to slip into a variety of more comfortable
bodies for sensual encounters?

I’m not joking here. If you think I am
it might be because you have been successfully conditioned by the Babylon
Matrix to take the whole corporeality scam completely for granted. If you put
aside the fatalistic conditioning of a mortal slave, ordinary common sense tells
you that being able to choose the right body for the occasion is as basic an
evolutionary progression as being able to choose the right words, facial
expressions or clothing for an occasion. It is only what is appropriate. What
would be grossly inappropriate for an evolving being would be to get scammed
into endlessly repeated corporeal incarnations in which you become stuck in one
leaky, aging body after another.

Corporeal incarnation was probably a
deal you made. Drunk on nectar and ambrosia, a giddy moment between
incarnations, and with the foolish overconfidence of the disincarnate, you
signed on for a mortal incarnation, which at the time seemed like the intense
thing to do, kind of like a Nineteenth Century adolescent who thought going to
war would be an exciting adventure.

But now you know better and might like
to renegotiate the deal,

“Can’t I just be any age I feel like?”

“Can’t I just create my own reality?”

Yes, you can create your own reality,
BUT . . .

(You knew there was a huge BUT coming.)

BUT, to really be able to create your
own reality you need to be a fully, fully empowered New Age person who has
completely internalized the you-create-your-own-reality principle and does not
harbor a doubt the size of an organic mustard seed. To get to that kind of
state of personal empowerment it’s going to take god only knows how many
workshops, past-life regressions, and other costly New Age products and
services.

But once you’ve paid for all that, and
gotten rid of all doubt, then you really can create your own reality. This may
finally explain the unsolved mystery of why there are no middle-aged New Age
people. They have learned that they can create their own reality, and so
they’ve recreated their ages and become the Indigo children who have such a precocious
knowledge of New Age principles.

But if you can’t afford all those New
Age products and services, or even if you can, but still harbor doubts, where
does that leave you in 2012? If you think mortality is inconvenient, try
mortality plus the inconvenient truth of climate warming plus apocalypse plus
no ability to create your own reality!  If you are not the maître de of
your own private reality by 2012, better prepare yourself for being left behind
in a world composed of failed New Agers and other clueless mortals unable to
self-rapture themselves into new realities.

That sounds harsh, but there is a kind
of cosmic justice to it.  No one wants to live in a world of immortal
changeling losers and doubters. The loser with a thousand faces. And it is so
easy to imagine how being an immortal changeling could be abused by the
unworthy — the devil that hath the power to assume a pleasing form, and all that.
Ideally, being an immortal changeling should be reserved for only the high New
Age elect like myself.

Without such selectivity the New Age
would be a disaster. Can you imagine the problems that would be created if you
allowed people who don’t respect diversity to live in a world of immortal
changelings? Can you imagine the burka that an Islamic Fundamentalist would
want you to wear if you were an immortal changeling?

So the losers and the doubters will get
filtered out automatically. But you know just as well as I do that with the
whole light and dark way that things work out, there are going to be immortal changelings
who are evil and have a diabolical array of fell powers. Any immortal
changeling knows that an epic struggle of light and dark comes with the
territory; same as on the Babylon Matrix, only the light and dark will be
differently distributed. In the epic world of immortal changelings, dark and
light are concentrated into a much smaller number of entities, and this makes
things considerably more dramatic and mythological.

I guess at some point it may have
become unclear, even to myself, if I was dissing other people’s attitudes
toward aging, spoofing my own, or pulling back the veil of a mortality obsessed
matrix. I’ve been losing control of my rants recently, and they seem to reveal
more of myself and my shadow than I intended. So let me clarify, what I am
basically saying is (the Second Noble Truth),

II.
Get over it. You are in an aging corporeal body. Take the damn two-digit number
(which is not something you can feel your way out of) and get on with it.

But by “on with it” I don’t mean to a
depressed acceptance of mortality. What I mean by “on with it” is (the Third
Noble Truth),

III.
Recognize that you are already a shape-shifting interdimensional traveler.

Your aging mortal body is not your true
identity, and although the present phase of congealing into one corporeal body
is such a convincing matrix, and no doubt a huge inconvenience and hardship,
remember that it is only a phase. Your age is probably a two-digit number, and
chances are, based on present medical technology, you will probably never have
to endure more than two digits worth of age. And if you have any sort of
background in math or science, you know that two digit numbers are really small
numbers. The whole mortal number you pulled on yourself may stretch out into
the scratchy last cut of a black vinyl golden oldie, but even that will
probably still be only a two digit number, or at best in the very low one
hundreds. Thankfully the mortality number is never a very big one, and once the
reset button gets pushed you’ve got a chance to renegotiate.

Of course, if you are a fundamentalist
materialist and a technological futurist, like Ray Kurzweil, then you may have
some expectation of having your consciousness downloaded into a quantum
computer housed in a titanium alloy exoskeleton with Zeiss Ikon optics and a
shape-shifting dermal layer consisting of nanobots able to reconfigure
themselves in any way that is consistent with the underlying titanium alloy
exoskeleton. In other words, your expectation is the nerdy gadget version of
being an immortal changeling. But no matter how many off-planet backups of
yourself you have downloaded into quantum computers kept in super-cooled, fully
hardened underground bunkers, there is always the possibility of a super wave
or galaxy devouring black hole destroying all those backups. This is what
Tolkien called premature immortality: the naïve confusion of immortality with
being in a single, age-resistant body.

In addition to your aging,
mortal/corporeal Version 1.0 body, with its two-digit age, and all its
obnoxious limitations and vulnerabilities, you have other bodies, and those
other bodies are not as stuck in one matrix as is the flesh and blood body. If
death seems too long to wait for a new body then just wait a few hours until
you are ready to go to sleep. Once a day most people enter another matrix
called the dreamtime, and while there they are in an age-variable,
shape-shifting dreambody that can defy gravity and rebound from
life-threatening situations with the resilience of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon
character. There are also the energy bodies that people experience during
near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences (of which I have had
numerous).  These energy bodies may have such enhancements as panoramic
vision, orgasmic aliveness and spiritual enlightenment.

Fundamentalist materialists would have
us believe that unless we have the luck to live long enough until technology
gives us an ability to download ourselves into quantum computers, then we are
just eternal losers, a bunch of rapidly deteriorating furless monkeys with a
couple of hemispheres of tangled wetware ready to crash into the velvet
darkness of eternal unrecoverable data loss the moment our monkey form
flatlines. And oh so many things can make a Version 1.0 monkey form flatline: a
banana peel on a staircase, another monkey driven car on the freeway…

And even if it hasn’t flatlined yet,
Version 1.0 is always buggy, and there is no warranty, no tech-support. The
best you can hope for (if you can afford about $700 a month) is the privilege
of turning your fate over to some caring, giant HMO, and maybe the mortality
mechanics that work for the HMO can patch you up for a bit, or maybe they will
kill you themselves if you are one of the unlucky hundreds of thousands that
each year succumb to an adverse reaction to a combo of pharmaceuticals.

So before I lose control over this rant
again, let’s boil things down to a few simple truths about aging. Stop trying
to pretend that aging is sexy or that it is about personal empowerment, high
performance, plus sentimental good feeling, like the fifty-five-year-old model
woman with perfect bone structure playing volleyball on the beach with her
grandchildren in the Celebrex ad.

Say after me the following
affirmations,

“Every day in every way I’m getting
older and older.”

“Today is the first day of the rest of
my ever-diminishing life.”

“Mortality sucks, and then you die.”

Here now are the Fourth, Fifth and
Sixth Noble Truths about aging:

IV.
Mortality is developmental, and you probably signed on for it because it puts
fire under your ass. Most immortal changelings are too stuck in the immortal
changeling rut to do anything with their endless lives.

V.
Fear of death is about fear of unlived life.

Evaluate everything from the point of
view of what you will remember well on your deathbed.  Live every day like
it could be your last and stop the countdown to apocalypse dates like 2012. The
count-down-to-apocalypse game was old when Revelations was written (in the
expectation that the freaky events described were going to happen to the
Christians of the First-Century AD).  Your personal event horizon of death
could come at any time and is guaranteed, so stop projecting it toward a
collective eschaton; it just binds you deeper into linear time.

VI.
Stop falling for the fundamentalist materialist longing for anti-aging medicine
and its vain efforts to forever patch up a pro-aging mortal body.

You already have glorified bodies.
Death, the mortal emergency, can actually be a liberating emergence of your
other bodies, and a chance to more fully recover your real identity as an
interdimensional traveler. So stop cringing from the amazing intensity and
vulnerability of your corporeal incarnation.  Mortality is a once in a
lifetime experience.  Disembodied entities are always talking about how
envious they are of  the dynamism of mortal incarnation. Try to
remember that however ambivalent you might be about being in a body, it
is for a limited time only, and then you may discover that there are other worlds
than these…

© 2007, Jonathan Zap, age
49     Revised 2008   Edited by Austin Iredale.

Image by Abode of Chaos, courtesy of Creative Commons license.