The Sage-ing^® Guild

Expanded Awareness: Hot-Housing Consciousness
by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

"Throughout most of history, elders occupied honored roles in society as sages and seers, leaders and judges, guardians of the traditions, and instructors of the young. They were revered as gurus, shamans, wise old mean and women who helped guide the social order and who initiated spiritual seekers into the mysteries of inner space. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on technological knowledge that often was beyond their ken, elders lost their esteemed place in society and fell into the disempowered state that we now ascribe to a 'normal' old age. Today, as the Age Wave crests all about us and we confront existential questions about the purpose of our extended longevity, we are searching for new myths and models to ennoble the experience of old age.

The model I'm proposing...envisions the elder as an agent of evolution, attracted as much by the future of humanity's expanded brain-mind potential as by the wisdom of the past. With an increased life span and the psycho-technologies to expand the mind's frontiers, the spiritual elder heralds the next phase of human and global development."

Excerpt of From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Profound New Vision of Growing Older (authors Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ron Miller, ©1995, Warner Books).

When my daughter, Shel, was 8 years old, she asked me, "Abba, when you're asleep, you can wake up, right? When you are awake, can you wake up even more?"

It is this issue that made the Buddha become the Buddha—the word Buddha meaning: "the awakened one." Every spiritual technology has been working on this issue and as you know from my teaching about spiritual eldering, I've often pointed to the opportunities for extended awareness to match our extended lifespan.

Much of what I am to suggest below will be more delightful if you don't do it alone, but instead do it with a trusted friend in spiritual intimacy. It is then that you can designate a day or a weekend for the two of you in which you decide to pamper your souls. I don't want to call this a "retreat" or a "spiritual practice" because these words tend to tighten us up as if we had to produce something rather than nourish our spirit. Such days will be a matrix for the expansion of awareness.

As I say during From Age-ing to Sage-ing® seminars, "If we don't have extended consciousness to match our lifespan, we are dying longer instead of living longer."

Here are several helpful activities to practice in expanding your consciousness.

1. Learn a new language or a new skill if possible, not only with your mind, but also with your body. If you learn a new language, for instance, learn to write in that language and in that script. If you learn a new skill, practice it for about 40 days until you find that your body has integrated it into its habit pattern. That will result in more of the synapses of the brain to be connected and accessed which equals some extension of consciousness.
2. Each time you read something in a book, magazine, or see something on the tube, set the source of your information aside and relaxing and closing your eyes, imagine what happened before, what is likely to happen afterwards, picture the setting and characters in your mind's eye...so that you almost feel it. The more you are able to do this, the larger your awareness will have expanded.
3. Make an inventory of as many of the experiences that you have had that gave you pleasure and made you feel right about yourself as you can remember. Order them from the mildest to the strongest. In your mind, construct a rosary that you can tell at will so that whenever you wish to change your attitude and mood you can consult that album of peak experiences. This will refresh your mind and your body, and will have the result that even your T-cells (immune-related cells) will increase, and thus, the vigor with which you face even your diminishments.
4. Study the contemplative teachings of world wisdom traditions. Many a time you have had moments of inspiration and ecstasy which, alas, disappeared from your memory. While they are difficult to access, often because you don't have good concepts for them, studying one form of inner teachings as can be found in the Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Sufism, the Vedanta and Buddhism, will give you a grid with which you can better recall those experiences. Then, using your imagination, paint on the inner canvas of thought and feeling, a scene on which you are experiencing that ecstatic moment, that revelation, that theophany. Then, make for yourself a marker, a motto, or a gate which you can re-enter that experience at will.
5. Before you go to sleep, recall some of these ecstatic experiences and fall asleep as you hug them, expecting to have good dreams. If you remember your dreams upon waking, record them in your journal.
6. Mentoring and oral history: If there are some people in your family, or friends who would be interested in some of your reminiscences. If they are younger and have different map of reality than you, then communicating with them is bound to expand your mind in their direction. Consider how the young ones can handle things of complexity like the Rubics cube and the esoteric parts of computer use with ease. Communicating with them will also help you expand in that direction.
7. Find a piece of music you are fond of and then, when no one else is in the room, as you play it, dance to it in free-form. Visualize yourself, on the inside, as a great ballet dancer so even it you cannot fully execute the movements that you imagine, your imagination and what you can do will provide you with a way of expanding your consciousness, not only in your head and your heart, but also in your thighs and toes so that they, too, will become awakened.
8. When you enter the December period of your life, it pays to recall loved ones who have passed on in the most vivid way you can. This will open entrance for you into the regions you are bound to inhabit after you drop your body.