THE AAA CLUB OF CONTEMPORARY ELDERS ACCEPTANCE, AWARENESS & ALLOWING
THE AAA CLUB OF CONTEMPORARY ELDERS
ACCEPTANCE, AWARENESS & ALLOWING
HOW TO SPOT A CONTEMPORARY ELDER
Contemporary elders reach deeper into the past and further into the future than others. They have an extraordinary ability to see the whole rather than the parts. They work reliably in complexity to see the elementary.
Contemporary elders develop higher wisdom, expanded experiential capabilities, and have widely opened their gates to metaphysical, ancestral, and existential knowledge.
Contemporary elders experience others more profoundly. These elders can hear the unsaid and sense the confined emotions and underlying perceived restraints of others. This recognition allows a contemporary elder to speak and be embraced as an elder.
Contemporary elders deliver a depth of compassionate understanding which is seldom available. This listening quality allows the elder to be honorably regarded and generously heard. Moreover, this listening allows elders to speak directly to another's often-shielded humanity.
Contemporary elders directly influence relationships and decision-making at every level of conversation. Moreover, they extract damaging influences so honest and empathetic conversations occur.
Contemporary fully embrace the archetype of traditional elder, the centuries of elder traditions, knowledge, and wisdom, but now transmogrified - transformed surprisingly or magically - bringing that magic to people living in today's uncertain, threatening world.
This makes a contemporary elder easier to spot. They all are card-carrying and dues-paying members of the three AAA club.
THE AAA CLUB
When one becomes an elder, they have successfully amplified three realms of living – acceptance, awareness, and allowing. These intensified and expanded realms allow elders much greater freedom, peace, humor, enhanced mental and physical well-being, and a bottomless well of self-understanding.
Not easy to be a member of the triple-A club. In our culture, the changes inherent in aging, which are irreversible and unstoppable, occur as a pestilence, a plague. And like any plague in our Western culture, it must be eradicated.
Contemporary elders disallow the cultural conversation about aging to overtake them. They have come to realize that shots, pills, surgery, and physical activities will not stop them from aging or dying. Prolong it, perhaps, but getting older and dying will happen.
Elders fully grasp the principle of impermanence. Nothing that exists in time and form is permanent. "Nothing endures but change," said Heraclitus, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher.
Contemporary elders have stopped contributing to the spending billions of dollars on something they can't do anything about – aging and death. They stop being ‘refuseniks' to aging. They stop holding aging, dying, and death as unacceptable, intolerable, and deplorable. They accept their fate as human beings.
Acceptance requires allowing thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the end of life without judgment or resistance. At the three A’s club, they go into deeper levels of understanding, getting down to the roots of these thoughts, feelings, and experiences that repudiate and deny the end of life and aging.
So, elders become aware, and conscious of why these thoughts and experiences exist in them, and this awareness allows these thoughts and feelings to lose their grip.
Hence, contemporary elders achieve acceptance through awareness and allowing, releasing them from the claws of those thoughts, emotions, and experiences. They accept death and dying in a way that eases the fear, repudiation, and disavowing of what is always true. If you live, you will die.
When you come to accept that life is limited, impermanent, and ephemeral, you come to a much greater appreciation of life. And when a member of the AAA club, you begin to live your life from your death backward having every day and every one count.
The next open Sangha call is May 24th.
See what being a member of the AAA club provides.
