Death and Wisdom Part 5

[quote FIN from Philosophy forum] My point being is; are you suggesting that death is the main, or at least a large, reason that helps one to realize and understand life simply because. Or is it that it is the combination of age and death and the constant realization of whats to come that makes one wise?

I had brushes with death when I was younger, which sobered me up considerably and left me with a degree of wisdom. But now that I am past my mid-sixties an entirely new perspective has come over me, one that i never had at any other stage of my life - and I have had a very eventful life.

Before this present moment in my life, the future always lay at some indefinite point ahead of me and was not part of my daily meditation. But at 64 (a year or so back) I seemed to have crossed over some psychic threshold. I crossed an earlier threshold at 42 when I reached male menopause.

Significant as that change was 21 years earlier, lifting me above my 30;s and 20, ( for the first time I wanted a son and teach him all I had learned), this next step in life - at 64 - is far more profound, far more spiritual. All my earlier ambitions are spent. Now I want to consolidate my earnings - to be a grandfather to be more of an advisor, and not so much a doer. I want my sons to take over the estate.

I am in a whole new ball game now and death is an essential part of my daily meditation. Unless my psyche is different from all other people - I am saying that age and experience and death are significantly different for me at age 64 onwards and that I feel all that more wiser now than I did just one or two years ago and I look forward to even deeper insights as the years go by.


[quote FIN ] HOWEVER!!!! I think you can gain the same wisdom from visiting a child's pre-school class if viewed and interpreted correctly.

We all gain wisdom from the moment we are born - and keep gaining more through each of the seven stages of life. But none of those developmental stages are the same as the wisdom you gain at the final stage. That stage it is far more profound, for it includes the sum of all the previous stages.

Seeing as how we all get it eventually, I do not understand why there is so much insistence on this thread by people who keep arguing that any and all of us are due its rewards at any stage of our lives. I am sorry, but that is not my experience. The argument that the young can be just as, or even wiser than the elderly, does not add up or make any sense to me. An inept elder is the result of an inept youth. Unless there is some disease of the brain cells, one does not start off wise and get dumber as one ages. That is simply ridiculous.

The wisest elder is the one with the widest experience - and the promise of death and the cessation of future ambitions gives them the time to be all that more reflective and inclusive about the treasures they have accumulated and ruminate over opportunities lost. Young people, busy chasing the future and ambitions yet to be fulfilled, do not have the time, the clarity nor the inclination to be so reflective. None of them want to retire or be grandfathers before their time. That is simple common sense.