How we view life- the perspective we have on life, on death and on human condition regarding birth, aging, sickness and death is the basis of everything.
The society today is in deep darkness, the root cause of is this is lack of understanding on the aspects of aging and death. the society's leaders have ignored the aspect of the cardinal sufferings of human being that is aging and death. Under the pursuit of immediate short term benefits. As a result, we are ignoring the fact that we are aging day by day. The bottom line is that we do not bring our attention back to the aspects of birth, aging and death, no matter what superficial measures we take, nothing will permanently change.
The phenomena of aging and death are like to deal a sickness with painkillers without knowing the root cause of illness. Though our symptoms may be eased temporarily, we are only deceiving our bodies, we will not get better.
What is life? What happens when we die? Why are we born? These are the most unanswerable as well as most important questions of life, but we, in today's times don't realize the importance of it and escape from the real facts.
The emergence of philosophies like Buddhism and Jainism, as well as Greek philosophies lie in understanding the aspect of aging and death. The story of Gautama Buddha itself says that by seeing four kinds of people as he steps out of his palace: a saint, a sick man, an old age man and a dead body. From this he drew out a conclusion about life that nothing is permanent in our life. Death is completely inevitable and old age is also inescapable.
In fact, the aspects of death and old age made him to find the real truth in his life.
Hence, like Buddhism, all other philosophies arise from the simple as well as complex phenomena of old age and death.
Old age is the time when we start witnessing physical shortcomings in our body. Our health starts deteriorating, and as we are in a stage of life, where we cannot actively contribute to the society by doing jobs or earning money. Also, it is the time when we find ourselves in solace. Most cultures and societies see old age and old people as a burden on the economy as well as for the society. At the same time, these old people also see themselves into rejection and doubt, hence live rest of their lives in depression.
There are distorted views about old age and death. Some people regard it as very burdensome and tiring as well as take it as a suffering of life.
People who regard old age as a suffering actually lack wisdom and confidence to face it. Hence the idea of old age is still vague in front of us there are negative (as we have already seen before) as well as positive aspects of old age.
"Why have we born?"-The old age is the time of our second birth. The first birth, which is our physical birth, the second birth, where we realize that we are truly born as a person. That is why we have to face so much in life as it is a struggle at each point of time.
THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF OLD AGE
As we see changes in our health, we see changes in our mental behaviour. The rigid part of brain starts coming up and the imaginary part starts fading. For example, while we play chess, we can imagine the movement of counters while we play; this is called imaginary part of our brain. Hence, when we grow older and older, our imagination power decreases and our rigid brain power increases and from this we can draw out wisdom and take actions from every experience in life.
Wisdom is an aspect which can be attained at any age it depends on individual to individual. Hence there is a need of determination at old age and not even at the old age but for the youth too.
The phenomenon of wisdom is like a lotus. While all of its petals are our capabilities and achievements or what we can do in our life. And they are tied intact by sepals of it which are like wisdom. Hence in every age, the wisdom is the most important asset.
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