How Old Are You?

So how old are you?

Does your physical age define or limit you? Is there something more?

All my life people have told me stuff like “You’re so lucky to be getting this stuff so early in life.” or “You’re only XYZ years old? How do you know all this so young?”

To be honest, the age of this physical body has little do with the age that I feel I am, and this is probably true for many of us, isn’t it? Yet it’s what people see nonetheless.

How old are we? Let’s take a look at that question by diving deeper into both the seen and the unseen.

It seems that by starting with the physical age and exploring beyond, there’s many different ways we could look at age:

Physical Age

The first age is the most obvious and so we’ll start with it. It’s what people tend to think of when we talk about how old we are. It basically has to do with how many laps we’ve done around the sun. Physical age. We (our bodies) may be 10 years old, 20, 50, 100, whatever.

Yet is that a good determination of how old you feel?

“I feel like a kid again!” Have you ever said that when letting go and playing around, acting silly without a care in the world?

There’s older people who act like little kids and there’s younger people who look and act like older people. How old you feel seems to be more “in your head” than where your body is, so let’s look at that one next.

Mental/Emotional Age

Maturity-wise, how old do you feel? If you were to ask me, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought to myself that I feel like an older guy experiencing the body of a younger guy. Have you seen the movie 17 Again where the middle-aged guy gets warped back into the body he had back in high school and gets to sort of relive that time period in his life? It’s kinda like that.. sorta.

I’m currently 25, but in many ways I feel like I’m somewhere in my upper 30′s or 40′s. That’s the age range I find myself socializing with. That’s the age of people I often hike with, do spiritual group things with, and even the age of the women I’ve find myself attracting and being drawn to the past year or two. (This last one has been taking some getting used to and came with a lot of head scratching, without a doubt, but there’s been some really amazing lessons and experiences that have come from this.)

Anyways, in many ways (though of course there are several big exceptions exceptions to this), I feel like I’m older than my body is and I currently resonate most strongly energetically with people around 5-15 years older than me, for whatever reason.

So physically our body may be in one place, but mentally and emotionally we may be experiencing something else entirely, and this experience can often feel more real than wherever our body happens to apparently be.

This also brings to mind kids with mental retardation whose bodies age but mentally they remain in the mindset of a little kid. Mentally and physically we may be in two different places.

Now beyond your physical age or your mental age, there seems to be another sort of measurement of maturity. We can call it spiritual maturity or the depth/age of your soul.

The Age of Your Soul

You know how people use the terms “young soul” or “old soul?” While technically that may be a bit of a misnomer because souls are ageless, we can still use those terms when we talk about how conscious someone is, how far along the karmic ladder/wheel they are, if they live a superficial life or if something deeper drives them, how far beyond the ego the person is gone, or whatever it is that we use to differentiate between newer souls and older souls. Sometimes it’s just more of an intuitive feeling, isn’t it?

With some people you can just look into their eyes and it feels like there’s an expansive ocean there. So deep and vast. There’s often an element of incredible peacefulness present or a radiant spark of light and joy in their eyes.

This age seems to be less tied to our physical age and more related to our emotional/mental age, but just because you’ve matured as a person and had many years of life experience doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve developed spiritually, so I like to differentiate between spiritual age and emotional age. They seem to be somewhat distinct.

Timeless Eternal Being

This is where things get really interesting. When it is discovered that what wakes up from the experience of personhood is neither male nor female, neither old nor young, then there is the experience of discovering that who you truly are is not a man or a woman, nor are you in any way bound in time. Your age is not found in time for you are ageless, timeless, and eternal, all those mystical esoteric things we hear sages and gurus and scriptures talk about.

That which wakes up from time is not subject to time and does not pass through time. Time is seen to be an appearance that passes through this. It’s like recognizing your essence to be the white movie screen that the movie is projected upon. The screen is not subject to the images that flicker upon its screen. The images are but a fleeting appearance that show up against the backdrop of this expansive, empty, spacious presence.

When this is discovered to be what you are, at the indescribable substanceless core of your being, there isn’t the experience of being young or old, male or female. There is just presence, existence, life, being. At the same time, the body that arises within this may have a certain age and may have a certain balance of masculine and feminine energy. It’s just that none of this is identified with to be what I am.

These days I tend to experience moreso one or the other. Sometimes there is the experience of being someone (Ariel) experiencing time, and other times there is the experience of causeless uncreated emptiness and timelessness. I don’t know what degree this evolves into experiencing both time and timelessness simultaneously and perhaps that is a duality that still needs to be experientially resolved here , but the way it seems to be happening here is sometimes TIME is happening loud and clear and seems so obvious whereas in other times, TIMELESSNESS is right at the forefront, nowhere yet literally right here. There is also a sort of stabilization process that is occurring where the swings from experiential separation to experiential oneness are strangely starting to quiet down and there’s becoming less and less of a distinction between separateness and oneness, ironically enough. The experiences are starting to become secondary to this presence that is present during both separation and oneness.

In any event, when timelessness wakes up, there literally is no experience of time. None. Not at all. Sure the sun still rises and sets yes movement is still seen, but somehow the experience of the passing of time throughout the day is nowhere to be found. There is just movement and silence happening here. Everything is happening and nothing is happening. Not really sure why and I can’t fully explain it. Just reporting on what it’s like.

So when people say something like “How did you get this at such a young age,” It sometimes leaves me scratching my head, to be honest. What wakes up from the physical is the timeless, and that has nothing to do with the age of the body, young or old. Ramana woke up at 16. Adya’s first awakening was at 25. Sure the stereotypical enlightened master is an old dude with a long white beard, but that doesn’t mean that you have to wait ’till you get old to wake up. lol…

So How Old Are You?

In your experience, how old do you feel?

There is no right or wrong answer here.

The question can simply be used as a helpful indicator to recognize what is most apparent within awareness at this moment. The physical? The emotional? The soul? The timeless?

All just different ways of experiencing the same identical ONE.

Many different experiences, some with the experience of an experiencer, others with the experience of no experiencer…

Life is cool.