It can be hard to accept signs of an aging body, to say the least.  Especially in a society like ours where a youthful appearance is so highly valued, it can be hard to see those wrinkles and sags become more pronounced over time.

Ram Dass, one of the great spiritual teachers of our generation, offers a different way to think about the changes in our bodies, and our lives, that occur as we grow older......

To our egos, change is scary. "The kids have grown up." "My friends  have started dying." "My body seems to have a lot more fat on it."   "I'm forgetting things lately." What we're sensing is our lack of  control over our universe at that moment, and if our identities are  based on identification with all the stuff around us, then a threat to any of it is a threat to our existence, and so change becomes something to avoid at all cost. And yet change is inevitable.  Interesting predicament.

It turns out that the solution to the problem of change is yet another change. But what we're changing this time is who we see ourselves to be. That is, we don't have to go on clinging to the past, buying into a cultural myth of The Youthful Me, hanging on to who we used to be. We don't have to go on identifying ourselves with that being who's changing, seeing the aging process through those eyes. If we can just quiet down and look a little more deeply, we see that right behind the identity that's so caught in the story line there is... someone else. Just behind all that drama is a place of mindfulness, a place of the witness. It is a part of us that is purely equanimous, that's just watching the whole story unfold. That's what I'll call the soul.

There are three consciousness planes we can inhabit—three perspectives, we could call them—from which we can view our situation. As Number One, we are our egos—our bodies, our personalities, our every-day selves. As Number Two, we are our astral selves, what I've called our souls. And as Number Three, we are—well, let's not give it a name, because wars have been fought over what to call the Nameless. So for the moment, let's just call it Number Three.

When it comes to aging, we have a choice about where we're going to position ourselves, as we watch the phenomena that getting older entails. We can look at them from the ego's point of view, from Number One, and get all lost in our clingings, and our fears, and our dramas. Or we can flip the channel and look at those same events from the soul's point of view. We'll find that everything changes with that shift in perspective. The situation itself doesn't change, mind you, but our experience of it becomes a whole different thing. The soul won't be busy getting lost in all the "stuff" the way the ego is—the soul is just appreciating the incarnation, appreciating the unfolding of it all.

As changes happen—sure, certain doors will close to us; but at the same time, the changes will open the opportunities and challenges of new roles. Which new roles we then choose to manifest will be decided by our appreciation of all the forces acting upon our lives, but there will certainly be new role opportunities that will arise for each of us as we get older.

But that's just the surface. There's also a much more interesting game going on here. Looking at our lives from the soul-perspective doesn't just give us a more effective way of fulfilling our roles—it takes us outside of our roles. The soul-view gives us a look at our lives from the outside, and that puts a different light on things.