THE TRUTH ABOUT SENILITY

 

Senility comes about with age, but you will find many older adults that are not senile at all. If you study their lives, you will find that some people become senile because those who have become senile have not been very active mentally. Among the greatest authors or musicians, George Bernard Shaw, for example, or even Churchill, or Gandhi, you will find that they did some of their best works at an old age. Why have they not become senile, and why do others become senile? It is because their minds have not been very active.

They might have been physically active, but those who have become senile have not been intellectually active. Senility begins with the mind and not the body because the mind influences every part of the body. All diseases and senility are the decaying of the body’s various organs and more so of the brain, and doctors have proven that one hundred percent of all diseases come from the mind. It is a method of wrong thinking. When a person gets older, the constant thought in their mind would be, “I am getting old, I am getting old, I am getting old”. They stop reading, they stop studying, and they stop all these mental activities. So, it would be natural that their thoughts make them senile. No one needs to become senile at all.

The basis of senility has to do with one’s way of life and thinking. If I reach the age of eighty, God forbid, I will not be senile because the mind is permanently active. And not only is the mind being intellectually active, but it is also empowered by the Spirit within. Senility can be avoided by more significant mental activity and by drawing that energy and that Force from within.

Many things are inexplicable, and doctors have no answers for senility. They do not go back to the samskaric nature of the person. Some people are very active mentally speaking, and some do not return to their childhood and pre-childhood stages. There are certain hereditary factors. When they reach a ripe old age, you will find that children of senile parents also become senile. But that is just a tendency, and the child can avert that tendency by taking a greater interest in everything around him, which means again by developing greater and greater awareness.

For example, I had the pleasure of being with Charles’s mother. She is eighty-three, and I had a little chat with her, and everything she spoke to me about was cohesive and reasonable. Unfortunately, she is reaching the end of the road as her face is bleak because of the illnesses she had gone through, there was such serenity on her face, and she has been meditating for about four or five years. That has produced in her that serenity, and with her terminal disease, just waiting for time, she accepts everything so well. She has no fear in her and is so, so serene.

Serenity can never come to a person who is senile, and serenity is not compatible with senility. Here is an active mind at eighty-three that could reason with you, ask you intelligent questions and speak to you very cohesively. It goes to show that not everyone needs to become senile.

In senility, there are certain samskaric factors.

… Gururaj Ananda Yogi: Satsang UK 1984- 13