« The illnesses which strike men before their disappearance must be considered as trials of love intended to purify them with a view to the hereafter. »
« The desire to enumerate everything makes you attach yourself to the materials and not to the face that they compose and that it is important to recognize first. It necessarily follows that you cling first to life as to the piling up of days, whereas if the temple is pure of lines, it would be foolish to regret that it did not assemble more stones. »
« To be unhappy with aging is to have no idea what old age is. If humans can grow old, it is to take time for reflection before leaving to replenish the answers to existence that they will still have to go through, as long as they have not found the goal to reach.
Old age is not made to wait for death, but to reflect on what we have already achieved. »
"To love without expecting in return")Contributions by Maddly Bamy on the subject of:The WAY, LIFE, HEALTH or DEATH
« Don't think it's so good to die happy. All the paths of purification that beings will not have followed here below, they will follow them in their future life. It is not a harsh law against the human species, no, it is simply a necessity. »
An Angel responds to EKR: « The agony represents the last chance for an individual to get rid of the negativity which he has not been able to undo during his life. »
« You are no longer dependent on men; this is why men will not be able to improve your physical condition, or so little! Live your sufferings in secret, live your spiritual rise in silence. »
Yes, aging is painful. But wanting to stay young at all costs generates far greater pain.
The weakening
« We sometimes see old men who have spent their whole lives in sin, imitating in their old age the way of pious men. They take for moderation the expression of their weakened desires, and die without true repentance. »
(Presences of Judaism, 'The Straight Path')
« If old age transcended itself, it would no longer be the lessening, but the sublimation of being. »
To refuse the progressive decline of our senses which prepares us for the inevitable deadline, is to expose ourselves to a departure in panic followed by a journey in anguish, then by stagnation between two waters in the misunderstanding, regret and remorse.
You have to prepare slowly for the idea of leaving everything behind, including and above all resentment, the unspoken.
That's why I accept a decline in my sight, my hearing, criticism when I say what I think, memory loss, fatigue that occurs more quickly, pain here and there...
« The bark of your soul must thin out as you approach death.
Age imposes slowdowns that cause the heart and intelligence to unravel desires. Welcome the advent of another world that is entering you. Thus weaned from human activity, you have time to recollect yourself.
Accept to be diminished, accept to remain on the margins of a universe which is no longer yours. Your eyes of diminishing perception, turn them to God
Or whatever you want to call it.. Pieces of your existence are buried because your memory is weakening. The work of destruction begins its work.
Aging is the increasingly marked maladjustment to human life. The reduction of the faculties can cause in the being strippings which will raise it until the highest summits. The weakening of the body can provoke jolts of sensibility that are sufficiently upsetting to bring a flood of remorse into the consciousness, purifying tears that try to redeem the faults of the past.
All that you lose humanly, it is given to you, if you will, to gain it in spiritual growth.
To grow old is to dissolve into the indefinable. To grow old is to slip into the nothingness of life. Aging, for some, is entering consciously into God while, for others, it is only darkness.
There are also those who are stricken with mental confusion. Do not rush to judge these mists, they are perhaps the void in which God inserts himself.
Have great respect for those nearing death.
When the physical devitalizes in favor of a sort of trance, ordinary mortals would qualify this as aging; accepts their adjective, but refuses what it implies of degradation. In fact, this state is like an exfoliation [lose its leaves, its skin] where the being, stripped of the useless, loses its dead leaves. Dusts of cells that die in favor of a bloom that blooms at the top. You call this senescence or third age, but you still have to discover the mental state in which this decline plunges you. Isn't the euphoria of certain old people the beginning of rapture? »
« I feel the attacks of age, insidiously. A little less vision, hearing, strength, flexibility. Slightly less automatic memory too. I forget a word, a name, a phone number. On the other hand, my deep memory, the memory of lived experience, of the essential, is growing.
This last age is the most fruitful and by far the most important in a man's life. »
(Jeanne Guesné, 'The Consciousness of Being')Contributions by Jeanne Guesné on the theme of:The WAY, LOVE, LIFE or DEATH
The departure
« As for this old man, get down to his destiny beyond the passage, to his re-birth. Don't reject him, love him as he is.
In the pitiful state of his inner dread, his frozen soul is inaccessible to you: he is the sheep too lost on Earth and whom age has isolated from all understanding and can only be recovered in the celestial pastures. Unless he changes his way of life, too attached to objects, to the earth, to the material world... Sickness, suffering in his flesh, could be a path of grace. Then it would be a sign for you[to be able to start talking to him]. »
« The old man or the seriously ill who really can't take any more suffering but whose body "absurdly" refuses to die, perhaps has a task to complete or is blocked by a psychological knot. »
« I think at times with deep joy that before twelve or fifteen years from now, at the latest, I will know what this shadow is, the tomb, and I have a sort of certainty that my hope of clarity will not be mistaken. O you whom I love, do not be distressed by this cry that I push towards the supreme expectation, do not be saddened by this impatience, for I have faith that it is in the infinite that is the great appointment. I will find you there sublime and you will see me better there. And we will love each other there as on earth and at the same time as in heaven, with the mysterious doubling of immensity. »
(Victor Hugo)Contributions of Victor Hugo on the theme of:The WAY, LIFE, God or DEATH
The reason for suffering
Contributions by Maddly Bamy on the subject of:The WAY, LIFE, HEALTH or DEATH
Or whatever you want to call it.
