The Gap Between the Six Worlds and the Seventh, Cont.

As to those who cling to their ego-deluded lives and reach old age with their samsaric carcasses still intact, we find many who are as willfully self-absorbed at sixty-five as they were half a century before, when they were teenagers. Unlike their peers who have mellowed with age - the unmistakable sign of ego diminution - many elderly people have egos that are still as tough, mean, greedy, capricious and demanding of attention as ever. We do not speak of sociopaths, derelicts or even of the ill or age-infirmed. A shocking number of perfectly healthy and otherwise respectable people often resort to a variety of petty crimes to satisfy egotistic whims. Managers of supermarkets located in prosperous retirement communities, to mention one sad example, have had to take a hard line against shoplifting and stand up to the negative publicity of having some 'poor, hungry old lady' arrested ever since they determined that what Grandma was boosting was pate de foie gras and caviar. (Grandma knows that you might as well get hanged for a sheep as a lamb.) And any traffic court magistrate can confirm the terrifying number of elderly drivers who are blind to objects more than ten feet distant and have reflex response-times measurable in minutes, and who still insist upon their inalienable right to operate a vehicle on a freeway. We are not all mandated to decline gracefully.

But every man or woman who does suffer the Gap's crisis of disillusionment will likely find his difficulty exacerbated by confusion and feelings of alienation. He will know that his standard of values must itself be re-evaluated, but he will not know how to accomplish the revision. (The subject cannot be its object just as the eye cannot see itself.) Since his judgment has already proven unreliable, he does not know where he can dependably turn or whom he can safely trust. His old strategies are ineffective, the rules of the game having so drastically changed. So much will seem to be going wrong at once that he will see himself as being under siege from every quarter. The tension he feels will be so oppressive that to relieve it he may recklessly consume alcohol or drugs and give, thereby, public notice that he is out of control and has 'gone off the deep end' or 'over the edge.' Or, he may conceal his despair from others and suffer in secret. He will not see the dangers in either response since his present emergency will prevent him from thinking rationally about the future. He will not realize that he is at war with himself and that his ego's monopoly over his destiny has finally been challenged.

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