AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND

The following quotations are from Deepak Chopra's book AGELESS BODY, TIMELESS MIND (N.Y.: Harmony Books, 1993). The book's main value is that it brings to the reader a summary of basic ideas about modern and ancient theories of how the mind works. The book's weakness is that it does not consistently identify the sources of its statements. I have tried to summarize most of the key concepts that the book offers that are worth your consideration.

"In order to create the experience of ageless body and timeless mind, which is the promise of this book, you must discard ten assumptions about who you are and what the true nature of the mind and body is. These assumptions form the bedrock of our shared worldview. They are:

1. There is an objective world independent of the observer, and our bodies are an aspect of this objective world.

2. The body is composed of clumps of matter separated from one another in time and space.

3. Mind and body are separate and independent from each other.

4. Materialism is primary, consciousness is secondary. In other words, we are physical machines that have learned to think.

5. Human awareness can be completely explained as the product of biochemistry.

6. As individuals, we are disconnected, self-contained entities.

7. Our perception of the world is automatic and gives us an accurate picture of how things really are.

8. Time exists as an absolute, and we are captives of that absolute. No one escapes the ravages of time.

9. Our true nature is totally defined by the body, ego, and personality. We are wisps of memories and desires enclosed in packages of flesh and bones.

10. Suffering is necessary---it is part of reality. We are inevitable victims of sickness, aging, and death.

These assumptions reach far beyond aging to define a world of separation, decay, and death" (pp. 3-4).

But Chopra challenges these assumptions. All of them are distortions, especially in the modern world of quantum mechanics. Life is far more mysterious and dynamic than these assumptions would lead one to believe. "Our cells are constantly eavesdropping on our thoughts and being changed by them" (p. 5). Therefore, any fixed idea of how the body works without taking the mind's powerful impact into consideration is a false idea.

"To challenge aging at its core, this entire worldview must be challenged first, for nothing holds more power over the body than beliefs of the mind. The ten new assumptions are:

1. The physical world, including our bodies, is a response of the observer. We create our bodies as we create the experience of our world.

2. In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and information, not solid matter. This energy and information is an outcropping of infinite fields of energy and information spanning the universe.

3. The mind and body are inseparably one. The unity that is 'me' separates into two streams of experience. I experience the subjective stream as thoughts, feelings, and desires. I experience the objective stream as my body. At a deeper level, however, the two streams meet at a single creative source. It is from this source that we are meant to live.

4. The biochemistry of the body is a product of awareness. Beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the chemical reactions that uphold life in every cell. An aging cell is the end product of awareness that has forgotten how to remain new.

5. Perception appears to be automatic, but in fact it is a learned phenomenon. The world you live in, including the experience of your body, is completely dictated by how you learned to perceive it. If you change your perception, you change the experience of your body and your world.

6. Impulses of intelligence create your body in new forms every second. What you are is the sum total of these impulses, and by changing their patterns, you will change.

7. Although each person seems separate and independent, all of us are connected to patterns of intelligence that govern the whole cosmos. Our bodies are part of a universal body, our minds an aspect of a universal mind.

8. Time does not exist as an absolute, but only eternity. Time is quantified eternity, timelessness chopped up into bits and pieces (seconds, hours, days, years) by us. What we call linear time is a reflection of how we perceive change. If we could perceive the changeless, time would cease to exist as we know it. We can learn to start metabolizing non-change, eternity, the absolute. By doing that, we will be ready to create the physiology of immortality.

9. Each of us inhabits a realty lying beyond all change. Deep inside us, unknown to the five senses, is an innermost core of being, a field of non-change that creates personality, ego, and body. This being is our essential state---it is who we really are.

10. We are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These are part of the scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being...

At its deepest level, your body is ageless, your mind timeless" (pp. 5-7).

The above 10 new assumptions are very important as they provide the foundation for the final sentence above. If you grant Chopra the 10 assumptions, then you also must grant him that you have an ageless body and a timeless mind---that you will live forever!

Since these are vital assumptions, you should go back over them until you understand just what they are saying. If you do not believe any of them, then you are, in essence, locked into the old assumptions and will be denying yourself some tremendous benefits that lie imbedded in the ten new assumptions. Please keep in mind that Chopra has not created these ten new assumptions. He has borrowed them from others. They are both very old assumptions, going back thousands of years, while at the same time they are supported by the most modern scientific thoughts about quantum mechanics and our changing knowledge of how the mind works.

"The great advantage of this new worldview is that it is so immensely creative---the human body, like everything else in the cosmos, is constantly being made anew every second. Although your sense report that you inhabit a solid body in time and space, this is only the most superficial layer of reality. Your body is something far more miraculous---a flowing organism empowered by millions of years of intelligence" (p. 8).

"The skin replaces itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six weeks, and the skeleton every three months. To the naked eye, these organs look the same from moment to moment, but they are always in flux. By the end of this year, 98 percent of the atoms in your body will have been exchanged for new ones" (p. 9). To think that you don't change is ridiculous. To think that you don't influence this change in very powerful ways denies just how powerful you are. You are going to dramatically influence how you change---that is a fact of life. The only question is whether you will influence the change process either negatively or positively.

THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE WORLD INDEPENDENT OF THE OBSERVER

"The world you accept as real seems to have definite qualities. Some things are large, others small; some things are hard, others soft. Yet none of these qualities means anything outside of your perception. Take any object, such as a folding chair. To you the chair feels hard, but a neutrino would whiz through it without slowing down, because to a subatomic particle the chair's atoms are miles apart. The chair seems stationary to you, but if you observed it from outer space, you would see it revolving past you, along with everything else on Earth, at a thousand miles per hour. Likewise, anything else you can describe about the chair can be completely altered simply by changing your perception. If the chair is red, you can make it appear black by looking at it through green glasses. If the chair weighs five pounds, you can make it weigh two pounds by putting it on the moon or a hundred thousand pounds by putting it in the gravitational field of a dense star" (p. 11).

"All that is really 'out there' is raw, unformed data waiting to be interpreted by you, the perceiver" (p. 11).

"As disturbing as this may sound, there is incredible liberation in realizing that you can change your world---including your body---SIMPLY BY CHANGING YOUR PERCEPTION. How you perceive yourself is causing immense changes in your body right now...In the first few years after retirement, heart attack and cancer rates soar, and early death overtakes men who were otherwise healthy before they retired. 'Early retirement death,' as the syndrome is called, depends on the perception that one's useful days are over; this is only a perception, but for someone who holds it firmly, it is enough to create disease and death. By comparison, in societies where old age is accepted as part of the social fabric, elders remain extremely vigorous---lifting, climbing, and bending in ways that we do not accept as normal in our elderly" (p. 12).

"Stresses you long ago forgot on the conscious level are still sending out signals, like buried microchips, making you anxious, tense, fatigued, apprehensive, resentful, doubtful, disappointed---these reactions cross the mind-body barrier to become part of you" (pp. 12-3). (See Frost's summary of HEAD FIRST by Norman Cousins in another handout.)

"...automatic processes play a huge part in aging...A lifetime of unconscious living leads to numerous deteriorations, while a lifetime of conscious participation prevents them. The very act of paying conscious attention to bodily functions instead of leaving them on automatic pilot will change how you age...The era of biofeedback and meditation has taught us that---heart patients have been trained in mind-body laboratories to lower their blood pressure at will or to reduce the acid secretions that create ulcers, among dozens of other things" (pp. 13-4). (See the work of Kenneth Pelletier for details. Pelletier was doing biofeedback work, as was Frost, some 20 years ago.)

"The five senses cannot go deep enough to experience the billions of quantum exchanges that create aging. The rate of change is at once too fast and too slow: too fast because individual chemical reactions take less than 1/10,000th of a second, too slow because their cumulative effect will not show up for years. These reactions involve information and energy on a scale millions of times smaller than a single atom.

"Age deterioration would be unavoidable if the body was simply material, because all material things are prey to entropy, the tendency of orderly systems to become disorderly. The classic example of entropy is a car rusting in a junkyard; entropy breaks down the orderly machinery into crumbling rust. There is no chance that the process will work the other way---that a rusty scrap heap will reassemble itself into a new car. But entropy doesn't apply to intelligence---an invisible part of us is immune to the ravages of time" (pp. 15-6).

"Intelligence can express itself either as thoughts or as molecules. A basic emotion such as fear can be described as an abstract feeling or as a tangible molecule of the hormone adrenaline. Without the feeling there is no hormone; without the hormone there is no feeling...Wherever thought goes, a chemical goes with it...distressed mental states get converted into the biochemicals that create disease" (pp. 16-7).

"...the body is capable of producing ANY biochemical response once the mind has been given the appropriate suggestion...If we could effectively trigger the intention not to age, the body would carry it out automatically...Intention is the active partner of attention; it is the way we convert automatic processes into conscious ones...By inserting an intention into your thought processes, such as, 'I want to improve in energy and vigor every day,' you can begin to assert control over those brain centers that determine how much energy will be expressed in activity. The decline of vigor in old age is largely the result of people EXPECTING to decline; they have unwittingly implanted a self-defeating intention in the form of a strong belief, and the mind-body connection automatically carries out this intention" (pp. 18-19).

The above is rather dogmatic and simplistic. If it were this simple, then we would expect to find tribes of people who are joyfully living in beautiful environments---e.g., the Hawaiians prior to the European discovery of their islands---living to be 200 plus years old. Or, we would expect to find monastic sages living endlessly. Neither is the case in real life. However, the knowledge we have of long living peoples is very interesting. And, to a significant degree, the knowledge we have of aging does coincide with what Chopra is advocating. I agree with him when he says that:

"Awareness makes a huge difference in aging, for although every species of higher life-form ages, only humans know what is happening to them, and we translate this knowledge into aging itself" (p. 21).

"There is no biochemistry outside awareness; every cell in your body is totally aware of how you think and feel about yourself. Once you accept that fact, the whole illusion of being victimized by a mindless, randomly degenerating body falls away" (p. 24).

"New knowledge, new skills, new ways of looking at the world keep mind and body growing, and as long as that happens, the natural tendency to be new at every second is expressed. In the quantum world, change is inevitable, aging isn't. The chronological age of our physical bodies is beside the point. The youngest-looking 50-year-old has molecules that are the same age as those of the oldest-looking 50-year-old. In both cases the chronological age of the body could be stated as 5 billion years (the age of the various atoms), or 1 year (the time it takes for these atoms to replace themselves in our tissues), or 3 seconds (the time taken for a cell to turn over its enzymes for processing food, air, and water)...Although there is a certain amount of fixed information in the atoms of food, air, and water that make up each cell, the power to transform that information is subject to free will. One thing you can own free and clear in this world is your interpretation of it" (p. 25).

"Interpretations arise from a person's self-interaction. You experience this as internal dialogue. Thoughts, judgements, and feelings are ceaselessly swirling through one's mind: 'I like this, I don't like that, I'm afraid of A, I'm not sure of B,' etc. Internal dialogue is not random mental noise; it is generated from a deep level by your beliefs and assumptions. A core belief is defined as something you assume is true about reality, and as long as you hold on to it, your belief will hold your body's informational fields to certain parameters---you will perceive something as likable or unlikable, distressing or enjoyable, according to how it fits your expectations. When someone's interpretation changes, a change in his reality also takes place" (pp. 25-6).

"In place of the belief that your body decays with time, nurture the belief that your body is new at every moment. In place of the belief that your body is a mindless machine, nurture the belief that your body is infused with the deep intelligence of life, whose sole purpose is to sustain you" (p. 26).

"If you choose, you can experience yourself in a state of unity with everything you contact. In ordinary waking consciousness, you touch your finger to a rose and feel it as solid, but in truth one bundle of energy and information---your finger---is contacting another bundle of energy and information---the rose...John Muir declared, 'Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.'...The possibility of experiencing unity has tremendous implications for aging, because when there is harmonious interaction between you and your extended body, you feel joyful, healthy, and youthful. 'Fear is born of separation,' the ancient Indian sages maintained; in this statement they probed deep into why we age" (p. 27).

"Instead of futilely trying to control the uncontrollable, a person in unity learns acceptance, not because he has to but because there actually is peace and orderliness in himself and his extended body. The modern sage J. Krishnamurti lived into his nineties with wonderful alertness, wisdom, and undiminished vitality. I remember seeing him bound up the stairs to a lecture podium when he was 85, and I was very moved when a woman who had known him for many years told me, 'I have learned one thing about him---he is completely without violence'" (p. 28).

(Chopra borrows from Krishnamurti and I would strongly recommend that you read some of Krishnamurti's books. I have found them to all be very enlightening and helpful in my journey.)

"The transformation from separation to unity, from conflict to peace, is the goal of all spiritual traditions" (p. 28).

"What makes us old isn't the stress so much as it is the PERCEPTION of stress. Someone who doesn't see the world 'out there' as a threat can coexist with the environment, free of the damage created by the stress response. In many ways, the most important thing you can do to experience a world without aging is to nurture the knowledge that the world is you" (p. 29).

Here again, Chopra is borrowing from the teachings of others far more knowledgeable than he is about stress. Hans Selye, the father of modern stress theory long ago acknowledged that it is our perception or attitude toward stressors that determine whether or not they are converted into stress. For Chopra to be borrowing as he does from others is totally acceptable, we are all borrowers from others. As Bernard of Chartres said long ago, "We are all sitting on the shoulders of giants." We are able to have the insights we have thanks to the vantage point they have given us. But, a scholar has a responsibility to give credit to others when he is borrowing. This is not only the humble thing to do, it also provides the reader with the sources so that the reader can go back to the sources and make sure that the author is correctly quoting them and not quoting inaccurately or out of context. Since Chopra fails to do this, the reader is somewhat at his mercy. He can correctly mention something about stress theory that is correct and then invent some theory of his own that has no validity whatsoever and the reader may not realize that, in essence, Chopra is misleading them.

"It is up to you, the perceiver, to cut up the timeless any way you like; your awareness creates the time you experience. Someone who experiences time as a scarce commodity that is constantly slipping away is creating a completely different personal reality from someone who perceives that he has all the time in the world" (pp. 30-1).

"Only the present moment exists; past and future are mental projections. If you can free yourself of these projections, trying neither to relive the past nor to control the future, a space is opened for a completely new experience---the experience of ageless body and timeless mind" (p. 31).

EXPERIENCE IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU;

IT IS WHAT YOU DO WITH WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU.

Aldous Huxley

(Once again, since Chopra is borrowing from Huxley, I strongly suggest that you read some of Huxley's wonderful novels as he was one of the finest writers of his age.)

"Thousands of decisions are being made in the mind-body system every second, countless choices that enable your physiology to adapt to the demands of life...The visible programmer is unlimited in the ways he can program the visible apparatus of the body...My memories are available to the programmer who stands above memory, silently observing my life, taking account of my experiences, always ready to entertain the possibility of new choices. For this programmer is nothing but the awareness of choice" (pp. 34-5).

HOPE versus THE SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

"We are made victims of sickness, aging, and death by gaps in our self-knowledge. To lose awareness is to lose intelligence; to lose intelligence is to lose control over the end product of intelligence, the human body. Therefore, the most valuable lesson the new paradigm can teach us is this: If you want to change your body, change your awareness first. Everything that happens to you is a result of how you see yourself, to an extent you might consider quite uncanny...animal researchers have been able to induce rapid aging, disease, and early death in laboratory rats and mice by putting them in situations of high stress, such as by throwing them into tanks of water with no escape. Animals that have never met such a situation perceive it as hopeless and quickly give up and die. Animals that have been gradually conditioned to the tanks persevere and survive, swimming for long hours without signs of stress-induced deterioration of their tissues. Much of the history of human aging has been characterized by hopelessness. Our fearful images of growing old, coupled with high rates of disease and senility among the elderly, resulted in grim, self-fulfilling expectations" (p. 38).

Please note that you can interpret the above research in another way than Chopra does. Yes, we need to develop hope and this can reduce the aging process as the research notes. However, much of the history of human activity is also about getting use to hopeless situations by being gradually conditioned to accept them. How many of us feel, at least some of the time, like the rats, conditioned to go on swimming and swimming and swimming..........

"Having to age is a fact we inherited from the old paradigm, stubbornly fixed in our worldview until a shift in awareness can bring new facts to light...Aging made sense in a scheme of Nature where all things change, fade away, and die. It makes much less sense in a world where an endless flow of ever-renewing intelligence is present all around us. Which view you adopt is your choice. You can choose to see the rose bloom and die; you can choose to see the rose as a wave of life that never ends, for next year new roses will spring from the seeds of this one" (p. 38).

BELIEF CREATES BIOLOGY.

Norman Cousins

WHATEVER IS FLEXIBLE AND FLOWING WILL TEND TO GROW, WHATEVER IS RIGID AND BLOCKED WILL WITHER AND DIE.

Tao Te Ching

"NEGATIVE FACTORS THAT ACCELERATE AGING

Asterisk (*) denotes major factors

*Depression

Inability to express emotions

Feeling helpless to change oneself and others

Living alone

Loneliness, absence of close friends

*Lack of regular daily routine

*Lack of regular work routine

*Job dissatisfaction

Having to work more than 40 hours per week

Financial burdens, being in debt

Habitual or excessive worry

Regret for sacrifices made in the past

Irritability, getting angry easily, or being unable to express anger

Criticism of self and others

POSITIVE FACTORS THAT RETARD AGING

*Happy marriage (or satisfying long-term relationship)

*Job satisfaction

*Feeling of personal happiness

Ability to laugh easily

Satisfactory sex life

Ability to make and keep close friends

*Regular daily routine

*Regular work routine

Taking at least one week's vacation every year

Feeling in control of personal life

Enjoyable leisure time, satisfying hobbies

Ability to express feelings easily

Optimistic about the future

Feeling financially secure, living within means" (pp. 69-70).

Although this is by no means a complete list and does not include factors such as genetics and environment, the list does provide you with an opportunity to review your own life. How many of the negative factors are a part of your life and how many of the positive? What can you specifically do to steadily increase the positive while you decrease the negative. Remember, all of these factors are within your control. If you think that some or even one is not within your personal control, then think again!

"The list cannot quantify intangible qualities such as being able to give of oneself and having regard for others...Larry Scherwitz, a University of California psychologist, taped the conversations of nearly six hundred men, a third of whom were suffering from heart disease, the rest of whom were healthy. Listening to the tapes, he counted how often each man used the words "I", "me", and "mine"...Scherwitz found that men who used the first-person pronoun most often had the highest risk of heart trouble...Counting the times a person said "I" was an ingenious way to quantify self-absorption...The antidote, Scherwitz concluded, was to be more giving: 'Listen with regard when others talk. Give your time and energy to others; let others have their way; do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs'" (p. 71).

In short, love and compassion are key forces that can retard the aging process. Another factor that is related to love and compassion and to all the items on the positive factors list is the "FLOW" dimension. (See Frost's handout on FLOW.) A person that gets involved regularly in flow will significantly retard aging.

So how do you encourage all of these factors in your life? Part of the answer lies in the value of adaptability.

ADAPTABILITY

"In 1957, Flanders Dunbar, a professor of medicine at Columbia University, reported on a study of centenarians"...(and found the following to be traits of those with the best chance of living to be 100:

"1. Responding creatively to change. More than any other, this trait made precentenarians stand out from ordinary people.

2. Freedom from anxiety. Anxiety is a great enemy of our ability to improvise and create.

3. The continued ability to create and invent.

4. High levels of adaptive energy.

5. A capacity to integrate new things into one's existence.

6. Wanting to stay alive" (pp. 72-3).

"Adaptability can be most simply defined as freedom from conditioned response. To remain open to change, to accept the new and welcome the unknown, is a choice that involves definite personal skills; for left to inertia, the mind tends to reinforce its old habits and increasingly to fall prey to its conditioning" (p. 73).

"The best way to ensure that you will be adaptable in old age is to work on being that way when you are still young" (p. 77). George Vaillant did one of the best long term studies of what makes for good mental health and concluded that adaptability was a key factor in sound mental health.  Vaillant recognized that stressors are not the problem as much as how we adapt to those stressors.

REVERSING THE AGING PROCESS

Stepping out of and away from old patterns can make a major difference in how you age. "A brilliant demonstration of this was offered in 1979 by psychologist Ellen Langer and her colleagues at Harvard, who effectively reversed the biological age of a group of old men by a simple but ingenious shift in awareness. The subjects, all 75 or older and in good health, were asked to meet for a week's retreat at a country resort...the resort had been set up to duplicate life as it was twenty years earlier. Instead of magazines from 1979, the reading tables held issues of LIFE and the SATURDAY EVENING POST from 1959. The only music played was twenty years old, and, in keeping with this flashback, the men were asked to behave entirely as if the year were 1959. All talk had to refer to events and people of that year. Every detail of their week in the country was geared to make each subject feel, look, talk, and behave as he had in his midfifties...they were instructed to talk exclusively in the present tense of 1959 ('I wonder if President Eisenhower will go with Nixon next election?')...Compared to a control group that went on the retreat but continued to live in the world of 1979, the make-believe group improved in memory and manual dexterity. They were more active and self-sufficient about such things as taking their own food at meals and cleaning up their rooms, behaving much more like 55-year-olds than 75-year-olds...Perhaps the most remarkable change had to do with aspects of aging that were considered irreversible. Impartial judges who were asked to study before-and-after pictures of the men detected that their faces looked visibly younger by an average of three years. Measurements of finger length, which tends to shorten with age, indicated that their fingers had lengthened; stiffened joints were more flexible, and posture had started to straighten as it had in younger years. Muscle strength, as measured by hand grip, improved, as did hearing and vision...Intelligence is considered fixed in adults, yet over half of the experimental group showed increased intelligence over the five days of their return to 1959, while a quarter of the control group declined in I.Q. test scores" (pp. 93-4).

The above research makes you wonder why we are not doing this is retirement and convalescent facilities? But, the basic idea is a simple one: if you want to stay young you have to think young. If you see old as tired and over-the-hill, then that is what you will become. If you see your later years as exciting and get into continuing growth-oriented activities, you will tend to retain your youth and health for a much longer time.

BALANCED LIFESTYLE

"The overall benefit of a balanced lifestyle emerged in 1965, when a Southern California research team headed by Nadia Belloc and Lester Breslow...decided to follow the aging patterns of people in Alameda County...After five and a half years, 371 subjects had died...the most important distinguishing feature of those who survived was not their income, physical condition, or genetic inheritance, but a handful of extremely simple lifestyle habits:

1. Sleeping seven or eight hours a night

2. Eating breakfast almost every day

3. Not eating between meals

4. Normal weight---i.e., not more than 5 percent underweight, and no more than 10 or 20 percent overweight (the lower number was for women, the higher for men)

5. Regular physical activity---i.e., engaging often in active sports, long walks, gardening, or other exercise

6. Moderate drinking---i.e., taking no more than two alcoholic drinks a day

7. Never smoking cigarettes

"This is a very brief list of balanced habits...a 45-year-old man who observed from zero to three healthy habits could expect on average to live another 21.6 years, while someone who followed six or seven good habits could expect to live 33 more years. In other words, doing something as simple as eating breakfast, no matter what kind of breakfast, and getting enough sleep added more than 11 years to a man's life...The cumulative results were not quite as dramatic for women, but the same pattern was observed at all age levels...

"A person in late middle age (55 to 64) who practiced all seven good habits was found to be as healthy as young adults 25 to 34 years old who followed only one or two...

"What seems to pay off is sheer regularity---the KIND of diet or physical activity being followed was not taken into consideration" (pp. 133-4).

ANGER

But regularity is not everything. How we manage our emotions is very important and anger is one of the most difficult emotions to manage.

"Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.

Pain in the past is remembered as anger.

Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety.

Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is called guilt.

The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression" (p. 186). (Based on the work of David Viscott).

"Living in the present means being honest enough to avoid the easy emotion, which is anger, and expose the hurt, which is harder to confront" (p. 186).

CHANGING

"The common honeybee...can change its age at will. Every beehive needs young workers whose job is to stay indoors to feed and care for newly hatching larvae. After three weeks, these workers grow up and move on to become nature foragers, the bees who fly from the hive to collect pollen from flowers.

"At any given period, however, there may be too many young workers or too many old foragers.  In the spring so many new larvae may be hatching that the hive lacks mature foragers and needs more very quickly.  When that happens, some of the young workers age into foragers in one week instread of the usual three and fly off seeking food.  On the other hand, if a swarm of bees splits off to form a new colony, it is likely to be composed mostly of old forager bees.  Sensing a shortage of young workers, some of these old foragers will reverse their ages and become young again---they regenerate the hormones of the youthful workers and even regrow the withered glands needed to produce food for the hatching larvae.

"When the bee researchers first discovered this behavior, they were astonished.  They realized that aging isn't a one-way process dictated by a fixed timetable for the honeybee, aging is 'plastic'---able to go back and forth, slow down or speed up; the real mystery is why this does not hold true for higher life-forms.  I would contend that aging is ALWAYS plastic, but that we have cemented it in place through our blief in death, the inevitable end point on the fixed timetable of growing old...the human body...is a mammoth hive of 50 trillion cells that grow old or stay young according to what is needed by the whole colony at any given moment" (pp. 308-9).

Should we not consider ouselves as evolved as the honeybee?

Try to think of yourself as capable of becoming younger, rathter than as someone who is growing older.  Specifically, make a list of the types of things you can do to make yourself younger, healthier, happier.  Go over the ideas in this handout and see how you can apply them in your plan for growing younger.