Question: The elderly have an especially emphatic fear that arises in any group: What if I won’t have enough time to reach the sensation of eternity and perfection? How to handle that fear?

Answer: We need to set very concrete tasks before them, not prospective ones, like for the youth, and to set defined goals that are attainable and realized very quickly. At the same time, we need to tell them about the entire global picture of nature’s system, its eternity, its life cycles, as well as our life cycles within it. That is, here we need to provide serious psychological support from the very beginning.

Question: During one of the programs you explained that a fear of death paralyzes a person’s life, impedes him. It manifests less in young people and more at a certain age.  How does the methodology of integral upbringing regard attitude to fear? How to work with it?

Answer: I think that a correct clarification of our place in nature is the key to understanding a person’s place within it, the place of death and our biological life. We need to bring a person to the next level of understanding, not even feeling yet, but simply understanding of this.

A person will reach the sensation of eternity and perfection when he or she will be integrally connected with a certain critical mass of other people who are also attaining this integration. Then it is as if we rise above ourselves, creating above us some image of one person with one heart and mind. And our physical body exists nearby as an animal that accompanies this one image, the way our dog or cat lives alongside of us.

We need to focus people’s attention on that and to try bring them to this kind of sensation. In principle, psychologically it’s not that difficult considering that there is no resistance on their end, but on the contrary, support and anticipation of results. They represent that part of humanity that joyfully strives towards integration and closeness, understanding that all else passes and vanishes.

Elderly people easily part with everything for the sake of achieving the feeling of ascent above death, rising above the very factor of the seemingly inevitably impending end. We need to give them a feeling as if they are in a plunging airplane set to crash into a mountaintop, but suddenly some great force force lifts it up, and it speeds upwards with boosted power. I think that such sensation can be created in them quickly.

Besides, the courses for the elderly naturally need to be easier. They don’t require great theoretical and practical studies; they will gladly just participate. And I think that precisely the egoism and fear that appear in all older people, the desire to achieve a result that uplifts them, all that will provide a very serious basis for movement to other groups in society.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #4, 12/13/11

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