FEATURE
Age, I abhor thee,
Prof. B. M. Hegde,
hegdebm@gmail.com
Youth, I adore thee.”
Shakespeare.
One does not have to abhor aged people at all. I do not agree with Shakespeare. One could grow up gracefully and could achieve many things even at the ripe old age. There are examples of people who have been creative even in their eighties and nineties. How to grow old gracefully is a million-dollar question? Any society, which does not have the wise counsel of its elderly people, is a poor society. Age mellows people a lot. If one is a thinker, age teaches many useful lessons. Life is not long enough for each of us to make all the mistakes ourselves and then learn from them. We could learn from others’ mistakes and, in this direction, the thinking elders are a great boon. Virtue and morality have taken a back seat. Look at what Shakespeare wrote about the state of affairs then:
For in the fatness of these pursy times,
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.”
Hamlet.
Ageing starts from the day one is made in the mother’s womb, soon after the father’s spermatozoon enters the mother’s ovum. The resultant zygote is only a small speck of protein weighing just 0.0000000000001 gm. This little speck of protein is the beginning of man. The zygote starts life at that very second with a consciousness, which gets to know all about all other living things on this planet postori and priori. The consciousness runs the person from that time till he eventually dies. The difference between life and death could only be made out by observation by others. This is the Schrodinger’s cat hypothesis. All zygotes thus formed have one certainty in this world, which is death. All other aspects of life are uncertain.
Thus defined, ageing starts from the day you are made, and goes on ceaselessly until death. In other words, ageing is a constant change from conception to death. The most important stimulus for ageing is the human consciousness; which, in simple terms, boils down to the vagaries of the human mind. Where, then, is the human mind? Never mind! The mind certainly is not in the brain or the heart or any other anatomic structure at the cellular level. Mind is a sub-cellular, sub-atomic quantum concept. It transcends all the physical laws of deterministic predictability. Even the Einstein’s theory of motion that states that “nothing could move faster than light” does not apply to the human mind. Mind could travel faster than light and could even communicate unconventionally by teleportation.
What pleases the human consciousness is the Universal consciousness of Universal Love. What hurts it is anything against this dictum. Ageing that happens from day one of our existence would, per force, depend on this principle. Love and compassion slows the ageing process while hatred and anger along with ego, pride, jealousy, and fear would enhance the ageing process. The secret of keeping your cells healthy and young (as much as possible), is Universal love. This message has to go down to the next generation before they get converted like us to hate one another. Universal compassion slows ageing.
Mankind must learn to follow nature and learn the secrets of nature. Science is to understand the working of nature. When hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was first introduced after menopause to make women look and feel young and sexy, I was the first to write that the effort is dangerous. No one listened to me. History has now shown how right I was. I was following nature. If nature wanted the woman to be eternally young it would never have introduced menopause in the first place. HRT was also sold as a panacea for all future complications like cancer and vascular diseases. History has proved me right unfortunately after thousands of women met their maker prematurely, thanks to long term HRT!
The commercial medical world is now out with many methods to keep women looking young. Wrinkles repair and many other shaping practices using even Botox injections are a fashion these days. My considered opinion is that all these look good and the clap trap is really amazing but any one who wants to be away from any medical problems would do well to avoid all those practices. Crash diets to quickly lose weight and look young, special exercise to shape up, hormones to keep oneself eternally young like DHEA are all there to fool the gullible and make money. All those efforts are definitely anti-nature and shall, per force, fail in their long term claims.
“Anti-aging creams may have the unintended effect of transforming young women’s fresh faces from plums into prunes. The Hollywood culture of youth drives the use of these creams. Movie star Scarlett Johannson, for instance, is quoted at the age of 20 as saying, “I already use anti-aging products. It’s hard not to feel under pressure everybody in Hollywood is just so damn beautiful.”
The result of such pressure trickling down to the girl next door is natural. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Dr. Susan Mayou, a consulting dermatologist at London’s Cadogan Clinic, said, “Eczema patients who use products that are too greasy often suffer from a condition called occlusive folliculitis. Sweat cannot escape from behind clogged pores, causing itchy red bumps. Teenagers using a heavy product could suffer from the same thing.” Dr. Nick (“Dr. Botox”) Lowe, who maintains a practice in both London and Los Angeles, told the Daily Mail, “These compounds are included in anti-aging products because they basically break down the top layer of your skin, increasing the rate at which skin renews itself.” Young skin, he said, is more “prone to react badly to these active ingredients.” The result can be itching, flaking, and redness. They probably need to spend more money on creams to try and get their skin back to normal.”
Dr. Lowe agrees. “Because these compounds damage the outer layer of the skin, they increase skin photosensitivity, leaving skin far more susceptible to sun damage,” he said. “Eighty percent of wrinkles result from the effect of ultraviolet light on the skin. When we’re outside in daylight, even when not in strong summer sunlight, we are sustaining damage that we’re not aware of and which won’t show up for another 15 or 20 years.”
To keep the skin healthy one must avoid sunbathing, not smoke and not use an SPF15 sunscreen. That is infinitely more effective than using artificial products. According to market research firm Mintel, sales of anti-aging skin products exceeded $1.6 billion in the United States in 2008. Anti-aging sales took a quantum leap over facial cleansers, surpassing them for the first time and leaving them a distant second with total sales of $570 million.
Simple methods to keep one fit and healthy with enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate are the following. Regular moderate physical exercise like walking and/or swimming, a balanced diet with variety, preferably vegetarian, avoiding junk preserved food, plenty of water intake, and keeping oneself busy with some enjoyable work is the secret of good health and longevity. Keeping the brain alert is another significant factor. Irrespective of the age one must have some new creative work schedule as for example learning a new language. These will keep one’s memory at its best as also the brain health. If you do not use your brain you gradually lose it. All artificial methods to look young like colouring one’s hair etc look so ugly and not graceful in the elderly. One should learn to age gracefully for one’s inner happiness. Cheating the world can fool a few people some times but not please one’s own consciousness.
Morphological ageing has very little to do with cellular ageing. One could still see many white haired elderly looking people still happy and healthy while the young looking people could have the most devastating illnesses. Cellular ageing depends on the mind to a great extent and the mind is not a cellular concept but a sub-cellular-sub-atomic concept. Happy mind resides in a healthy body and vice versa. The modern epidemics of the West, divorce and suicide, both originate in the mind. Wars are born in the minds of men and not in the battlefields.
The solution to all the ills of the world is to ensure a healthy mind in our next generation by the methods advocated above. It may not be very appealing to most of the readers, as this concept has not reached medical textbooks yet. “Truth”, said Aristotle, “could influence only half a score of men in a given century or time, while falsehood and mystery would drag millions by the nose. Love everyone to live happily till you die. Death can never be postponed, nor avoided; as it is against the Laws of Nature. The only thing that we could try to do is to live well till death. Modern medicine and all the scientific knowledge, put together, could just about do that; if only we could change our attitude to life as enunciated above. True positive definition of health is “enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate.” With this definition minor aches and pains become a part of ageing and also the sign to show that one is still alive.
The following Ameri-Indian song tells it all.
“I eat when I am hungry,
I drink when I am thirsty,
If heavens don’t fall down,
I shall certainly live till I die.”
Prof. B. M. Hegde,
hegdebm@gmail.com
Youth, I adore thee.”
Shakespeare.
One does not have to abhor aged people at all. I do not agree with Shakespeare. One could grow up gracefully and could achieve many things even at the ripe old age. There are examples of people who have been creative even in their eighties and nineties. How to grow old gracefully is a million-dollar question? Any society, which does not have the wise counsel of its elderly people, is a poor society. Age mellows people a lot. If one is a thinker, age teaches many useful lessons. Life is not long enough for each of us to make all the mistakes ourselves and then learn from them. We could learn from others’ mistakes and, in this direction, the thinking elders are a great boon. Virtue and morality have taken a back seat. Look at what Shakespeare wrote about the state of affairs then:
For in the fatness of these pursy times,
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg.”
Hamlet.
Ageing starts from the day one is made in the mother’s womb, soon after the father’s spermatozoon enters the mother’s ovum. The resultant zygote is only a small speck of protein weighing just 0.0000000000001 gm. This little speck of protein is the beginning of man. The zygote starts life at that very second with a consciousness, which gets to know all about all other living things on this planet postori and priori. The consciousness runs the person from that time till he eventually dies. The difference between life and death could only be made out by observation by others. This is the Schrodinger’s cat hypothesis. All zygotes thus formed have one certainty in this world, which is death. All other aspects of life are uncertain.
Thus defined, ageing starts from the day you are made, and goes on ceaselessly until death. In other words, ageing is a constant change from conception to death. The most important stimulus for ageing is the human consciousness; which, in simple terms, boils down to the vagaries of the human mind. Where, then, is the human mind? Never mind! The mind certainly is not in the brain or the heart or any other anatomic structure at the cellular level. Mind is a sub-cellular, sub-atomic quantum concept. It transcends all the physical laws of deterministic predictability. Even the Einstein’s theory of motion that states that “nothing could move faster than light” does not apply to the human mind. Mind could travel faster than light and could even communicate unconventionally by teleportation.
What pleases the human consciousness is the Universal consciousness of Universal Love. What hurts it is anything against this dictum. Ageing that happens from day one of our existence would, per force, depend on this principle. Love and compassion slows the ageing process while hatred and anger along with ego, pride, jealousy, and fear would enhance the ageing process. The secret of keeping your cells healthy and young (as much as possible), is Universal love. This message has to go down to the next generation before they get converted like us to hate one another. Universal compassion slows ageing.
Mankind must learn to follow nature and learn the secrets of nature. Science is to understand the working of nature. When hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was first introduced after menopause to make women look and feel young and sexy, I was the first to write that the effort is dangerous. No one listened to me. History has now shown how right I was. I was following nature. If nature wanted the woman to be eternally young it would never have introduced menopause in the first place. HRT was also sold as a panacea for all future complications like cancer and vascular diseases. History has proved me right unfortunately after thousands of women met their maker prematurely, thanks to long term HRT!
The commercial medical world is now out with many methods to keep women looking young. Wrinkles repair and many other shaping practices using even Botox injections are a fashion these days. My considered opinion is that all these look good and the clap trap is really amazing but any one who wants to be away from any medical problems would do well to avoid all those practices. Crash diets to quickly lose weight and look young, special exercise to shape up, hormones to keep oneself eternally young like DHEA are all there to fool the gullible and make money. All those efforts are definitely anti-nature and shall, per force, fail in their long term claims.
“Anti-aging creams may have the unintended effect of transforming young women’s fresh faces from plums into prunes. The Hollywood culture of youth drives the use of these creams. Movie star Scarlett Johannson, for instance, is quoted at the age of 20 as saying, “I already use anti-aging products. It’s hard not to feel under pressure everybody in Hollywood is just so damn beautiful.”
The result of such pressure trickling down to the girl next door is natural. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Dr. Susan Mayou, a consulting dermatologist at London’s Cadogan Clinic, said, “Eczema patients who use products that are too greasy often suffer from a condition called occlusive folliculitis. Sweat cannot escape from behind clogged pores, causing itchy red bumps. Teenagers using a heavy product could suffer from the same thing.” Dr. Nick (“Dr. Botox”) Lowe, who maintains a practice in both London and Los Angeles, told the Daily Mail, “These compounds are included in anti-aging products because they basically break down the top layer of your skin, increasing the rate at which skin renews itself.” Young skin, he said, is more “prone to react badly to these active ingredients.” The result can be itching, flaking, and redness. They probably need to spend more money on creams to try and get their skin back to normal.”
Dr. Lowe agrees. “Because these compounds damage the outer layer of the skin, they increase skin photosensitivity, leaving skin far more susceptible to sun damage,” he said. “Eighty percent of wrinkles result from the effect of ultraviolet light on the skin. When we’re outside in daylight, even when not in strong summer sunlight, we are sustaining damage that we’re not aware of and which won’t show up for another 15 or 20 years.”
To keep the skin healthy one must avoid sunbathing, not smoke and not use an SPF15 sunscreen. That is infinitely more effective than using artificial products. According to market research firm Mintel, sales of anti-aging skin products exceeded $1.6 billion in the United States in 2008. Anti-aging sales took a quantum leap over facial cleansers, surpassing them for the first time and leaving them a distant second with total sales of $570 million.
Simple methods to keep one fit and healthy with enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate are the following. Regular moderate physical exercise like walking and/or swimming, a balanced diet with variety, preferably vegetarian, avoiding junk preserved food, plenty of water intake, and keeping oneself busy with some enjoyable work is the secret of good health and longevity. Keeping the brain alert is another significant factor. Irrespective of the age one must have some new creative work schedule as for example learning a new language. These will keep one’s memory at its best as also the brain health. If you do not use your brain you gradually lose it. All artificial methods to look young like colouring one’s hair etc look so ugly and not graceful in the elderly. One should learn to age gracefully for one’s inner happiness. Cheating the world can fool a few people some times but not please one’s own consciousness.
Morphological ageing has very little to do with cellular ageing. One could still see many white haired elderly looking people still happy and healthy while the young looking people could have the most devastating illnesses. Cellular ageing depends on the mind to a great extent and the mind is not a cellular concept but a sub-cellular-sub-atomic concept. Happy mind resides in a healthy body and vice versa. The modern epidemics of the West, divorce and suicide, both originate in the mind. Wars are born in the minds of men and not in the battlefields.
The solution to all the ills of the world is to ensure a healthy mind in our next generation by the methods advocated above. It may not be very appealing to most of the readers, as this concept has not reached medical textbooks yet. “Truth”, said Aristotle, “could influence only half a score of men in a given century or time, while falsehood and mystery would drag millions by the nose. Love everyone to live happily till you die. Death can never be postponed, nor avoided; as it is against the Laws of Nature. The only thing that we could try to do is to live well till death. Modern medicine and all the scientific knowledge, put together, could just about do that; if only we could change our attitude to life as enunciated above. True positive definition of health is “enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate.” With this definition minor aches and pains become a part of ageing and also the sign to show that one is still alive.
The following Ameri-Indian song tells it all.
“I eat when I am hungry,
I drink when I am thirsty,
If heavens don’t fall down,
I shall certainly live till I die.”
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