Age: An issue of mind over matter

Our generation is crazy about staying young forever. People are spending a fortune on anti-wrinkle creams even though many of them have no scientific backing for their claims and surgical face lifts along with them. They don’t know that they get a much better result from meditating. It is said that age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter, but the new generation definitely minds ageing and dread it more than death. However, treating the skin is a very superficial way of arresting ageing, what is useful is trying to understand why does the body age at all.

There is a protein called telomerase which repairs the caps at the ends of chromosomes. Telomerase was discovered by Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn in 1984 for which they received the Nobel Prize in medicine.

One class of theories of ageing is based on the concept that damage — either due to normal toxic byproducts of metabolism or inefficient repair/defensive systems — accumulates throughout the entire lifespan and hence leads to ageing.

A Vedic meditation instructor named Charles Knoles has experimented in Japan with meditation.

He measured levels of the enzyme telomerase in a group attending a meditation retreat for three months and has found that meditators showed a huge increase in reparative telomerase at the end of their retreat — a physical proof of reverse ageing. These studies have found that meditation actually causes your DNA to heal itself, repairing your cells from a genetic level, which is amazing.

If we make inner cleansing a part our daily life, the accumulation around cells will be dropped leading to rejuvenation.

Meditators and yogis are rumoured to be healthy and fit for a longer time than the non-meditators. Now we have found a scientific explanation for this phenomenon which was considered a miracle a while ago .

Osho was asked about the agelessness of people around him. He answered: “Here the old are just as innocent as the children, or even more so because your inner being is ageless. Once you come in touch with it, it is timeless, it never grows old or young or anything. It is just the same from eternity to eternity.”

“Once you start coming closer and closer to your eternity, a certain agelessness starts radiating from your eyes, from your faces. I can see it happening: you are becoming younger every day. As you go deeper a great silence descends. A little deeper, and fountains of peace start bringing your whole inner space to a coolness you have never known before.”

Amrit Sadhana is in the management team of Osho International Meditation Resort, Pune. She facilitates meditation workshops around the country and abroad.