"An older man is walking down the street, and he hears a voice saying, 'Psst, could you help me out?'

"He looks around, but he doesn't see anybody.

"Again he hears, 'Psst, could you help me out?'

"He looks down, and there is a big frog. He's embarrassed — I mean, you don't talk to frogs. But he says, 'Did you speak to me?'

"And the frog says, 'Yeah, could you help me out?'

" 'Well, what's the problem?'

" 'I'm under a curse. If you pick me up and kiss me, I will turn back into a beautiful maiden, and I will serve you and cook for you and warm your bed, and I will be everything you ever wanted.'

"The man stood there for a little while. Then he picked up the frog, and he put it in his pocket and walked on.

"After a while the frog said, 'Hey, you forgot to kiss me.'

"The man said, 'You know, at my age I think it is more interesting to have a talking frog.'

"The nature of aging has to do with change. Old age trains you for change — change in your body, change in memory, change in your relationships, change in energy, change in your family and social role — all leading to death, which is the big change in our lives. You can see this last part of your life, the age stage, as a diminution. On the other hand, from a spiritual standpoint, many of these aspects are sensationally great. The clamor of the ego calms, your motivations become clear, and wisdom begins to come forth.

"Wisdom is one thing in life that does not diminish with age. Wisdom is learning how to live in harmony with the world as it is in any given moment. One aspect of that wisdom is the deep understanding that we are all in the same boat. Out of that comes compassion — compassion for yourself, compassion for others, compassion for the world. Can you allow the changes and delight in them and look for the wisdom inherent in each change rather than resisting them?

"Changing phenomena are endlessly wonderful and fascinating. But when who we think we are begins to change, the fascination turns into fear. Aging brings personal changes that are both physical and psychological. It's painful and confusing when the body doesn't do what it used to do, and starts to do a lot of things it didn't used to do.

"Physical changes are endless, and if you're identified with your body, they can completely grab your consciousness. Whole Sunbelt colonies in places like St. Petersburg, Florida, or Phoenix, Arizona, are full of people sitting on benches reciting these changes to each other. They call them 'organ recitals.' You don't ask, 'How are you?' unless you have the time to listen.

"While you can hear how real that is for some people, just imagine sitting on those same benches with people like Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Marc Chagall, Bob Hope, Grandma Moses, or Margaret Mead. Can you imagine them having the same responses?

"Part of how we deal with change depends on our perception. Perceptually, each of us is two beings, an ego and a soul, that function on different planes of consciousness. If we live predominantly in our soul, then the changes in the body are interesting, like changes in the weather.

"Here's a way to think of perception. Suppose you have a little television receiver next to your eyes. Let's pretend the various planes of consciousness are channels on this television set. Most of us, most of the time in this culture, act as if we have a one- or two-channel set. We don't have cable or satellite TV with hundreds of channels. But maybe we've heard about cable, and we can at least acknowledge the existence of these other channels floating around in the room, even though we're not picking them up. We can't receive them because we don't know how to tune our receiver. That's basically what perception is about.

"On channel one, when you look at another human being, you see the physical body: old, young, dark, light, fat, thin, and so on. Especially if you're obsessed with your own physical body, that's what you see when you look at the world: other people's physical bodies. That's the channel you're seeing. Youth, sex, fitness, fashion, beauty, sports — you know the programming.

"Flip to channel two, and you're in the psychosocial realm. You see power, and you see happiness and sadness and neurosis. This is the therapy channel and the social role channel. Here, we are mothers and truck drivers and lawyers — all the different roles and identities, intricacies of character and interaction, all the social stuff. It's As the World Turns, a fascinating, never-ending soap opera that just goes on and on, episode after episode. Most people are happy with channel two. Maybe 98 percent of the people you meet are busy with these two channels all the time.

"Now suppose you turn to yet another channel. This is the astral channel. Here you're seeing archetypes, the Jungian archetypes. You're dealing with what are called astral or mythic roles and mythic identities. It's the sort of place where you see people in their mythos rather than in their personality structures. You'd look at me, and you'd say, 'He's an Aries. I just knew it,' in the same way you'd know someone's a Sagittarius or a Leo. On this channel there are only twelve of us in various permutations.

"But if you flip to the next channel, you go behind all those individual differences, and all you see is another soul, just like you. All the packaging is different, but inside the wrapping each one is another being just like you. That's when you say, 'Are you in there? I'm in here. How'd you get in that one?' All of the personality stuff and the astral and mythic archetypes and the physical form — all of it is packaging. Inside, you see the individual spiritual entity.

"Now, just for fun turn the channel once more. Here, you're looking at yourself looking at yourself — pure awareness looking at itself. And there's only one of it.

"You try to live life in a way that is harmonious with what you know on these other planes of consciousness. That harmony is part of the wisdom that comes with age. Learning how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

"One of the subtle traps of the ego, of the mind getting caught on channel one or two, is your concept of time, because aging has to do with time. But there is a part of you that is not in time, and finding that place and resting in it is a key part of the mystical journey. What you begin to see is that the spiritual journey is one of going deeper and deeper into your being, going behind the part of you that changes, to seek the part that does not change."