ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the following set of existential issues related to growing older. They include the troubling changes in how one experiences time; self-alienation, especially from one's own body; the sense that one can no longer live according to one's potentialities or possibilities. The existential issues also include the loss of the will and ability to adequately comprehend new developments in the arts and the shifting values of society; and increased mortality awareness. For Chuang Tzu, as with other Axial thinkers like Ecclesiastes, by identifying with the vital, repetitive and eternal rhythms of Nature, the individual participates in the infinity of the universe. As all great Axial religiously inspired sages have affirmed the way down can be the way up, the experience of the suffering body can be the place of spiritual vision and psychological uplift. Psychoanalysts have weighed in on the issue of "living with dying," in terms of the inordinate "fear of death" that some patients manifest.
