Is conscious self-dissolution the evolutionary potential of ageing?

Bettina Wichers

This article was submitted to the Journal Action Research on 27th Aug 2024, following this call for papers: Call-for-papers-Inner-journey-and-mindset-shifts-of-transformation.pdf

The publication was rejected on 17th Sept 2024. Even though it does not meet the journal's requirements, I still see it as a relevant contribution to a transformation of the mindsets of ageing in the context of the development of the collective consciousness and the evolutionary challenges of the present, so that I would like to make it available to interested people here and in other places, even in its incompleteness.

If you have found this article inspiring and it has enriched you with new and inspiring perspectives on aging, I would be very grateful if you could support my research, which has been fully self-funded to date, the development of this website and the writing and provision of the information with a financial contribution. After six years of a very intensive research process, including several years without income because I wanted to understand the process before I started teaching and writing again, my financial resources are largely exhausted, so I am asking for support to be able to continue my research and writing with a clear mind and a healthy standard of living. Thank you!  paypalme/bettinawichers

"In the context of polycrisis and systemic collapse, the primary challenge we face is a widely shared sense of collective depression—a lack of agency in regard to the bigger picture. What does it take to serve evolutionary transformation in the face of this collapse?" (Scharmer & Pomeroy, 2024, 19)

When we talk about poly- and meta-crises, when we name the upheavals and collapses of our old systems, indeed of the old world, when we strive for, call for and urge transformation processes, when we speak of a future that will somehow be different, better, more human and with more planetary awareness: one group is largely left out of the considerations, the discussions and the initiatives about evolutionary transformation, and that are the old and very old right up to the centenarians and older.

Of course, older people are involved in the discussion circles and individual, especially indigenous elders are heard and often quoted, but overall, it is a rather small number of old people who (can) join in the public chorus of crisis actors with a perspective of evolutionary transformation. Especially the voice of the of old age, and an awareness of the responsibility of the entire group of the elderly for individual and collective transformation of consciousness, nourished and informed by the specific phase of life itself, is relatively rarely heard in public discourse. Rather, in the multiple manifestations of (social) media and also in semi-public and private discourses, an equation of (advanced) ageing with increasing physical decline, frailty, loneliness and increasing forgetfulness often seems to dominate the discourse, with increasing withdrawal in general, indicating that the disengagement theory (Cumming & Henry, 1961) as one of the theories of ageing still seems to have a high normative significance, at least for the external perception of (advanced) ageing. The described conditions associated with ageing, but also the perception of widespread poverty in old age and reduced resources of various kinds, make it seem inappropriate to appeal to the responsibility of these people for collective and planetary crises. If dementia is then added to old age as an additional factor, it seems not only ethically inappropriate, but also intellectually ignorant at best and downright stupid to call on old and very old people to take responsibility for the polycrisis of humanity.

And yet I do, as a gerontologist, a consciousness researcher, a dementia specialist and an ageing woman: According to the World Health Organization [WHO] (2023), 55 million people were living with a diagnosis of dementia in 2023[1], and at the same time, the number of older people worldwide also continues to grow; a global population of people aged 65 years and older was estimated at 761 million in 2021 (United Nations, 2023). As a result, of the total population of older people, around 7% are living with symptoms of dementia, and just under one percent of humanity is living with a dementia diagnosis. And according to the WHO (2023), an additional 10 million people worldwide are newly diagnosed with the syndrome every year.

As a result, every year humanity loses another 10 million contributions of factual and experiential knowledge acquired over a long life. With this we lose access to traditional methods and rituals of everyday living, of potential wisdom, of mediation skills, guidance, support and, not least, spiritual strength, which can be of great importance to local communities, especially in times of crisis, while at the same time these 10 million people draw on a high level of resources from their fellow human beings, which does not seem to contribute to further strengthening communities in times of crisis.[2]

This is an uncomfortable perspective, because it seems to attribute responsibility for the world situation also to people with dementia, to whom the current narrative ascribes an increasing inability to look after themselves, sees them per se as in need of protection and considers them to be subject to the increasing care and decision-making responsibility of others, by stating that they are no longer able to decide properly and responsible for themselves. But a holistic view of the global polycrisis is not complete if we do not consider that people with dementia are progressively abdicating their responsibility for humanity and the planetary fabric and thus increasingly becoming part of the burden of others who must try to navigate family, community, humanity and the planet through these crises.

This and everything that follows is expressly not victim blaming, it is about description and not condemnation; in the spirit of action research, I also appeal to the reader's willingness to self-explore, to perceive and accept any pluralistic implications of their own consciousness at this point: They are important and helpful to accompany people with far advanced dementia, but here at this point I must call for transcendence of this level of consciousness - we need the consciousness of at least the autonomous, ideally construct-aware or later (Cook-Greuter, 2013) to be able to take up and examine these theses because only then can we see how we partake in the autopoiesis of systems and how systems can change through our personal perspectival choices.

From my own research history with dementia, the realization emerged in me that from a deeper sense of what dementia actually means at the level of consciousness - or at a spiritual level - we can not only gain a whole new understanding of dementia, but (re)discover exactly that, or rather strengthen the already existing realization of what, as the evolutionary potential of ageing, can make a completely independent contribution of ageing to transformation through the polycrisis: 

(a)     the willingness to transcend the self, to increasingly let go of personal identity and its desire for one's own significance,

(b)    which can be achieved through increasing anticipation and acceptance of one's own physical mortality and a growing openness and connection with the cosmic dimension of this existence.

The latter, which Tornstam (2005) also describes in his Gerotranscendence, can lead to a complete dissolution of personal identity and a full embodiment of a transpersonal or even unitary identity (Cook-Greuter, 2013) that places itself entirely at the service of the whole - or the field, as Scharmer and Pomeroy (2024) call it - its knowledge, its abilities, but above all its earthly and cosmic being and, in the end, itself entirely; identities whose nature we will probably still have to discover in the breadth of humanity, and which at the same time are already present, folded into every human being as potential.

It seems to be a daring arc that I am walking, from dementia to the transpersonal to unitary dimensions of human existence in ageing, but to name this, what I call the transcendence of dementia, is part of my responsibility for the whole, for the field. And so I first trace my path with dementia and third person knowledge of this phenomenon, to continue to keep the reference to Scharmer and Pomeroy (2024)[3], but also my experience or first person and second person knowledge, which finally culminated one day in a knowledge that I would like to call a knowledge out of nothingness, non-conceptual, a tiny moment only, and yet all-changing through an experience that may be intended for old age as both a “natural” and “cosmic” experience. From there, I can then further unfold my hypothesis that conscious self-dissolution is the evolutionary potential of ageing.

Let us first turn to the old narrative of dementia and not only question it, but also open ourselves to a new way of listening to and perceiving this phenomenon - as described in Scharmer's (2009) U-process on the left, descending side: What lies behind the phenomenon of dementia on both the individual and collective level?

Is dementia really an inevitable, physically determined fate of ageing for many, as the biomedical narrative has woven it into the collective consciousness? We have become so accustomed to this narrative and have quietly given it the power of interpretation over this particular state of consciousness of ageing, while other interpretative approaches, e.g. from the social sciences (Wetzstein, 2006; Wißmann & Gronemeyer, 2008), seem to be drowned out in the chorus of technicized medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. But from the perspective of consciousness research the question is: can at least one further hypothesis be put forward about the connections between dementia, ageing and consciousness? A hypothesis that enables the elderly person at risk of experiencing a dementia-related change to become a witness and controller of their own events, an action researcher of their own consciousness?

As a gerontologist and clinical case supervisor in geropsychiatric care, I spent many years torn between classic geropsychiatric diagnostics, the person-centered approach to care that I taught, and the long dormant but mostly suppressed hunches I had about the “other nature” of dementia, while developing an “integral dementia concept” (Wichers, 2011), and my research describing the regression due to dementia using developmental models (Wichers, 2021a, 2021b), which I observed in my clinical work in a geropsychiatric care facility. I became aware that the old perspectives were no longer sufficient to explain dementia, and yet it had not yet led me to fully transform this narrative in my work and thinking.

Although I saw early on that the underlying structures and methods of treatment and care and the narratives about the nature of dementia were already becoming increasingly thin, and less and less sustainable I myself did not know how to break out of this maelstrom. Worsening this the people within the system - carers and cared for - were in a frenzy of helplessly managing the lack of resources, materials and staff, the excessive demands and often also the ignorance of the complexity of dementia, and not least the daily balancing of staff shortages from shift to shift, which made it hard for them to adopt or experiment with new perspectives.

The systemic collapse in healthcare had already been underway for a long time, and when finally the Covid-19 situation emerged, it revealed the polycrisis of this system once and for all - though it still needs a willingness and ability

(a)     to look into the collective shadow world of dementia, and

(b)    to look behind the mechanisms that, under the guise of humanitarian action, coupled with collective ignorance about the reality of the lives of people with advanced dementia in nursing homes, but also in private households, forced inhumane behavior from everyone involved (Schulz-Nieswandt, 2021).

In the pre-Covid years, the depicted conditions made me increasingly fall into “collective depression”, as Scharmer and Pomeroy (2024) call it in the quote at the beginning of this article. I felt resignation in my work as a supervisor and teacher in geriatric care, and at the same time there was also a development that I could not yet classify at the time, a feeling of bumping into a glass ceiling above me, a ceiling that was not systemic, but in my consciousness.

I perceived something about dementia and about the people who lived with this diagnosis and the corresponding symptoms that I could not grasp with my previous knowledge of geropsychiatry, my previous models and also with my approach to Integral Theory (Wilber 2007) at the time, and therefore could not express. Something was in motion "in me", which brought with it a tremendous inner restlessness, triggered an increasingly intensive preoccupation with consciousness research, and at the same time brought me gradually into silence and a perception of something that seemed inexplicable to me. This  finally culminated in an experience of consciousness that I had previously considered unimaginable and now suddenly had to recognize as a normal human experience and - in a process that took years - learn to integrate: the experience of nothingness, the dissolution of all existence, ajata (Wolfe, n. d.) - a mere snap of the fingers and yet a change of everything, indeed a dissolution of all constants of my previous being. This resulted in a knowledge that can only be described as a-perspective, non-conceptual, non-linear, beyond all dimensions that define human existence.

“Now I have to completely rethink dementia,” was one of my first thoughts when I returned from this experience back to my previous reality, completely unaware of why this experience had occurred in me, and even less aware of the consequences it would have.

I had to “rethink” not only dementia, but everything; not only did my perspectives on dementia and on ageing itself change radically as a result of the transformation process it triggered, the old perspectives expanded and almost dissolved without me losing touch with them, but my former perspectives on this existence itself also dissolved in the months and years that followed, neither being prepared for it in any way nor having any guidance on how to deal with such an experience, what practice might be helpful and how to continue living with it. I was able to recognize and cognitively grasp this confusion, which helped a little in coping with the emotional, psychological and spiritual aftermath - a development that I verified not only through the documentation of my process and exchanges with a very few consciousness researchers and through transpersonal supervision, but also through assessments in two adult development models (Angerer, O'Fallon). The process itself took years, during which I no longer felt authorized to teach and supervise - until at some point a new clarity emerged that enabled me to share what I had experienced and my insights about dementia again.

Furthermore, I was able to recognize the parallel to my previous professional field, dementia, through the process that led me again and again into dementia-like state experiences, so that I could now suddenly taste dementia, which I had previously got to know very intimately from within in professional witnessing, but still distanced, now almost completely "from the inside". It was the deepest disorientation about my being and the world, which led me into a long phase of confusion and despair, and through which and out of which my mind, my cognition, the tool of the third person knowledge helped me.

I realized that this experience I had had could not only have happened to me, but the possibility emerged that this or similar experiences could also have happened to people who were later diagnosed with dementia, long before they showed the well-known symptoms, but - similar to me - were unable to express let alone understand what had happened (which was fortunately different in me due to my previous knowledge and experiences as a professional witness to the states of consciousness of people with dementia).

I have researched this process, phenomenologically, in spiritual sciences, and compared it with neuroscientific findings. It is the momentary culmination of a research process on ageing and dementia that has lasted for over 25 years, a research process that involved a radical personal transformation process that not only changed my perspective on the research subjects (people with dementia), but also made me no longer just a researcher, but a research subject myself. Ultimately the research process itself underwent a transformation from focusing on dementia towards focusing on the dissolution of the self (experienced internally and manifested physically in the brain), thus raising a new question that is genuinely gerontological:

Is the conscious self-dissolution (in opposition to the unconscious self-dissolution in dementia), the conscious dissolution of personal identity, as it has been actively practiced for centuries in the Far Eastern and in many other spiritual traditions as a desirable goal, the evolutionary potential and the evolutionary task of ageing?

This and also the original question of what it takes in the context of dementia to serve an evolutionary transformation appear paradoxical: dementia represents the embodiment of individual collapse, which seems to run counter to evolutionary development, so that both considerations (a) of a higher consciousness hidden behind it and (b) of ageing peoples’ contribution to prevent systemic collapse seem almost forbidden, or at least seem to lead way too far? This is the moment where what I call dementia transcendence can begin.

Not only as a dementia and consciousness researcher but also as a newly post-menopausal woman (which is not irrelevant in this context, given the recent research on gray matter change in the precuneus in women during perimenopause, see Mosconi et al., 2021) and thus as an ageing person, moreover as a scientist in a process of transformation outside the academic framework and, last but not least, also fundamentally as a person living in this time of massive collective transformations of consciousness, I see this question as more than justified, even necessary, and my attempt at a (first) answer to it, which is provocative and complex, can therefore only be incomplete and sketchy for the time being.

I reiterate the question I have already quoted and expand on it: “What does it take to serve evolutionary transformation in the field of elderhood and dementia in the face of this collapse?“ and give a supposedly simple first answer: In my opinion, what is needed is the full, mature, self-transcending consciousness of as many old people as possible as an existentially necessary influencing factor, as a source of knowledge and wisdom beyond egocentric-materialistically oriented life forms, aligned with the well-being of humanity, the entire biosphere and the planet, all the way to an opening of consciousness towards the noosphere. This means that humans mature to higher stages as described by Carl Rogers (1995) as the “fully functioning person”, in relation to spiritual development by James Fowler (1995) as the universal faith, or by Lawrence Kohlberg (1984) as transcendental principles, and in particular also described in the various approaches to ego development (e.g. Cook-Greuter, 2013). People who reach or have already realized these levels of consciousness have allowed the readiness to grow and mature within themselves that can serve the evolutionary transformation of humanity - they possess the capacity for gerotranscendence as described by Lars Tornstam (2005) and an increasing awareness of a cosmic dimension that far exceeds the conventional world view; perspectives that have already been addressed by various authors in the context of Transpersonal Gerontology (Sherman, 2011, Wacks, 2011).

As humanity, we are at a point in our collective, planetary and cosmic development where we can no longer afford - speaking on a very simple, manifest level (and I ask you to check any associations with conventional or post-conventional morality that may arise as you read this for your own projections, which I also do again and again in this context) - that many old people, instead of progressively transcending the personal being in favor of the collective, thus dissolving the I in favor of the WE, many old people remain on the level of material possessions and established roles and claims, often until the end of their lives, and evade the inner work for growing wisdom and increasing detachment from the personal identity - also in ignorance of the importance of such inner work or for lack of cognitive or psychospiritual capacities. Trends such as anti-ageing medicine ultimately only reflect this development, which (in abbreviated form) can be assigned to the ego development stage of the achiever (Cook-Greuter, 2013), where it is a matter of making maximum use of one's own lifetime, more or less regardless of the budget to be spent on it - an approach that, if pursued consistently, could lead to transhumanist trains of thought. Consciously maintaining a healthy body and mind is certainly an approach that is also in the interests of the collective (which I myself advocate in an approach that I call “integral life practice for conscious ageing”), but “anti-ageing” cannot be thought through to its logical conclusion without distinguishing between life that can continue to live “without ageing”, i.e. ultimately “eternally”, and life that can and must be dispensed with in the face of a world population of almost eight billion people. People who strive for an anti-ageing approach for their own life should be aware of this implication.

An ideal-typical scenario for a path of conscious ageing involves - from my perspective - the willingness of every ageing person to be present to the finiteness of their physical-mentally existence in every moment and to make decisions and carry out actions in such a way that they always anticipate and want to realize a "good life" for humanity and the entire planetary community of entities also on the day after their death.

As a consciousness and dementia researcher, I have long been faced with the dilemma of, on the one hand, researching the mature stages of consciousness and, on the other hand, automatically excluding people with dementia from considerations of mature development in old age. I not only accepted their passive attitude, indeed the perspective of them being a victim of the seemingly inexplicable disease of dementia as a given, as much as I looked at it as a seemingly inevitable reality. It was only through my own so-called extraordinary experiences of consciousness, which I experienced in the midst of my research endeavors, in the midst of deep scientific contemplation, through the experience of ajata and the long, very challenging integration process that followed, that perspectives emerged in me which emancipated me to radically question the medical narrative of dementia. In addition, I can now also present initial evidence that strengthens my current theses on dementia, and which I have begun to formulate and review as an expansion of perspectives on dementia.

According to my findings from years of transdisciplinary research, dementia can be described as a disappearance of personal identity, as an unconscious self-dissolution, as a falling into the void that allows the person concerned to escape the many unpleasant, frightening, shameful unresolved issues of life, but at some point, manifests itself as a void in the brain. It is epigenetics in its purest form - the self-induced, because uncontrolled self-dissolution, which finally materializes at the densest level of this manifestation, at the level of the body; references to telomerase (Razganova, 2020) are conceivable here as explanations on the rational level of knowledge.

Dementia is therefore a disease of consciousness - but what is this consciousness that seems to be undergoing pathological change? We, science as well as people themselves, are still looking for explanations at the biomedical level, in the synapses that dissolve, down to the smallest molecular level, ever deeper and ever finer - which is understandable because this is the common narrative of our world, that consciousness appears from or in matter. And yet there has been no explanation that seems helpful for decades.

All people who cultivate a spiritual, meditative, contemplative practice, all those who know or at least sense a witness consciousness, know that consciousness is about something else, something that is “outside”, beyond this body and therefore also – but not reducible to - the brain. Mostly it is just a hunch, and it is also not yet a topic that is really socially acceptable (except perhaps in integral, transpersonal or spiritual circles). But for me, what is increasingly needed at this point is “spiritual integrity”, an open acknowledgement that “I” am seriously pursuing a practice in my life that starts from dimensions of consciousness beyond the mind, that can sense and recognize the “spirit” beyond the “mind”.

If we succeed in taking this understanding, which results from witness consciousness, for example, into our considerations of dementia, then we can look at dementia differently, not in organic-psychological terms, but as a kind of “deficiency disease of higher consciousness”, and thus at least include the idea that dementia is a spiritual disease whose external expression we are currently trying to understand in medical-organic terms. I therefore invite those who feel stable and sufficiently sustained in life to explore the state of dementia in meditation or contemplation. What does it feel like when there is no longer an “I” in this state of contemplation? Permanently, when there is no longer an inner entity that can tell a coherent story of your (own) being and the world. And if there is no one around you who can explain these processes to you in understandable language?

Dementia can also be understood beyond the consideration of individual fate as the manifestation of a collective shadow, as a consequence of the cultural exaggeration of personal identity, of cognition, but also of the material itself, which is also expressed collectively in anti-ageing medicine and in transhumanist fantasies in an attempt to delay one's own finiteness, one's own mortality or, if so, then at least to transform it into a new, digital form, which the individual should somehow still be able to preserve. In this cultural context, the loss of one's own identity, the loss of cognition and, as a result, the loss of control over one's own life and any form of self-determination can only be understood as the complete failure of the ego, which, if it cannot be prevented with certainty, must at least be suppressed - at the price, that the dimension of a higher consciousness hidden behind the phenomenon of self-dissolution cannot be perceived, cannot be understood and therefore also cannot be consciously realized by many, at least so far, and thus increases the risk of going down the path of unconscious self-dissolution, of the increasing embodiment of (unconscious) emptiness or nothingness.

In my research, especially in the more explicit part of action research in my mixed methods approach, I turn to the phase of life where a person's unconscious self-dissolution begins and it is still unclear - and thus, from my point of view, influenceable - in which direction the consciousness of the self-dissolution will go: into the unconscious (what I call the pre-personal level of consciousness, following Ken Wilber) or into the self-transcendent (what I call the trans-personal level of consciousness). A dissolution of the self inevitably takes place in old age, at the last moment of our existence the self will (has to) dissolve, the personal identity will (has to) be ready to give up its own existence.

It is provocative, and at the same time it is a wake-up call for many people with whom I have shared these findings so far - and this is not without scientific evidence, even if the corresponding data situation is complex and certainly not yet available in quantitatively high numbers: On the one hand, research findings from meditation research are to a certain extent transferable to this research, if one follows the assumption that dementia could be a matter of an increasing being in emptiness and possibly also short-term experiences of “cessation of consciousness” (Laukkonen, 2023), but again uncontrolled and unconscious, could be hidden in the prehistory of a far advanced dementia manifestation. For this, it is necessary to include research such as that by Josipovic (2021), Laukkonen et al. (2023) or Sharp (2011). From my first interviews with relatives of people with dementia on the question of whether dementia could be the result of an unconscious self-dissolution, I have gained some initial indications that people who later went into dementia made statements in conversations with relatives many years earlier (15 - 40 years) that suggest extraordinary experiences of consciousness but were interpreted quite differently at the time.

These findings encourage me to continue on this path as a multidimensional, transdisciplinary, integral research process that will always include research on myself. I also see myself as a role-model for other people for the possibility to live through phases of strongest confusion and disorientation, even relatively alone, as in my case, if we change the narrative about the cause; namely, that confusion and disorientation do not have to mean the automatic path into a permanent manifestation of dementia, but can simply be an indication of an incipient process that is a natural part of ageing: the process of conscious self-dissolution and the dissolution of personal identity that can be consciously self-explored and guided into a transformation of consciousness that can reveal truly evolutionary perspectives on ageing.

With this, I focus my further approach on ageing people

a)        who do not perceive any cognitive changes in themselves and are interested in a transpersonal development, a path of conscious self-dissolution in ageing

b)        or who occasionally perceive cognitive changes in themselves (e.g. temporary disorientation, forgetfulness) or have already received diagnoses that correspond to the symptom descriptions of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or the early stages of dementia; according to the GDS-Reisberg-Scale (Reisberg et al., 2011) stages 2 and 3, which can be described as “minor perceptual disturbances that may be age-related” and “mild perceptual disturbances that may be externally perceived but are not yet necessarily diagnosable as a symptom of dementia”, and who are willing to do awareness work to steer their changes in a transpersonal direction.

People in more advanced stages, from GDS-Reisberg scale 4, or moderate dementia, are explicitly not addressed, at least at this stage of my research, and we may not be able to turn around the development of the elderly and very old who are on a more advanced path of dementia. Nevertheless, we as relatives and caregivers can look at this developmental path with different eyes.

Of course, my approach is also and especially aimed at anyone who is ageing - where I define 'ageing' in reference to menopause in women aged 50 and older, the phase when (peri-)menopause is complete and they enter the post-menopausal state, which actually embodies a completely different physical, mental, but presumably also spiritual identity to the one they embodied until peri-menopause; findings arising from new research on gray matter changes in the precuneus during peri-menopause, but whose further interpretation is still pending (Mosconi et al., 2021).

For the relevant awareness work, we need to consider that the states of consciousness as described in Buddhism and Hinduism for centuries as desirable, but described in our Western psychology, if not pathologized, yet as “extraordinary”, in Western spiritual contexts as “spiritual-transformative” and in consciousness sciences as “altered” states, could be a reality and a normal state of ageing, especially of advanced ageing. We must consider that spiritual awakening, as experiences of unity consciousness, emptiness, nothingness, ajata, nirodha are also called, could be a normal experience for old age, but that ignorance of these phenomena and especially ignorance of the possible consequences on psychological, physical and spiritual levels – i.e., that such experiences can lead to an increasing retreat into these consequences (fear, insecurity, confusion, shame in varying degrees of intensity) and into emptiness – pose a threat to physical, mental, psychological and spiritual health in old age.

We must also consider that the traditions that have so far had the authority to interpret these spiritual processes may have - unconsciously - themselves contributed to the pathologization of the consequences of unconscious extraordinary state experiences by not considering that such experiences could also happen without decades of practice, without guidance and outside of spiritual contexts. They have to consider that they have overlooked, or simply not imagined, what it means when spiritual state experiences and the dissolution of the self is truly the default mode of human existence. What happened to me was that I kept running into walls when I looked for help somewhere, because the help was usually only accessible to people who were socialized and initiated in certain traditions, had internalized certain rules and practices, understood certain languages and had access to certain teachers. The global collapse of systems may also be linked to a collapse of the old spiritual traditions, which followed a strict system of rules that excluded others who were seemingly ignorant (in the eyes of the traditions). It is time to develop a western, secular language and narratives for these state experiences that truly allow everyone knowledge and access to information – a fact that Suzanne Segal (1998) was also stating in the report about her awakening process.

Evidence of overlooking or ignoring spiritual developments in “ordinary”, worldly people can only be found at second glance when one takes a closer look at instructions for spiritual practitioners, as here, for example, with Daniel P. Brown, a well-known Western meditation teacher in the Buddhist Mahamudra tradition.

“A seed only ripens when conditions are appropriate. The seed must first be planted in a proper soil. Then it must slowly germinate. Finally, a sprout breaks through the ground. Then, if nutritional and climatic conditions are suitable, it will blossom. As far back at the preliminary practices the lama empowered the practitioner and established the propensities for awakened wisdom within the practitioner's mental continuum. It is as if a seed were planted then. The meditation experience at each of the many stages of the preliminary and essential practices are manifestations of the slow germination of this seed. The first glimpse of awakened wisdom becomes especially possible at the end of the one-taste meditation, like a seed-breaking soil. The yoga of nonmeditation establishes the appropriate nutritional and climatic conditions so that the sprout of awakened wisdom blossoms into perfect enlightenment.” (Brown, 2006, p. 402)

But what if the seed can ripen under completely different conditions, in soil that does not seem appropriate, where there is no lama, guru or teacher to guide it?

We can understand dementia as a form of advanced spiritual emergency, an embodied spiritual crisis, a spiritual crisis that becomes quieter and quieter over time until the person falls completely silent. The organic symptoms associated with dementia are, in my view, the consequence, not the cause of what we call dementia, it is the consequence of the experience of emptiness that is not only psychological, but at the level of consciousness - or spiritual; an emptiness that begins years, if not decades before. I see the physical symptoms as the manifestation of emptiness that began long before, as the involutionary consequence of an inner struggle that was lost, as a struggle with the dissolution of the self that, due to a lack of knowledge about such processes and the dominance of the medical narrative, resulted in despair, fear and shame, which then led to a breakdown of synapses without a new knowledge of the higher self being able to be anchored in the being.

So far, however, the events have been interpreted organically, from a third person knowledge, following the common narrative. To understand dementia, however, we need the fourth person knowledge, the larger field behind individual being that encourages people from an interpersonal, second person stance to explore their own process of dissolution of the self from a first person knowledge. They are thus empowered to become action researchers of their own consciousness. I assume that we will then recognize the increasing dissolution of the self as a default mode of ageing and learn that behind the dissolution of personal identity, other dimensions of human existence, a transpersonal identity, an embodied gerotranscendence can emerge that can serve the field, the greater whole from the very specific perspective of ageing in a very special way that may only be reserved for (old) age. And this is what spiritual traditions have been pointing to for centuries:

Die before you die. (Rumi)

We remain responsible for the development of our consciousness even in old age; no one can take this task away from us, and our immediate environment, like human consciousness itself, depends on us to fulfill this task until the last moment, that we are responsible citizens, elders, grandparents, role models, peacemakers - and at the same time we will see and co-create a world emerging in and for us, in which we are held, nurtured and cared for in the days, weeks and months in which our being prepares for the final dissolution, for the last evolutionary transformation that a human being undergoes - and - when our life, the creative impulse woven into us, has been fulfilled, make the final contribution to solving the crisis of our time: Letting go.

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