Summary: In this dialogue, the Storyteller reveals that while the body can spark a regenerative “forever hormone,” emotional attachment and fear inevitably restart aging. True vitality, they suggest, comes not from escaping life but embracing it—living from joy rather than survival. By choosing action over reaction, cherishing oneself, and allowing discovery instead of control, one slows time itself, learning that immortality lies in how fully one lives, not how long.
Small thing I will give you. You can spark within the brain a regenerative, forever hormone which will effectively make you not age. Unfortunately, your emotions will take your aging and make it happen again. To stay with that hormone being produced in the quantity that is necessary for you to live forever, you leave behind feelings of closeness with other persons. You leave behind interrelationships that require you and another to reach agreement and fulfillment of those agreements by self-action. You reach a place that says the rest of the world became invisible, I am a forever being. That means you can’t even play in the rest of the world and still produce the chemical. You can produce it, play a little bit, age a little bit, and produce it again. You can slow your aging, but you can’t live within this world in a physical sense and live forever unless you give up living in this world.
Audience question: What is the best way to at least retard the aging process?
Live in the world because it is a pleasant place to be, not because you are running from bears. Know that you don’t have to run from bears and that you don’t have to fear everything as a tiger. Taking the steps of action rather than reaction. That is not easy, nor is it simple, because you are human beings and you have a lifetime of something teaching you that you have to do this, and you better do that, and you will be in trouble if you don’t do this, and you will be eaten by the world if you don’t do this. You live in a world that teaches you all of the things that can go wrong, and not very many have taught you all of the things that can go right. No one taught you how to cherish yourself. The examples you have had have taught you how to abuse yourself. No one taught you to embrace yourself in the greatest pleasure and the greatest joy, even when what you are looking at appears to be your greatest failure. No one taught you how to recover. No one taught you how to uncover and discover. And no one taught you that you aren’t supposed to know — you are supposed to find out. So.