Crucial unfoldment of being

By Homayun Taba

For many years a retiring person was usually sent off with a gift of a clock, with two implications not wholly unrelated: your time is up, or you now have all the time in the world. The deeper significance might be that one has not paid much attention to varied aspects of life other than earning and parenting, but from now on, you need to shift your focus to ‘issues of ultimate concern’. Getting a realistic hang on retirement takes much thinking and reflective processing of expectations.

Sensing this need at this stage of life, Indian sages came up with one of the most significant rites of passage, called Sashtiabdhapoorthi or Sashtiapthapoorthi – ‘sashti’, sixty; ‘abda’, year; ‘poorthi’ – together meaning ‘completion of age’.

Sage Markandeya is evoked due to penance, divinities granted him immortality. The individual expresses gratitude for reaching this far and offers invocations for longevity to fulfil the task of self-realisation.
Sashtiapthapoorthi has visible and invisible significance. The physical aspect takes cognisance of signs of ageing. To address this, the person focuses on various parts of the body by way of consecration while specific mantras are voiced for their healthy and proper functioning and vitality. The five vital forces, pranas, and five sense organs are also consecrated.

At the psychological level, a new identity is in the process of being forged, which is more in the nature of letting go of control, symbolically enacted by graciously handing over resources and possessions to the younger generation, requesting them to take care of the person’s survival needs. Role leaving is the reversal of socialisation and acculturation, freeing one from existing cultural expectations, duties and introjects. Unfettered by familial and professional preoccupations, one is free to work through new options, which will fortify one to counter disturbing yet natural onset of slowness, exhaustion and depression.

Unburdening helps to proceed with a relatively clean canvas where one seeks a deeper sense of enlivenment. It points to a reorientation of priorities from an external focus to a more inward one. There is a mellowing life waiting to be unfurled in years to come, which again emphasises a movement from becoming to being.

One’s sense of time undergoes a major shift, and realisation of the ephemerality of life sharpens. Though bodily transitions reveal certain unavoidable realities, the spirit is waiting to be met in a new way. Because of relinquishing roles, one feels lighter while moving towards a deeper ground of being. Sashtiapthapoorthi is a setting designed to facilitate the crucial unfoldment of ‘being’.

Some people declare that they will go ‘with their boots on’. Sashtiapthapoorthi is different. Yet it does not mean ending connections with the world and becoming a recluse, but a voluntary limiting of one’s exposure to social involvements to increase the time of relocating to internal anchors. Sashtiapthapoorthi is about the unfolding of the next twenty-year phase of processing experiences into wisdom.

This new involvement is less about managing systems and people and more about counselling, wisdom-sharing, and peace-anchoring.