There is a place where no one lives much past the age of twelve.

It is a playground kind of world. Populated by children. Run by children for children.

Every morning, the children leave their houses and go out to play. They play with trucks and erector sets and small machines and balls and electronic games and guns and shovels and doctor kits and marbles. Some of them play house.

Snacks and meals are provided automatically. So are clothes, sneakers and other necessities of life. No one goes without. No one lacks.

It is a well run economy with centuries of stability behind it, although no one seems to know how or why it works. In many ways, it is better than yours and mine. In many ways, it is somewhat the same.

The most important difference is that no one lives much past the age of twelve.

You know what happens when you turn twelve, don't you?

Your glands pulse with strange new secretions. Your biological clocks shift to a different rate of ticking and propel you down new developmental paths. Your body begins to lengthen out. Your proportions change. You grow hair on places that are not your head. Physically, you no longer appear childlike. Your emotional needs rise to unaccustomed levels of wanting and longing. And you are led in new directions by new dreams and new ideals.

Your mental perspective expands along with your metamorphosing body and emotions. So you see things in ways you never saw them before. And your intellect processes material differently than it did one or two or five years before.

Even time flows at an altered rate of speed than it did when each day stretched out like an eternity and each night became an endless struggle with shadows and terrifying hidden forces of adversity.

You know what happens when you turn twelve.

You change.

And when you change, the other children do not like it one bit.

They don't like it when you begin to think differently and look differently and act differently than you used to think, act and look. There is some scary substance that sticks to the notion of change.

At first, they good-naturedly make fun of you. They kid around about how your child-styled playclothes don't fit you so well. And how your hands are too big to manipulate the child-sized controls on the games. And how your mind no longer tracks clearly on childish chatter.

At first, it is so good natured that you even join in and make fun of yourself. But that stage passes quickly. Soon it is no longer funny at all.

The closer you get to the other side of twelve, the more serious a problem it becomes in the playground world.

The children will not allow anyone in the play areas past the age of thirteen. There is a special isolated section of benches where thirteen and fourteen-year-old people have to sit, if they live that long. All they can do is watch and wither away.

Those who live to the ripe old age of fifteen look and act so grotesque that they cannot come out in public at all where the children can see them. They are shut away in dark rooms because they are so close to death.

Naturally, they die there. Where the children don't have to be around them or deal with them. Naturally, it is better that way.

And in that merry little place of eternal spring and summer, sheltered and securely set in their youthful patterns, the peachfaced cherubic children play on and on and on.

The day that sperm met ovum and you were conceived, an interesting process began. You started to age. It's true. Before you were even born, your process of aging replicated in microcosm the entire history of life on the planet Earth.

Each human organism does it. So you were not alone as you passed through all the ages and stages of evolution as we know it. Ages and stages, after all, are simply periods of time in which aging occurs.

You experienced all of it, personally and profoundly:

The Age Of Single-Celled Protozoas, in which you engaged in life at its simplest level.

The Age Of Multicelled Creatures, in which you began to differentiate into cooperative families of cells, all working together in harmony.

The Age Of Fish, in which you actually possessed rudimentary gills and flipper-fins.

The Age Of Amphibians, in which your lungs and limbs emerged and you changed as tadpoles do each spring.

The Age Of Reptiles, in which your heart and internal organs developed into more efficacious instruments and your skin thickened into a protective coating.

The Age Of Mammals, in which you stabilized as a warm-blooded life-sustaining being.

By the time you were born, you had crossed over into the Age Of Man. You had already acquired billions of years of aging experience. In just nine months. Most people will never age that much or that dramatically ever again. Not in this life anyway.

But by then, another equally profound period of aging had begun. In the first five years of your life, you grew from a tiny baby who needed assistance to lift its own head to a small but perfectly scaled model of an adult human being.

Once again, a staggering amount of growth, development, aging and expansion had occurred. You may not remember any of it but there are reminders all around you. Just keep your eye on any baby. And watch what happens.

Puberty and adolescence marked the next most profound cycle of aging in your life. Chances are, you remember a lot of it. Even more than the significant physical changes involved in becoming a mature sexual being, you may recall the emotional activity: All the loneliness, the alienation, the suppression of feelings and of personal identity. The struggle to become the next step in your life. And all of the differences associated with that step that seemed so awkward and strange to you.

Wherever you are right now in the chronology of your years, those three major cycles of aging are probably behind you. Each of those three huge waves of metamorphosis has smoothed out. Even the ripples are still. The fascinating thing is, you survived. In fact, you grew.

So you probably think all that upheaval is finally all over.

Not quite.

If you are anywhere between the ages of 16 and 60, a fourth wave is on its way. It is a cycle of aging that is just as massive and just as transformational as your prebirth, babyhood, and adolescence.

The problem is, unlike each of those previous cycles, this one is loaded down with consciously and unconsciously accepted belief systems, attitudes and evaluations that clog the gears of workable change. The coming of aging, for example, is almost universally considered to be a period of major slowdown and shutoff. A problem. Instead of what it actually is: just another phase in the process of life.

In other words, the problem is not aging itself. Aging is no problem at all. Aging is nothing more than another period of growth and development and change. Birds do it, bees do it; even uneducated trees do it.

The problem occurs when you begin to define aging as a problem. By doing that, you begin to create more than enough internal stress and trouble to cause the kind of disturbances that justify your definition. As you will soon see.

Take the next few moments to find out exactly where you stand regarding aging. Most of us are sandwiched somewhere between being somewhat fearful of it and being completely unconscious about it. Some of us watch furtively for each new sign of decrepitude. Others pay severe penalties for pretending that nothing is going on, nothing at all.

The following short exercise will begin to put everything more in perspective for you. With how many of the following statements do you agree or disagree?

1. Most older people are not able to take care of themselves.

2. Old people are more susceptible to colds and disease.

3. Old people are more fragile than young people.

4. As you get older, you lose your eyesight.

5. As you get older, you lose your hearing.

6. As you get older, you lose your desire for sex.

7. As you get older, you lose your ability to perform sexually.

8. Old people shrink and shrivel up in size.

9. Old people smell funny.

10. Old people cannot think clearly and lose their memories.

11. Old people cannot concentrate very well.

12. Old people need lots of medical care and drugs.

13. Old people should take more vitamins.

l4. Old people tend to be emotionally unstable.

If you believe that at least four of these statements are true or more true than false, take another moment and do this exercise. Say the following sentence beginning to yourself over and over about 20 times. Fill in a different ending to it each time.

The older you get… (You finish the statement in your own words. Any words will do. They don't even have to make any sense.) By now, you may be beginning to see what you are up against when it comes to aging. You are pressing your nose against a tightly woven blanket of negative beliefs and attitudes. And it is literally smothering you and your ability to age freely, spontaneously and joyfully. It is also making it difficult for you to discover expansion and satisfaction. Instead, at every turn, you immerse yourself in depression and loss.

You will have an extended opportunity to examine and reconstruct your beliefs, attitudes, positions, evaluations and judgments about aging in Chapter 6. For now, just begin to notice the extent to which you have them. Also begin to become aware of the way they act like fences and boundaries that limit, suppress and contain your experience. Notice also exactly whose beliefs, attitudes, positions, evaluations, and judgments they are, who put them there, and who holds them tightly in place.

None of the twelve statements you read, by the way, is necessarily true or false. In terms of your own life, you will soon see that you get to choose which of them will become true or false for you.

And that, more than anything else, is what this book is all about. It will return to you a power that you have always had but may have failed to use. The power to choose how your life will be.

You will see that you have always had alternatives, whether you actually used them or not. And you will realize that you are the one who gets to cast the decisive vote about whether you will have:

• A face that is liver spotted and distorted or a face that is calm, clear, strong and attractive.

• A body that aches, weakens and dies a little more each day or a body that is strong, vibrant, usable,and able to support you completely.

• Emotional upsets and strain or a balanced ebb and flow of feelings coming from an overall sense of your own magnificence.

• Mental degeneration or expanding clarity and heightened perceptiveness.

• Failing health and persistent physical problems or remarkable wellbeing and vitality.

• Disappearing sexual desires and capabilities or a constantly regenerating sex drive that leads you to new levels of satisfaction and a renewed cycle of potency and responsiveness.

• Alienation, shutdown and despair or powerful new abilities, evolving personal characteristics and expansive growth.

All the alternatives in each area of your life will open up for you in this book. You will then be empowered to take it from there. As a result, you will find yourself choosing responsibly to have what you want with each passing day and each advancing year.

A large variety of life-extending techniques will be revealed, some for the first time, about exercise, diet, vitamins, goal direction, and other physical, emotional and mental mechanisms for maintaining vigor and health at youth-like levels and for restoring capacities and appetites that you may have unknowingly let slip away. I have personally used, tested and proved each technique you will read about. I have also instructed many many others in their use over the last twelve years with consistent success. The techniques work. Absolutely. They provide dramatic and often instantaneously measurable results.

But more important than any techniques, tips or advice, my intention in this book is to provide you with an altogether new context in which to handle aging and to offer a powerful new way to align yourself with your experience of the passage of time. What this book is all about is how you can become older with style and dynamic growth; it is not about what to do to resist the processes of life.

Looking at it one way, there is no Alternative To Aging. You age from the moment you are conceived. You age from birth. You age until you die. And only then do you become ageless.

Looking at it another way, you can begin to get clear about how you perceive aging right now. Then you can open yourself up to a variety of alternatives to what you have always thought of as aging, to your pictures about aging, and to virtually all of the problems that you and most of contemporary Western civilization associate with aging.

Those alternatives are all here for you. And the principles behind each of them will hold true whether you are 14 or 140 or any age in between.

Much of the book's material will be especially relevant if you are on one side or the other of the decade of your 60s. Or if you are particularly concerned about that critical and perilous period and what comes after it.

What comes after it, if you catch the brass ring of the next cycle around the carousel of life, can be as many as 50 to 70 more years of vitality and adventure. All at new and more intense levels of mental and psychic expansion, power, control, and freedom.

That is the biggest and best alternative of all. For you, it begins to unfold right now.