The Three Essential Life Stages: Why You Need Each, and How They Empower You

Don’t we all harbor some secret longing to be a Master of the Universe?

Our ongoing fascination with (and often immersion in) the heroic actions of super-heroes tells us what is important to us: we desire to live a heroic life, to be much, much larger than the events and circumstances of our daily lives.

The way that we do this, in real life, is not to become a fantasy action-figure, but to go through each step of our adult life journey. This is actually a huge challenge, and one that taxes and challenges us as much as any story in myth or legend.

Low-resolution Masters of the Universe poster, from Wikipedia, under Fair Use Act, for educational and illustrative use.

Often, we have to wait until our children are grown and are careers are more-or-less stable. Then, we can begin devoting more attention to our “voyage of self-discovery.”

This is not something recent in human history. Rather, our most ancient stories and legends tell us about a Tree of Life that held the secrets of human experience.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life Holds Guidance for Our Personal Growth

From the very earliest of human stories, we have held this “inner seeking” as finding the Tree of Life. Those of us who have done a little esoteric study know that this Tree of Life is a fundamental aspect of the Judaic Kabbalah. It represents the different “realms of existence,” through which our consciousness travels as we seek to know God.

Kabbalistic Tree of Life includes twenty-two pathways connecting the various “centers” (Sephiroth). These pathways are numbered 0 through 21. (The “zeroth” pathway gives it a total of 22 instead of 21 paths.)

There is a reason why, in some esoteric Judaic traditions, men were not allowed to study the Kabbalah until they were at least forty years old. It was not until then that they were potentially in a more balanced frame of mind.

Now, of course, Kabbalah studies are available to women as well as men, and to young as well as more mature adults.

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Knowing “Who We Are” Becomes More Possible As We Mature

Sometimes, we begin learning about “who we truly are” when we are young. More often, this is something that we start later in life. This is true for both women and men.

For women, the shift to asking more about ourselves ties into changes in our hormonal balance. As we go through peri-menopause and menopause, we are less driven by hormones that cause us to seek soul-satisfaction through nurturing and caring for others. And as our monthly cycles diminish, we have a calmer baseline for self-observation. Also, we begin to gain more testosterone, especially relative to our other hormonal levels. This often gives us renewed vigor for pursuing a new career, running for public office, or taking on a new area of interest.

On a similar note, as a man’s testosterone levels diminish, his hormonal balance shifts. He is now able to find greater satisfaction in bonding with others. This allows him to access the more humanly-connected aspects of his psyche, which previously were not as available to him, when he was driven by testosterone-fueled competition.

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Three Major Stages in Our Adult Life Journey

Throughout millenia, scholars and sages have used the Kabbalah to guide their inner journey. One derivative of the Kabbalah has been the Major Arcana, commonly associated with the Tarot. These Major Arcana comprise twenty-two cards, and each is associated with a significant human archetype: an aspect of who we are, an important step in personal growth, or a key event.

These twenty-two Major Arcana cards correspond to the twenty-two pathways connecting the Sephiroth in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and to the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet). However, without going deeply into Kabbalistic studies, we can see how some scholars have organized the Major Arcana to describe our “adult life journey.”

The first Major Arcana (Card 0) is called the Fool. This does not mean a “foolish person.” Nor is it like the “Fool” in medieval courts. Rather, it suggests that when we start our adult life-journey in some depth, we are open-ended, optimistic, and a little bit naive. We are willing to go wherever our journey takes us, and are light-hearted and carefree.

Once we set apart the Fool as our starting point, we are left with twenty-one Major Arcana. We can group these naturally and straightforwardly into three sets of seven cards each, as shown in the layout above.

We can see that each set of seven deals with a different kind of “life theme.” In this discussion, I use the names given by Rachel Pollack, in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom.

• The Worldly Sequence: We are still very involved in the world, and in our roles in the world. This is our opportunity to cultivate aspects of “who we are” that have not received much attention up until now.
• Turning Inwards: We begin to realize that our various “roles” in the world are still not completely satisfying, and go much deeper into ourselves.
• The Great Journey: This is a time of great discovery and transformation. If successfully concluded, we begin to create the greatest work of our lives, fully realizing our purpose for being.

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Our Experience of Our “Adult Life Stages” May Not Always Be in Linear Order

Just because our “adult life stages” have a logical order does not mean that we always have that simple, straightforward progression in our lives. This is because our lives are now very complex.

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Now, more than ever, the various aspects of our “life-journey” are brought together in a kaleidoscope-like manner; we are often experiencing aspects or fragments of each of our major life-journey aspects in new and unsettling ways.

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Our Experience of Our “Adult Life Stages” May Not Always Be in Linear Order

Just because we often seem to be having lots of different “life stage experiences” all at once, doesn’t mean that we’ve lost all sense of order and balance. There is often a sort of “local order.” This means, some of these major steps or experiences do connect with each other.

The challenge for us in these times is that just as in a hologram, there is a lot of information – many patterns – contained within each small aspect of our lives.

In a previous blog, I called this a “holographic” experience of our archetypes.

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Autostereograph – the 2D image on the bottom is recreated as a 3D representation. Work done by Fred Hsu. Used with permission.

There are still aspects of our life-journey stages that stay connected, even when the overall picture seems fractured and disordered. This is because in many cases, one life-journey aspect leads naturally to another, and then perhaps to a third. There are natural connections that make some aspects of our personal growth at least a little – if not predictable, then – meaningful.

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Resources for Understanding in Unveiling: The Inner Journey

In Unveiling: The Inner Journey, I address each of these three different life-stages.

The Worldly Sequence: Archetypes and Integration

• The Core Power Archetypes: Chapter 7, “A Real Woman’s Path (Really Does Exist!)”
• Shifting Between Archetypes and Integration: Chapter 11, “Shifting State”

Turning Inwards

• Discovering Inner Strength in Quietness: Chapter 9, “The Essence of Stillness”
• Becoming Aware of Inner Processes: Chapter 10, “In Our Bodies”
• Becoming Aware of How Our Bodies Have Held Emotional Pain, Starting the Release Work: Part IV, Chapters 14 – 16, “Locking Our Minds,” “Softening,” and “Unsticking”
• Reframing How We Live Our Lives: Part V, “The Ritual,” Chapters 17 – 21
• Creating and Using Intrinsic Vital Energy, or Ch’i: Part VI, especially Chapter 26, “Unveiling: Selective Revelation,” and Chapter 29, “Pragmatic Esoterics.”

The Great Journey: Everything “Comes Apart” and Comes Back Together

• Our “Dark Journey”: Chapters 27 & 28, “Letting Go: The Inanna Story” and “Going Deeper,” respectively.
• Victory at Last: Chapters 30 & 31, “Releasing Passion” and “For All of Us (Spiral Pathworking),” respectively.

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You can read the Table of Contents, along with the Introduction and first chapter of Unveiling using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. You can obtain either a trade paper or Kindle version of Unveiling through Amazon.

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Subsequent blogposts will organize the blog material written thus far according to the “three life stages” identified here. The majority of the posts written over the past year concentrate on one or another of the six Core Power Archetypes identified in the first adult life journey, called the Worldly Sequence.

The next blogpost will overview the Worldly Sequence, identify each of the six Core Power Archetypes (along with the two “reserve” or “battery-power” archetypes), and discuss integration – the final step in this sequence.

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