Please, have a seat.
I am about to reveal what’s going on in your life – not just around you, but to you and within you. Many things will fall into place and the path ahead will be made clear. When I’m finished and you realize that my reading was on the money, you can send me what you owe. Otherwise, on the chance that I had it completely wrong, just keep your money and don’t bother coming back.
Let’s begin with your age. How old are you? In my “magic window” (see diagram) you will find three numbers comprising four age ranges: birth to age 10, 11 to 25 years old, 26 to 60 years, and any age 61 and above. Don’t get confused over how things are displayed in the window. For now, simply identify yourself as a Child, Youth, Adult, or Elder using the age ranges just provided.
Now I will start my reading, beginning with the earliest and moving through all four life frames in turn. As you might guess, each life frame offers a distinct lens on reality, on the world in which you live, the concerns that focus your experience, and on your unique sense of self.
If you are already some distance into your life story, feel free to compare my descriptions of earlier frames with what you remember, just as you might use later frames to anticipate what is still to come.
CHILD (birth to 10 years old)
This life frame corresponds to the Age of Faith, when basic trust in the provident support of reality is your primary concern. When this support is present, your experience is one of security – that what you need to feel safe and loved is provided to you by taller powers who care for you.
A sense of existential security will underlie – or undermine, if not sufficiently established – every challenge and opportunity of your journey ahead.
Upon this foundational impression of reality in your nervous system, your taller powers have also been busy at work shaping the attitudes, beliefs, roles and behaviors that together carry your identity in the family system. If your early years were characterized by warm regard and positive support, that foundation of security is allowing for healthy flexibility in the formation of your identity.
As a result, you are generally secure in who you are and don’t stress out when the situation needs you to adapt. Another benefit is that, as situations and relationships change, that same security in who you are enables you to hold your integrity – or as we say, to remain true to yourself.
If, on the other hand, your early reality wasn’t so provident, existential insecurity predisposed you to be less confident in who you are. In your effort to please, placate, flatter, or impress your taller powers for the love and support you still need, you have learned how to “alter your ego” to match their attitudes and expectations. Today you continue to struggle for integrity in your relationships, all too ready to surrender who you are to what others want and expect from you.
YOUTH (11 to 25 years old)
If this is your present phase of life, then you are in the Age of Passion. You have strong feelings about things that matter to you. In this life frame, working out your identity as it connects you to peer groups, vocational preparation, and romantic partners is foremost on your mind.
You share this concern over identity with your younger self (Child), but now it’s more about agency and influence than safety and belonging.
Added to this question of identity is thus one of purpose: What’s expected of you? What is required for you to pass through the various qualifying rounds on your way to securing a position (status, title, occupation) in the world? In other words, purpose is mostly about external objectives: things to accomplish, goals to achieve, social expectations to satisfy, benchmarks of success to reach.
If you carry some insecurity in your nervous system from early on, you probably try especially hard to live up to the expectations of others, or at least not to disappoint them. And because the adult world you’re moving into is one built around stereotyped roles, perfectionism may be your preferred strategy for winning the recognition you feel you deserve – or is it a craving?
If this is true of you, then there is also something in you that avoids too much spotlight and even pulls back on your own success, since the risk of being exposed as you really are is unbearable. Youth is a time of heightened self-consciousness, which doesn’t necessarily mean a healthy self-awareness but can frequently spiral into varying degrees of self-obsession. Whether you are seeking attention or trying to evade scrutiny, you may be stuck in this spiral – but there is a way out!
ADULT (26 to 60 years old)
Adulthood is the Age of Reason, and if this is your current life frame, it’s important to you that things make logical sense and fit together in a rational worldview. You have enjoyed some success in your pursuits of life partners, a career path, and social prestige. You are learning how much of adult life is really a ‘daily grind’, and have even wondered at times whether it ultimately matters.
If you are somewhere around 40 years old, this question of relevance has become especially haunting. Just fitting into the schemes of others isn’t as exciting as it once was, and you’re even starting to feel yourself disengage in parts of your life where you have less freedom. The external objectives that had gotten you up early and kept you up late now can barely hold your interest.
The so-called midlife transition (or “crisis”) marks this psychological shift where purpose becomes less about duties, assignments, and shared missions than about personal intention – not living for a purpose but rather living “on purpose” or “with purpose.” You have also started to realize that perhaps your most important intention is to create a life of meaning.
If you deny this realization and simply redouble your efforts at conforming to the world around you, you are at risk of losing your soul – so be careful!
Whether it comes early or later in the Age of Reason, you will also be confronted with the fact of mortality, as the funerals of close friends, parents, and other family members remind you. And once again, if you are carrying some insecurity inside yourself, this will be a time of significant temptations, where it’s easier to throw yourself into a job, bounce across relationships, get lost in distractions, or fall into addictions of one kind or another.
ELDER (61 years old and older)
Having lived this long means that you have a lot of experience behind you, regardless of how much time may remain. The Age of Wisdom is your opportunity to integrate that vast library of personal experiences and lessons learned along the way into a more grounded way of life. Despite the losses, disappointments, and numerous failures, and however short of the youthful ideal your actual life has turned out to be, you are beginning to understand that it really is about the journey and not the destination.
Picking up those lessons and incorporating them into the running script of your life story is what wisdom is all about.
The “meaning of life,” which you had come to appreciate in your adult years as your creative purpose and responsibility, is now opening out to include not just your individual life but all of life, not just your existence but being itself. You are coming to know “All is One” as an experiential reality and not only a conceptual idea.
Even though from a societal perspective the later years of many are characterized by retirement, withdrawal, and increasing isolation, the deep discovery of this age is that nothing stands utterly alone. The universe is one vast network of coexistence, cooperation, and communion – and you belong to it. Not only that, but each individual is a manifestation of the whole. In this moment, the universe is self-conscious and contemplating this very truth – in you!
Perhaps the most precious realization the Age of Wisdom has to offer is that your own self-actualization as a human being and unique person is what the universal process is intending. With roots anchored in the grounding mystery and branches reaching out to everything else, your individual life is – just now! – pressing outward in the full blossom of your true nature. This is what is meant by fulfillment.
A word of caution from someone who can see into your life: Don’t make the mistake of sacrificing fulfillment on the altar of security. This is not the time to fall asleep inside your daily routine!
There you have my reading of your life so far, and of what’s still to come. Please gather your things and see your way out.
I’ll be looking for your check in the mail.
Tracts of Revolution 