Ideally most people hopefully recall a childhood of pleasant memories and increasing awareness of the magical world around them. Moving through childhood into adolescence should encompass increasing awareness of our “self” and our relationship to other humans, the planet, and even the cosmos.
Adolescence is the transition time of progressing from childhood to beginning adulthood. For most of us, adolescence contained stages of extreme physical, emotional, and mental turmoil, fluctuating between highs and lows, with little in-betweens. If we are honest with ourselves, we will recall much of our adolescence as being self-serving, demanding constant stimulation and satisfaction (often to the detriment of ourselves and others).
For centuries different cultures have had rites of passage to help transition from adolescence into adulthood. In earlier eras—when people were expected to become adults around the age of 13 or 14—the rites of passage happened then. For example, the Jewish bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, the Indigenous Apache girls and boys having coming-of-age ceremonies, other Indigenous tribes having some version of a vision quest, the Mexican tradition of Quinceañeras at the age of around 15 for a girl, and so on.
In today’s modern societies, the rites of passage are often more superficial and may include graduation ceremonies from high school (or college) and the legal identification of automatic adulthood at the age of 18 or 21—as if a person somehow instantly becomes a mature and responsible adult on their birthday. Unlike the earlier religious and spiritual rites of passage, which went into more depth and meaning, these contemporary ones are based more on materialism and the ability to suddenly earn money (income) to provide for your material needs and wants on your own, eventually being able to take on more responsibilities and support a family of spouse and children, and, for the more civic-minded, contributing to the larger society, either financially or through service.
What I have just described is more from a third-dimensional perspective, which is the worldview of today’s dominant culture that unfortunately has increasingly become based more on materialism without a spiritualized perspective. We all are aware that the world is a mess, because the primary institutions—economic, political, social, and religious—are still in the adolescent stage of development.
In the third-dimensional culture, a large percentage of individual people, though growing biologically older, are remaining psychologically adolescent, constantly trying to find “self” and meaning in life, clamoring for more and more to fill up the empty spaces felt within. Usually this quest for meaning is to obtain more social status through having an overabundance of possessions and “cheap thrills”, as well as economic and political power. For an individual, or a group, or a culture, remaining in the state of adolescence will result in the eventual fall or collapse of those individuals and cultures.
F. Gard Jameson, a theologian and Urantia Book reader, explains it this way:
When self-awareness morphs into excessive self-reference [me, me, me], existence becomes a selfish house of mirrors. When self-awareness morphs into excessive self-reference [I, I, I], the result is a shift from the self-in-cosmos to self-as-cosmos, freezing the soul’s animation, which can lead to psychological stagnation and emotional instability. Put these together with today’s technological power and human inequalities, it is a formula for mass dystopia.
We do not realize the potential of who we are as beloved children of a Creator God. As progressive scientists and truly spiritual persons realize, innate within the evolutionary process of life is a progression towards betterment, towards perfection—from plants to animals, and within humans to soul growth and personality integration, resulting in a level or degree of perfection. In other words, as ascending sons and daughters of God, the Universal Father, we strive to become more godlike, which (on our human level) would include the manifestation of the Fruits of the Spirit and ascending the psychic circles of thinking, feeling, and doing.
If we remain adolescents in our consciousness, our soul is not activated and growing and we do not unfold into our personality integration, thus remaining clamoring, selfish adolescents with little depth of meaning in our lives. Dr. Jameson expresses it this way: “Like a great dam holding back life-giving water,” perpetual adolescents stop “the flow of the inexhaustible spiritual energies of the cosmos by wrapping their lives in a narcissistic myopia that fuels prejudice, bigotry, and bias. Today, these conditions engender anger, greed, and fear, and they are providing the foundation for aggression, addiction, and depression.” . . . . Definitely sounds like the present state of many individuals who are trapped in the dominant-culture mindset.
In becoming spiritized, an individual is empowered to move out of the adolescence stage into adulthood with the worldview of life being a journey that involves transformation as our soul evolves and ascends. (Another way to put it is that life is an adventure of growing up.) Enobling the soul in this way brings meaning and significance to life and enhances our continued personality integration, thus becoming more unified in our personhood.
One traditional way of seeing aging in a woman is moving from being a maiden to being a mother to becoming a crone. From an even more spiritized perspective, I would see it as moving from childhood through adolescence into becoming more integrated with the Universe Mother Spirit circuitry and then into becoming a sage. (I don’t like the word “crone” because it has negative connotations, whereas “sage” indicates a unified and wise person.)
Recently I came up with a saying that “We should be aging into saging, rather than aging into raging.” In other words, aging with grace and dignity. Of course, being a sage includes both men and women. And as the sage Gard Jameson realizes, “Life is neither a tragedy nor pointless, but in fact an adventure that is continually unfolding, in which even the most tragic events can be transformed.” . . . . I would add transformed with the assistance of the Threefold Spirit of: the Fragment of the Father (Thought Adjuster), the Spirit of Truth, and the Holy Spirit of the Universe Mother Spirit.