Carl Jung said “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” There is nothing healthy about the ego – it simply carries us through the first half of life, as our conditioned selves struggling through a dysfunctional, Dystopian, conflict-ridden world, until we hopefully ‘wake up’ before we reach our death-bed. Do you want to wake up before yours? We are meant to thrive and not just survive. Then you will need to fall upward: It is no less than a Hero's Journey...
Falling upward
Falling upward
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and spiritual Master, wrote in 'The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche' “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie."
We need to learn to ‘Fall Upward’, as Father Richard Rohr states in his book of the same name. In the first half of life, governed by our ego (our petrified seven-year-old selves), we are naturally preoccupied with establishing our selves; climbing, achieving, performing, and gaining accolades.
Rohr wrote “When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us... There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone... It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences - all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey... The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey... If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.”
Rohr continues “The genius of the Gospel was that it included the problem inside the solution. The falling became the standing. The stumbling became the finding. The dying became the rising. The raft became the shore. The small self cannot see this very easily, because it doubts itself too much, is still too fragile, and is caught up in the tragedy of it all. It has not lived long enough to see the big patterns. No wonder so many of our young commit suicide. This is exactly why we need elders and those who can mirror life truthfully and foundationally for the young. Intimate I-Thou relationships are the greatest mirrors of all, so we dare not avoid them, but for the young they have perhaps not yet taken place at any depth, so young people are always very fragile.”
Mistakes are our building blocks
Love your mistakes. How many times do we fall off bicycles before mastering the skill of cycling?! Life is the same, and as we keep trying we grow, spiritually and emotionally. Rohr wrote “You learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realising it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.”
As we grow older and encounter challenges and make mistakes, we need to see our Selves (note the capitalisation to denote our Higher Selves) in a more life-giving and forgiving way. This message of falling down - that it is in fact moving upward - is the most resisted and counterintuitive of messages in leadership coaching, psychology, spirituality, and religion.
Falling upward offers a new paradigm for understanding one of the profound of life's mysteries: How those who have fallen down are the only ones who understand 'up'. We grow spiritually more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, and the disappointments of life are actually stepping stones to the spiritual joys in the second half of life. We need to keep the soul open for something more, much more, than our ego.
The great remembering
We all seem to suffer from a major case of mistaken identity. Carl Jung wrote “In each of us is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” We need a healing of our amnesia. We have simply forgotten who we are.
Rohr wrote “The English poet Wordsworth put it so beautifully: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our Life's Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness. And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy.”
The ego
The ego is who you think you are, but are not. Rohr wrote “Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real... The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “The pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.”
Rohr continued “The ego hates losing – even to God... The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.”
Rohr said “If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God.”
As Rohr wrote “It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.”
We need to create space inside us to allow our 'cup' to be filled. Rohr wrote that “All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.”
As Paulo Coelho wrote "Myabe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place."
Rohr wrote “Your true Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God.”
We are shedding our fake selves. There is no going back to the childish side of the rainbow. Dorothy says to her dog in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.”
When we awaken, we are coming home to our true Selves. This is the pool of swimming in infinity. Rohr wrote “Home is another word for the Spirit that we are, our true Self in God. The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find our Selves inside God, and this is the full homecoming, according to Teresa of Avila.”
Rohr continued “The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking... Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them.”
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The great Greek philosopher Aristotle once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” This is the child and the man before personal transformation. They are one and the same and behave in the same way.
The spirit is like a homing pigeon.
As you do the inner work you will realise that your self-image is not something to have to hold on to.
Rohr wrote “Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, "The face you had before you were born," as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial Self, your absolute identity, which can never be gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "The pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.”
He continued “In this second half of life, one has less and less need or interest in eliminating the negative or fearful, making again those old rash judgements, holding on to old hurts, or feeling any need to punish other people. Your superiority complexes have gradually departed in all directions. You do not fight these things anymore; they have just shown themselves too many times to be useless, ego-based, counterproductive, and often entirely wrong. You learn to positively ignore and withdraw your energy from evil or stupid things rather than fight them directly.”
Great people come to serve and not be served. They radiate light. They are effulgent. As Jesus described such people (John 7:38) “From their breasts flow fountains of living water.”
Rohr wrote “We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-sized hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.”
Learn to hear the still quiet voice
Rohr wrote “There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life."
Meaning
The soul cannot live without meaning. We have to create meaning in this empty world. When we return to our sense of meaning we will feel like a return to simplicity, light, love, peace, joy, and bliss.
Pain and darkness
Rohr wrote “St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/ transformation/ God/ grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.”
Rohr wrote “Before the Truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.” You will have to face your pain, emotions, and darkness, but have no fear: All is well. He continued “The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.” It's no co-incidence that it appears as many days as there are in the year.
There is no such thing as ‘evil’
‘Evil’ is merely sleepiness, superficiality, shallowness, projection, and digital, and social toxicity. Don’t follow these passé judgemental zealots. They are elderly without being elders. There is no real evil. You become a mirror image of what you fight. Therefore give up the fighting. Frontal attacks on evil just produce more evil.
Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing. There is no such thing as sin, apart from deciding to live in a contracted, fearful state. Rohr said “It has been acceptable for some time to remain "wound identified" (that is, using one's victimhood as one's identity, one's ticket to sympathy, and one's excuse for not serving), instead of using the wound to "redeem the world," as we see in Jesus and many people who turn their wounds into sacred wounds that liberate both themselves and others.” He continued “Ken Keyes so wisely said, “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offence than by people intending to give offence.”
As a society we are in love with elitism (the ego trying to be the best, because it feels unworthy and full of shame) rather than egalitarianism. Rohr wrote “Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you... The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime... Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.”
Rohr continued “This is surely what Jesus meant when he said that you could only tell a good tree from a bad one “by its fruits” (Matthew 7:20). Inside of life energy, a group or family will be productive and energetic; inside of death energy there will be gossip, cynicism, and mistrust hiding behind every interaction. Yet you usually cannot precisely put your finger on what is happening. That is second-half-of-life wisdom, or what Paul calls “the discerning of spirits” (1 Corinthians 12:10)."
We are all in this together: If you so wish. Look for the things that you share in common. Creating dramas has become very boring. Rohr wrote “Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will... In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.” Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
Your greatest gift to the world is your inner light. If you meet a person who is filled with light, or become such a person, you will never be the same again. Rohr warns us not to get attached to 'spiritual heroism' “If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self-improvement on our own terms... I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it is true.” Rohr continued “As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!.. A person must pass the lessons learned on to others - or there has been no real gift at all.”
Heaven is right now. The only mistake religion has made is to push off Nirvana and Enlightenment into the next world or next life. Heaven and Hell are effectively states of consciousness in this life, not physical places.
The divine union with our Higher Power has been called Heaven. It’s loss has been called Hell.
You are a human BEing
Rohr wrote “When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves.”
You have to take the Hero's Journey
Rohr wrote “We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?”
Rohr continued “No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do your journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations; you will never know why this first container must fail you, the wonderful fullness of the second half of the journey, and the relationship between the two. Such is the unreality of many people who “never grow up” or who remain Narcissistic into their old age. I am afraid this is not a small number of people in our world today.”
Science
Science is increasingly confirming Nature’s secrets that have been held in spiritual terms for thousands of years. There is even a ‘God particle’! Rohr wrote “The gift of living in our time, however, is that we are more and more discovering that the sciences, particularly physics, astrophysics, anthropology, and biology, are confirming many of the deep intuitions of religion, and at a rather quick pace in recent years.”
Rohr wrote that “Wisdom was distinguished from mere knowledge by Isaiah (11:2), by Paul (1 Corinthians 12:8–9), and by Scholastic philosophy, which spoke of analytic intelligence (knowledge) and intuitive or “co-Natural” intelligence (wisdom; “like knows like”) as two very different levels of consciousness.”
Conclusion
Most of us live our lives asleep. Rohr wrote “It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.” We need not be afraid of falling upward and waking up. Rohr wrote “We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right... Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.” These examples of external validation allow us to remain asleep and anaesthetised. We need to awaken to our wholeness and follow our intuitive inner voice. Rohr wrote “The ancients rightly called this internal longing for wholeness “fate” or “destiny,” the “inner voice” or the “call of the gods.” It has an inevitability, authority, and finality to it, and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it - wherever!”
Falling upwards is no less than a move from an egocentric world view to a soul-centric world view. Everything in your life until now has been mere preparation for the second half of your life.
No-one can keep you from the second half of your own life except your Self. Nothing can inhibit your second journey except you. You will need creativity, patience, and courage. Your second journey is all yours to walk or to avoid. Rohr wrote "If you don't walk into the second half of your own life, it is you who do not want it. God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. So make sure you desire, desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true, and beautiful. All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring... The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and “secretly,” at “the deepest levels of our desiring,” as so many of the mystics have said... More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an already existing flow, if we but allow it. We never “create” or earn the Spirit; we discover this inner abiding as we learn to draw upon our deepest inner life.”
Rohr wrote “Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have - right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all...In the second half of the spiritual life, you are not making choices as much as you are being guided, taught, and led, which leads to choice-less choices. These are the things you cannot not do, because of what you have become. Things that you do not need to do because they are just not yours to do. And things that you absolutely must do because they are your destiny and your deepest desire. Your driving motives are no longer money, success, or the approval of others. You have found your sacred dance. Now your only special-ness is in being absolutely ordinary, and even choice-less, beyond the strong opinions, needs, preferences, and demands of the first half of life. You do not need your visions anymore. You are happily participating in God’s vision for you.”
Rohr wrote “As Mary Oliver puts it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Your spiritual awakening is an unfolding of rememberance. Effort isn't part of the equation. The best thing you can do is be in the present moment, listen to your heart, and live in a state of flow. The knowledge you are seeking will find you, the people you are seeking will find you. Trust the Universe. True spirituality does not require a life-long dependency on an external middleman or mediator (priest, rabbi, guru, shaman, book, technique, object, religion, etc.) that stands in between you and the Universe. An authentic teacher’s role is to move out of the way and hold up a sacred mirror and remind you that… “You are already that which you seek.”
Rohr continued “We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.”
Are you ready for your very own Hero's Journey? Rohr wrote “So get ready for a great adventure, the one you were really born for. If we never get to our little bit of Heaven, our life does not make much sense, and we have created our own “Hell.” So get ready for some new freedom, some dangerous permission, some hope from nowhere, some unexpected happiness, some stumbling stones, some radical grace, and some new and pressing responsibility for your Self and for our suffering world.” No falling down is final: It contributes to the bounce. The stumbling is the finding...
Namaste.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.