Initiation and Old Age

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

Stillness by ROBERT GOSLIN

Tormented friend, why do you still enquire

And thirst to know the sum of things entire?

The more you strive, the less you will succeed;

The mind cannot fulfil the spirit's need.

Striving too hard begets a troubled mind

And those who strive will always stay confined.

For you are not the body, not the mind

But LIGHT IMMORTAL, mortally enshrined.

So live in bliss — enjoy the simple task;

Seek not to know, and do not dare to ask

Why you are here, or what your fate will be.

Be still and listen to the symphony

Which your surroundings play in unity.

The part cannot exist without the whole;

The whole cannot exist without the part;

And reason has no place in cosmic art.

When stillness reigns, you are the sum of things;

The Nothing and the All that Oneness brings.

When stillness reigns, you are Infinity

And sense the nearness of Divinity.

Just as the pigeon navigates in flight.

And homeward speeds before a hint of night;

So too, the soul, will homeward soar one day

Without a mind to guide it on its way.

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When most people hear about initiation, they think of the adolescent rites of passage: moving from childhood into adulthood. We have expanded the concept of initiation to include any life-transforming transition, occurring during a period of one-sidedness, experienced as a birth to an old identity and rebirth into a new identity. We have explored how the modern use of consciousness-altering drugs is initiatory, in many respects. This week, we will change gears a bit. We will discuss another form of initiation – initiation into late maturity, and preparation for physical death.

There are few written accounts of historical initiations into old age and death. In part, this is because of the role that initiations played in the structure of ancient societies. An uninitiated young person – particularly an uninitiated young man, full of power and destructive potential – was a potential detriment to society, unless his energy could be channeled into constructive channels. That was the main purpose for the rites of passage. What would be the equivalent social benefit for preparing an aging person for death? In most ancient cultures, living until old age was a rarity, leading to veneration of those who reached that stage. However, now we live in different times. The human age span continues to increase, and more and more of us will live long enough to have a long preparation for our deaths. Jung speculated that this was a positive sign – with more and more elders, there would be a greater chance for cross-generational learning and more widespread individuation. It may certainly be debated whether this has come to pass.

Nonetheless, initiation into late maturity and preparation for death is an increasingly important issue for modern societies, and such initiation will have a decidedly different character than adolescent rites of passage. For adolescents, the rebirth is into a life of increasingly complicated and varied choices, mostly involving the outer world. She or he will form long-lasting partnerships, have children, select a vocation, acquire skills, and prove and define himself or herself over and over again. With midlife, this begins to slow down. Choices have been made that are increasingly difficult to remake or unmake; this is a time to see how all those choice turn out. Then, in late maturity, one begins to integrate the meaning of a lifetime of choices and consequences, and the vision turns more inward rather than outward.

Often what heralds the transition into late maturity is a blunt reminder of mortality. It may be your own physical illness or accident, or it may be the death or declining health of someone close to you, such as a parent, a sibling, or a friend. It’s clear – life will not continue forever. What will you do with the remaining time?

In a youth-worshipping culture such as ours, the transition to late maturity is often delayed as long as possible. Those with the means to do so seek out plastic surgery, cosmetics, the health club, and the bright red sports car to continue an impression of continued youth. All this is doomed to fail. Old age will inevitably come. The only choice is the manner in which the ego handles it. If the ego has rigidly bound itself to persona – the mask shown to the world – transition from mid life to late maturity is often very painful. Appearances aside, there is the inevitable decline of energy and a loss of a competitive edge in the world’s games. Retirement from worldly duties approaches, and the accomplishments of others get more and more notice. Room must be made for the next brash young hero, intent on correcting all the errors of the old-timers. The old timer faces harsh realities. Who am I, if not a brash young hero? What is my worth, if it is not a paycheck from an appreciative world? If late maturity is nothing but a series of losses to be mourned – loss of status, loss of income, loss of those I love – how can I face going on? Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens summarizes the dangers and potentials of late maturity as follows:

Retirement, bereavement, and physical infirmity can turn this period into a martyrdom of sickness, hopelessness, and despair – unless the truth of one’s situation is faced up to and dealt with honestly, creatively, and above all, psychologically. Jung found that the inner figures now become more important than ever: as one loses people in the outer world, increasingly one needs the Self. In late life isolation is something that many people suffer, at the very time they are least able to adapt to it. Then a good relationship with the Self becomes invaluable. Moreover, the inner resourcefulness that this relationship brings can inhibit social withdrawal and enable one to increase one’s cultural contribution. Creatively lived, retirement can be richly productive: so many things can now be done that could not be done in the past due to lack of opportunity. As a result, late life can be the period when individuation proceeds apace. The fact that there are few outer goals left means that life is now essentially a process to be experienced: for many people, for the first, time, esse in anima now becomes a practical possibility.

At this time of life, therefore, three strategies become apparent: first, people may feel so defeated by the implications of old age that they become depressed and helpless; second, they may retreat from the implications of age, deny mortality, lose touch with meaning and take refuge in day-to-clay routines; or, third, they may manage to remain conscious of their situation, grow through the late-life transition and reach a point where they are ready, as Jung put it, 'to die with life'. To choose the latter strategy is to embrace life and death as a pair of' profoundly related opposites and to declare one's participation in a process that transcends them both. Then one develops an awareness of `ultimate concerns' and comes to an acknowledgement of 'the rhizome that exists beyond the blooming and dying of' the tangible world.

As a stage in personal evolution from egohood to Selfhood, therefore, the late-life transition is both a preparation for the ultimate transition of death and the opportunity to accept one's personal existence as part of the immutable will of' the cosmos. (Stevens, On Jung, pages 221-222)

Jung’s own life certainly exemplified this transition. In 1944, at age 68, Jung suffered a broken leg that progressed into emboli in his heart and lungs, which nearly killed him. He had what we now call a near-death experience, seeing the earth from thousands of miles out in space, and was most distressed when his physician brought him back to life. From this date forward, Jung entered the most productive period of his work. He wrote extensively, and it was a different type of writing, as he explained in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “I no longer attempted to put across my own opinion, but surrendered myself to the current of my thoughts. Thus, one problem after another revealed itself to me and took shape.” (MDR, page 276)

Analyst Garith Hill sheds additional light on the transition from mid-life to late maturity and ultimately to death. In his book Masculine and Feminine: The Natural Flow of Opposites in the Psyche, Hill argues that all of us – both male and female – face a reemergence of feminine energies during these last stages of life. As we leave mid-life, we experience energies that Hill calls “dynamic feminine,” characterized by undirected movement toward the new, the nonrational, and the playful – a flow of experience that is vital, spontaneous, open to the unexpected, yielding, and responsive. It is the energy of great insight about oneself, and can therefore be uplifting and transformative. However, if the ego is not ready for and is resistant to such energy, it can also be experienced as moodiness, depression and even psychosis and a tendency toward drug addiction.

According to Hill, as we move through late maturity and its dynamic feminine energy, we face a period of initiation. Unlike the initiation of adolescence and young adulthood – which he call a fiery initiation – this initiation is more integrative, a dark night of the soul, and a watery initiation. Speaking about the male experience, Hill puts it this way:

In the Jungian ideal, the ego follows the pattern of the dynamic feminine into a watery initiation in the depths of the unconscious, letting the anima be its guide in an exploration of the world of inner experience, toward a conscious apprehension of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. In ordinary experience, the watery initiation often takes the form of depression as a man faces his mortality, his limitations in fulfilling the ideals of his young adulthood. He begins to relavitize his ideals, to face his ordinary humanity in the service of seeing possibilities of an experience of meaning in dimensions of human experience that he had hitherto eschewed or neglected. (page 29)

Hill does not describe how the female experience might differ from this, but one might speculate that, for men, this might feel like venturing into a new, and somewhat frightening, new territory. For women, this will feel more like a homecoming after a long journey.

If this watery initiation goes well, the next phase of the initiation involves what Hill terms “the static feminine.” The paradigm shifts to “being” rather than “doing.” The detail of life, the expectations of oneself and others – these fade into the background. Life is seen in terms of large sweeps of meaning. The underlying themes, neglected in the earlier phases of life, come more clearly in focus. How better to face the end of bodily life? I would like to end with a poem by Arthur Osborne that reflects such an attitude:

‘He hath revenge on death, for he died well,'

A poet wrote in life's far distant spring,

Stumbling on truth. Death's fabled heaven and hell

And drearier prospect yet the new times brings

Of a blank nothingness hedge like a ring

The seeming self whose lifelong passing bell

Tolls in his ears, although the mind may cling

To fragile hopes the gathering years dispel.

But 'Die before you die^' the Prophet said:

Give up the seeming self that from the world

Falls into death; remains that Self instead

Wherein earth, heaven and hell like dreams are furled.

The world in you, not you in it, has died,

For That you are and nothing else beside.