LIFE COACHING NEWSLETTER
DECEMBER 2006
A SERIES ON THE GROWING EDGE OF SELF-DISCOVERY
PRACTICES AND PERSPECTIVES
HAUNTING REGRETS
TIME AND TRANSCENDENCE
SECOND CHANCES
Third Edition
"By Transcendence, I mean emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent to other people, to the future, to evolution, to the divine, or to the universe."
M.P. Seligman, Prof. of Psychology at University of Pennsylvania[1]
“Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?” When we discover that we have been living what constitutes a false self, that we have been enacting a provisional adulthood, driven by unrealistic expectations, then we open the possibility for the second adulthood, our true personhood.”
James Hollis, The Middle Passage
Carl Jung thought we had two adulthoods: a First Adulthood that ended at thirty-five, and more or less conceived of as an unconscious collective cultural construction designed to develop a separate ego identity for young adults, apart from their parents, through the acquisition of a career, spouse, home, and children (e.g. the American Dream). All in a timeframe that the Greeks refer to as Chronos time (sequential, linear and horizontal).
In the wake of those years, most of us can attest to the haunting regrets we collected during that unrelenting drumbeat of time that accompanies the First Adulthood.
On the other hand, the Second Adulthood or the Midlife Passage is usually associated with turning forty and turning inward within an entirely different timeframe -- one the Greeks called Kairos time because it has a vertical perspective that inevitably stuns one into consciousness and restores the “wonder” that was lost in the rush of our First Adulthood. Kairos is also called soul time and goes around and around in circles and asks existential questions like: Who am I? Why am I here? What does life mean? What is my destiny? Because those are questions only asked by fully self-conscious creatures who have awakened and put away culture’s agenda in order to keep appointments with themselves and all that was left undone during their own First Adulthood.
While preparing for this newsletter I discovered that the word Transcendence unfailingly brought a blank stare in response, so I decided to use Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, because it is not only the most effective story I know about how an individual is “stunned into consciousness,” but it is also the most wonderful story I know about Transcendence.
The transcending of ordinary time and space through the visitation of Three Spirits: Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Future, all of whom have come for the soulful purpose of offering Scrooge – a stingy, mean-spirited man – an opportunity to save his soul. And when he awakens the next morning, and is still alive, he knows that he has been given a second chance, a fresh start, a new life, and he unhesitatingly snatches it up, grateful beyond measure to have transcended his old life.
In Scrooge's case, his life then hence flowed out of Kairos time because his past was nullified forever.
Alan Watts described the complexity of time this way:
“When we speak about freedom from Karma, freedom from being the puppet of the past, that simply involves a change in our thinking. It involves, in other words, your getting rid of the habit of thought whereby you define yourself as the result of what has gone before and instead get into the more plausible and more reasonable habit of thought in terms of which you don’t define yourself in terms of what you’ve done before but in terms of what you’re doing now. And that is liberation from the ridiculous situation of being a dog wagged by its tail.”
A Course in Miracles describes the complexity of time this way:
“Miracles are both beginnings and endings,
And so they alter the temporal order.
They undo the past
In the Present
And thus release the Future.”
So if you are feeling at this moment as if you cannot alter the temporal order, think again! There may be a miracle in your future, just waiting to be released.
May this New Year bring peace in Iraq.
Angela Maffeo
©December 2006
The schedule for the Day of Self-Discovery Programs at Radcliffe for 2007 is:
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Sunday, April 1, 2007
Visit www.discoveryourpsychologicaltype.org
Email your comments and questions to:
amaffeo@post.harvard.edu
[1] Author of Authentic Happiness. Inspired the Positive Psychology Movement
