It’s become a common observation that contemporary societies have very few real elders — plenty of “olders” but not many people of wisdom capable of effectively caring for the greater Earth community. However, a much more devastating and incisive cultural critique is to observe that the modern world has very few true adults — and that this is precisely the root cause of all our current global crises.
I’ve come to understand a true adult as someone who knows why they were born, who knows who they are as a unique individual participant in the greater web of life, and who creatively occupies their distinctive ecological niche as a gift to their people and to the greater Earth community. This definition has virtually no relationship to contemporary understandings of adulthood but it resonates with those of healthier, nature-based cultures. The superficiality of our conventional Western ideas of adulthood suggests a root cause of our cultural immaturity: a lack of depth.
The scarcity of true adults is, naturally, the explanation for why there are so few real elders. It is the passage from psychological adolescence to true adulthood that has become so challenging and so rarely traversed — not the passage from adult to elder.
How does one become a true adult? Not by way of a rite of passage, but through the journey of soul initiation, an odyssey of many years. I’ll introduce the five phases of the journey and we’ll consider whether Jung traversed each of them, as revealed in his Red Book experiences and elsewhere.