The Two Halves of Life
Two years ago, about a week or two after my naked surrendering moment, I got fired from a job I had spent ten years dreaming of (being the creative director to help design a town for creatives...not exactly something you can just find again down the street). To be fair, I definitely stirred the pot. I asserted my point of view and was let go for a clash of vision. Then, in the same week, I asserted my point of view in (i.e., blew up) my sixteen-year marriage. (Well, it didn’t end then, but it proved to mark the beginning of the end.)
A fair amount of the problems in both scenarios likely came from a lack of finesse and sophistication on my part—asserting my point of view in clumsy, clunky, imperfect, and underdeveloped ways.
Nonetheless, between that week, my dad having died not too long before, and ongoing health problems with an autoimmune disease, I was grieving and feeling a lot like a victim.
I heard myself say something about how much I’d lost.
I decided to write down a list of things no one could take away from me. It turned out to be a really helpful list to see. (I’m so curious what you’d write if you made a list like that.)
That experience and list helped me stumble into a much deeper understanding of a phrase Carl Jung first popularized called “the two halves of life.”
These “halves” have nothing to do with a numeric age. Some people may move into the second half of life at age twenty; some may live to be 100 and never transition into it.
In the language and imagery we’ve been talking about, the first half of life is characterized by the “mud,” force, and moving up the lower levels of the developmental spiral. The second half of life is when we have broken through that 200 line on Hawkins’ Scale and spend most of our time in the clearer water of surrender and service.
Richard Rohr explains:
“The first half of life is spent building our sense of identity, importance, and security—what I would call the false self and Freud might call the ego self. Jung emphasizes the importance and value of a healthy ego structure. But inevitably, you discover, often through failure or a significant loss, that your conscious self is not all of you, but only the acceptable you. You will find your real purpose and identity at a much deeper level than the positive image you present to the world.
In the second half of life, the ego still has a place, but now in the service of the True Self or soul, your inner and inherent identity. Your ego is the container that holds you all together, so now its strength is an advantage. Someone who can see their ego in this way is probably what we mean by a “grounded” person.
In the second half of life we discover that it is no longer sufficient to find meaning in being successful or healthy. We need a deeper source of purpose. Science gives us explanations, and that is a good start, but myth and religion give us meaning which alone satisfies the soul.
Jung says that during the second half of life our various problems are not solved so much by psychotherapy as by authentic religious experience. Jung had a significant influence on Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Thus, Wilson also emphasizes that a “vital spiritual experience” is the best therapy of all. A vital spiritual experience, according to Wilson, is the foundational healing of addiction, much more than mere “recovery”—which is just getting you started. In the classical three stages of spiritual life, recovery of itself is purgation, but not yet true illumination or divine union.
The unitive encounter with a Power greater than you resituates the self inside of a safe universe where you don’t need to be special, rich, or famous to feel alive. Those questions are resolved once and for all. The hall of mirrors that most people live in becomes unhelpful and even bothersome. Now aliveness comes from the inside out. This is what we mean when we say “God saves you.”
Jung believes we can do damage, therefore, by “petrifying” our spiritual experience when we try to name it, to express God as an abstract idea. Before you explain your encounter with the Divine as an idea or a name that then must be defended, proven, or believed, simply stay with the naked experience itself—the numinous, transcendent experience of allurement, longing, and intimacy within you. This is the inner God image breaking through! No idea of God is God of itself, but the experience of God’s action in you is what grounds you and breaks you wide open at the same time.
‘My deepest me is God.’ — Catherine of Genoa
This is both a transcendent God and also my deepest me at the same time. To discover one is to discover the other. This is why good theology and good psychology work together so well. You have touched upon the soul, the unshakable reality of my True Self, where “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). The second half of life is about learning to recognize, honor, and love this voice and this indwelling Presence, which feels like your own voice too. All love is now one.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.” — C. G. Jung
Bâyezîd Bistâmî, a ninth-century Sufi mystic, came to a similar understanding and stressed that the real renunciation was of the lower self:
“I shed my self as a snake sheds its skin, then I looked at myself and behold! I am He.”
Jesh de Rox, who I’d consider a contemporary mystic, describes this process and experience beautifully and honestly.
Click here to watch the video.
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