Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life > Status Update

Our inner loyal soldier gets us through the 1st half of life safely, teaching us caution, impulse control, the sacred ‘No’ that gives us identity, direction & boundaries. Without it we would be aimless & shapeless, with no homebase or ‘Me’ to have a relationship with. Its voice is that of all our early authority figures, & may contain shame/guilt/warnings/self-doubt. It cannot get us to the 2nd half of life.

Upheavals of postmod. society have prevented many from living the 1st half well & we have a generation of educators, bishops & politicians who are still building their personal towers of success. Self-knowledge is dismissed as “psychology”, love as “feminine softness”, & critical thinking as “disloyalty”, while law, ritual & priestcraft have become substitutes for divine encounter & honest relationship.

Creative Tension: Both law & freedom are necessary for spiritual growth. Despite having been directly taught to hold this creative tension by Jesus (Matthew 5) and Paul (Romans & Galatians), very few Christians hold this tension well. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them- both immature responses.

We all need to experience some ‘Limit Situations’ in the 1st half of life where we confront restrictions & boundaries to grow up. We need a wall to butt up against to create proper structure & strong identity- to internalize our own deeper values, educate our feeling function & dethrone our own narcissism. Yahweh created a good limit situation for A&E by telling them NOT to eat the apple, fully knowing they would

We do not help our children by always preventing them from what might be necessary falling- because we learn to recover from falling by falling! It is by falling off the bike many times that we eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right & left eventually goes where they want to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off-balance, while not realizing it at all

Ken Wilbur says most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question at one point (that is on a very good day!)
We can save ourselves a lot of distress & accusation by knowing when, where, to whom and how to talk about spiritually mature things. We had best offer what each one is ready to hear, and perhaps only stretch them a bit!

2 Key insights on Steps & Stages:
1. You can only see & understand the earlier stages from the wider perspective of later stages. (Hence mature societies were meant to be led by elders/seniors/saints/the initiated).
2. From your own level of development, you can only stretch yourself to comprehend people just a bit beyond yourself. (Those at higher stages oft. appear wrong/sinful/heretical to those at lower stages)

The 1st half of life is preoccupied with 3 big issues: identity, security, and sexuality & gender. We do need boundaries, identity, safety, order & consistency to get started (personally & culturally). But human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, teaching impulse control & finding certitude. Thus the common biblical refrain to “Not Be Afraid” (appears 365 times!)

Inclusion & Transcendence:
The juniors cannot understand what they have not yet experienced; can’t see beyond their task. If a person has transcended & included previous stages, they will always have a patient understanding of the juniors, and can help them (w/some trial & effort). This is precisely what makes such people elders! Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages.

xxviii.
(Metaphors from The Odyssey)- at the end of the story Odysseus must leave Ithaca again (an island) and go to the mainland on further journey. What makes things inherently “religious” is whatever reconnects (‘re-ligio’) our parts to the whole, & is an experience of God, whether we call it religious or not. He is also reconnecting his outer experience to his inner world (Ithaca)- (2nd half of life task)