these stages, becoming stuck instead in one or more of them as they go through life), this aspect of ourselves is best represented as an age period of perhaps 15-40 years, with the main action taking place from 15-25. It is at this time that we first begin to express ourselves as unique individuals in the world, out to make a place for ourselves and carve our mark. It is a time of ambition and emotions, when we first fall in love, have our first sexual experiences, have our hearts broken, find partners, and ‘settle down’ to focus on home and career. Spiritual work becomes unconscious, bubbling on within us while our minds and bodies are occupied with the physical world. Because of the emotional content of this period it is identified with the element of Water, whose ebbs and flows correspond to the highs and lows and the emotional comings and goings of this age.
As we reach the West we find that we have entered what we in the Western world call middle age. This is a time for large-scale recapitulation of self, a time when many people re-examine their lives up until this point, the assumptions they have made about the world and the agreements they have made with it. It is a time when, in the words of the philosopher Noam Chomsky, many of us will realise that “The average man follows not reason but faith and this naive faith [has been founded upon] necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplification by the myth maker to keep him on course.” We have been living a lie, in other words, which has been based on the mythology of our culture and its definitions of what makes a ‘real’ (socially acceptable) man or woman, success or failure. This myth, most likely, has never been us, but we have still lived it without ever