"Back to the garden" (Thanks, Joni)

"Third Age" is the extended life-span technology has brought us.   Dr. William Sadler calls this our “30-year life bonus" and it means we’ll average living three decades more than our great-grandparents!

The Mythology of Eden : A Map for our Ages

Like our First, Second and Third Ages, the mythology of Eden offers us three progressive, and very different, phases:  life in The Garden, existence after we partake of The Tree of Knowledge, and the possibility of something more in The Tree of Life or Unity.  Just like the culture we live in, most of us only recognize the first two, and this is not only sad but unhealthy.  But there’s good news!  Enough of us are now living long enough to discover how Third Age can be opened, lived and shared.  Come along and see what waits for us when we can, as Joni Mitchell sang, "...get ourselves back to garden..."  

First Age Enjoys – and loses - the bliss of the gardeN

In the beginning, we (like Adam and Eve) are infants living in the bliss of undifferentiated wholeness.  Everything is one, and there are no complexities, opposites or paradoxes to make us crazy.  We name the animals, "play in the sunshine” and have no shame or guilt.  But this can’t last, of course, because The Garden is, as one Jewish rabbi put it, “a setup”: if you tell children they can play with everything but The Tree of Knowledge, of course that’s where they'll go as soon as your back’s turned.  Since none of us think the Supreme Being is an idiot, the only sensible interpretation is that the Divine Intention is for Adam and Eve (and the rest of us) to eat the apple and come to know all opposites, not just good and evil.  In one of the great injustices of all time, womankind and serpents have been blamed for the stresses of this natural growth spurt.  

We know children must and will forsake the innocence that allows them to live in the Oneness of early First Age and plunge into the dualities and ego-centeredness of Second Age.  As bizarre a choice as this seems from our Third Age perspective, children think it's a good idea at the time, and that’s why we all did it.  We may see it as a sad step backwards into the trials and tribulations of worldly ego-achievement — and it is.  But it’s also essential because there is no other route to the maturity of BOTH/AND except through the confusion and pain of EITHER/OR.  God, how we hate to have to watch it, especially when the grandchildren are our own!  

Second Age Thinks it knows (and others know more)

Back to Adam and Eve (and other adolescents) hiding shamefully behind their fig leaves (of university degrees, corporate personas or new wealth).  “Hey,” we want to say, “you don’t need that nonsense – you’re beautiful as you are!”  But they do think they need "that nonsense" -- and, if we're honest, we'll remember most of us really thought we needed those leaves when we were imitating James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.  So we’ll celebrate whatever “successes” they count as important with them, no matter how silly we might think they are.  Why?  Because, like us, it’s only by having enough of those “successes” they can come to want something more.  

And how do we come to “want something more”?  

In Second Age we initially deal with opposites by deciding one is good and its opposite is bad.  Having achieved such black-and-white clarity, we then go about maximizing “the good” (our fast-track career) and minimizing “the bad” (distractions from that fast-track career like relationships, ethics and time in nature).  If we don’t move along our path as speedily as we think we should (and we hardly ever do), our desperation insists we increase the imbalance in our lives to have those “successes.”  It is a terrible thing to be caught here, and few escape.  But if we can manage to have enough “successes,” at some point this game begins to feel hollow because we have sacrificed so much to it.  Now we parents and grandparents can be helpful…  

Third Age Holds the Tension - and the wholeness…

How do we come back to wholeness?

When we've had enough EITHER/OR, we open ourselves to something beyond our comprehension – a Third Way and a Third Age.  As children we’ve experienced undifferentiated wholeness, and we don’t have a clue about how to get it back.  As young adults we’ve experienced differentiated partialness, and we don’t want it anymore.  But we don’t know if there is anything more -- and if there is, what do we do to find it?

There is a way.  It’s not easy or familiar.  It has been available and ignored for centuries.  My friend, Atum, has phrased it most clearly for me.  “Hold both the EITHER (your achievement in the world) and the OR (the quality of your life) and stay in that tension until a new possibility (something you’ve never seen before) arises in your consciousness.  When this happens, you still have, and love, the awareness of the opposites, but you now participate in a wholeness that allows you the fullness, wisdom and ecstasy of BOTH/AND.

This is what happens in The Whale Rider when Paka has the revelation that his granddaughter, Pi, can be the tribe’s new chief – even though she's not a man.  It's what happens in The Karate Kid when Daniel understands "we learn to fight so we don't have to fight."  It’s what happens when we grasp there could be no resurrection without a crucifixion, that there could be no chosen people without the suffering and persecution.  It’s what happens when we celebrate the complexities and deliciousness of being both Spirit and Flesh.  It's what happens when we finally “get it” that there can be no light without dark, no good without bad, no life without death.

Understood and embraced, these (and an infinite number of other Second Age paradoxes) become the stuff of our Third Age – and our launch pad into infinity!  As Hafiz wrote:  

You have all the ingredients to turn your life into a nightmare

Or to build a swing for God in your backyard…

Build the swing.