The Levels of Being

When we view life from the point of view of biological cycles, an interesting and important asymmetry between the sexes comes to light. Clearly, both men and women go through childhood and puberty. From van Gennep’s research, we know that practically all cultures have rites of passage specific to these phases of life and that puberty is a major transition point. Since puberty is the time when the full adult sexual characteristics are developed, it makes sense that most cultures have a subset of initiation rites specific to each sex.

So far, so symmetrical. But what about the Adult and Elder archetypal phases? Here is where the asymmetry comes in because the next major biological metamorphosis after puberty is pregnancy/childbirth and it is a statement of the obvious to say that it is only women who go through this. Women have the further metamorphosis of menopause to deal with which can be said to mark the transition from Adult to Elder.

By contrast, men have no biological markers for the Adult and Elder phases of life. There are general biological trends that occur as men age, but nothing resembling the metamorphoses of pregnancy and menopause. This asymmetry between the sexes has important ramifications that are out of scope for the purposes of this essay.

Despite the asymmetry, it is nevertheless true for both sexes that there is a biological aspect to the archetypal phases of life and this biological aspect is a direct correlate of the psychological and socio-cultural we have already seen summarised by the Hero’s Journey and rites of passage. Putting it all together, we can see that the cycles of life resonate across the psychological, socio-cultural and the biological. This is almost a statement of the obvious and yet it is something we have lost sight of in the modern world, especially with the rise of the technocracy in the 20^th century.

One of the results of the rise of the technocracy is increasingly specialisation. We have doctors who deal with biological issues; we have psychologists who deal with mental issues; and we have anthropologists, sociologists, and a host of other specialists who deal with socio-cultural issues. There is no “expert” whose job it is to think holistically about the interactions between these domains.

To rediscover the interdependence that is inherent in human life, we can use a concept that comes down to us from antiquity: the levels of being. The traditional formulation of the levels of being posits a hierarchy that begins with the physical and ascends through the biological to the psychological and then the spiritual.

For this brief introduction, we will simplify things by leaving out the physical and spiritual levels. We then map the biological, sociol-cultural and psychological against the levels of being as follows:-

	Child	Orphan	Adult	Elder
Biological	Childhood	Puberty	Adulthood	Senescence
Socio-Cultural – economic	Nonage	Student/Apprentice	Practitioner	Retiree
Socio-Cultural – political	Nonage	Adolescent	Citizen	(Elder?)
Socio-Cultural – religious	Nonage	Initiate	Full member	(Elder?)
Psychological	Oedipus Complex	?	?	?

If we read the table from top to bottom, we get a summary of the main aspects of each archetypal phase. If we read the table from left to right, we get the progression through life at each level of being.

There is an important fact about the levels of being that is partly captured in the above table. The “higher up” the levels of being we go, the more individual is the journey that each of us takes. At the biological level, almost everybody will have much the same experience of the phases of life, setting aside the sexual asymmetry mentioned earlier.

At the socio-cultural level, there are generally more pathways available, especially in more complex societies. Here, attributes such as class, wealth, caste, and other variables come into play to determine where we will end up fitting into the fabric of the society in which we live.

It is at the psychological and especially at the spiritual where the most variability occurs. Freud and Jung gave us some solid evidence for repeatable patterns in childhood (eg. the Oedipus Complex). But, even then, the variability is much greater and becomes greater as we get older. The variability is greatest at the spiritual level of being, and most religions will have recourse to concepts such as karma to try and account for this.

Although the levels of being make a useful analytic tool for thinking about these issues, the key point is our lives, including the major archetypal phases, resonate across the levels of being simultaneously. The biological changes ushered in by puberty align with the creation of a sexual, economic, political, and religious identity. All of these throw up new psychological challenges that must be navigated. The failure to overcome those psychological challenges may then negatively affect the other levels of being.

Thus, the archetypal phases of life can be analysed as Hero’s Journeys-rites of passage that resonate across all the levels of being. The cycle ending in transcendence pattern then becomes the progression to the next archetype. Childhood is a cycle that transcends into adolescence. Adolescence transcends adulthood. Adulthood transcends into old age. Every religion tells us that old age transcends into a spiritual realm beyond.

The biological and socio-cultural aspects of these cycles are more fixed and stable, while the psychological and spiritual domains show far more variation between individuals. It is for this reason that great works of myth and literature are crucial to our understanding, because they are a vehicle by which we can explore the relatively unknown higher states of the human being.