Mid-Life Crisis – Friend or Foe?

If you missed your mid-life crisis, don’t worry.  Your ego will soon be big enough to cause it!  Life changes are meant to serve as catalysts for transforming our current state of consciousness but they are rarely viewed as such. The first phase of profound life changes tend to occur between the ages of 35 and 42.  This is especially true for individuals who have primarily defined themselves through their professions till that age.  Another wave of mid-life change occurs between the ages of 42 and 56.  This is especially relevant for parents who have predominantly defined their lives and relationships in terms of raising their children.  As the children leave home, these parents can experience feelings of abandonment, lack of purpose or even find there is little in common without the children in the mix.

Until we reach these stages we predominantly tend to seek fulfillment by defining ourselves externally – be it through our relationships, our professions or our children.  As we enter our mid to late thirties and forties and the specter of our own mortality begins to emerge through the passing away of parents or other loved ones we find ourselves deeply unsatisfied with the status quo.  This uneasiness often prompts existential questioning of one’s careers, relationships, purpose in life and brings us to a fork in the road. 

This fork leads to two paths.  One path leads to a “train wreck” – broken marriages, embarking on serial changes of all consuming jobs, a relentless pursuit of material acquisitions and expensive toys.  The one common theme on this path is the continued seeking of the self in the external world. 

Another path leads to an inner introspective journey, striving to reach balance and inner peace.  If this inner journey is undertaken seriously and with discipline then it manifests itself in the external world as rewarding and revitalized relationships and also as fulfilling professional career choices. 

If we are open to learn from these gut wrenching moments of our mid life crises we begin to experience realizations best described by Vitvan the Gnostic teacher “that by putting our trust in impermanent external objects our reward is without exception disappointment, disillusionment and ultimately loss”.  Through these realizations and experiences we gradually begin to experience higher states of consciousness. At these moments in time, we begin to increasingly treat objective events as ephemeral and transitory.  For the few whose world view begins to transform, they begin to trust something much more enduring. Their own Unity Quest has begun.

In Unity Quest, we see that learning only comes through experiences, as that is what gets imprinted in our consciousness.  Conceptualizing and thinking driven by our mind-made ego cannot alter our current state of consciousness. This approach only serves to continue the meaningless search for seeking the self externally (in this case through external knowledge) and leads to knowing more about subjects (religion, spirituality etc) rather than knowing the subject itself!

Mid-life crises are the first experiential steps to bring you closer to knowing your true self.  But we often find ourselves lacking the discernment to choose the path to awareness (having spent the bulk of our adult lives worshipping at the altar of our mind-made ego)!  Unity Quest book discusses the life change processes in a compelling story format and provides practical messages that are helpful for both men and women in today’s world to begin the journey of transcending their mind-made ego.