When we say “ultimate place” — which is to say, when we are speaking of soul — we are calling attention to the very core or heart of a thing's identity, its decisive meaning or significance, its raison d'être.

What's so great about being human? It might be this: The ability to know that we know gives us the ability to know ourselves, the ability to know that we exist and that we exist in an astonishing universe. It gives us the ability to fall in love with every thing and with eternity. If we are the only beings who know that we know, then we are the

These confusions about adolescence are reflected in how we have collectively responded to puberty, which is, other than birth and death, perhaps the physically most obvious human transition. As a whole, Westernized societies don't seem to have a clue about how to prepare a young person for sexual flowering, social independence, authentic personal

In contrast to those presented in most other developmental models, the stages of life portrayed here are essentially independent of chronological age, biological development, cognitive ability, and social role. Rather, the progression from one stage to the next is spurred by the individual's progress with the specific psychological and spiritual

True adulthood, or psychological maturity, has become an uncommon achievement in Western and Westernized societies, and genuine elderhood nearly nonexistent. Interwoven with arrested personal development, and perhaps inseparable from it, our everyday lives have drifted vast distances from our species’ original intimacy with the natural world and

As soon as enough people in contemporary societies progress beyond adolescence, the entire consumer-driven economy and egocentric lifestyle will implode. The adolescent society is actually quite unstable due to its incongruence with the primary patterns of living systems. The industrial growth society is simply incompatible with collective human

THE WHEEL OF LIFE In this book you'll find a model of human development that is both ecocentric and soulcentric — that is, a nature-based model that fully honors the deeply imaginative potentials of the human psyche. I think of this model as a new natural history of the soul, a description of the organic, indigenous process by which a human child

the concept of personal powers, which divides into three categories — abilities, knowledge, and values — each of which enables us to do things we could not otherwise, which is what renders them personal powers.12 Our soul powers are the ones that enable us to take our ultimate place.

Thomas refers to the latter perspective as “the time-developmental model.”13 His larger point is that our approach to the development of anything must now embrace both models — both circle and arc (in a sense, both feminine and masculine), which together describe a spiral progression through space and time.