The Human Odyssey

The Stages of Life According to Rudolf Steiner

The early twentieth century philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner conceived of a theory of human development based upon seven year cycles, and linked those cycles to astrology.  The first seven years of life (0-7 years old) were associated with the Moon. During this time, the psychic forces are working to transform the body of the child from one that was inherited from the parents, to one that represents the full personality of the child.  The second seven years (7-14 years old) is associated with Mercury. At this time, the child's imagination and feeling life takes center stage.  The third seven years (14-21 years old) is associated with Venus, during which time the higher mind of the adolescent takes root, and the psychic development can be disturbed by the strong impulses of puberty.  The next three seven-year segments are associated with the Sun (21-42 years old), and the elements of sentient soul, intellectual soul, and consciousness soul.  The next seven-year segment is associated with Mars (42-49 years old), when the soul works hard to impress the full forces of its personality upon the world.  At this time, the soul has the opportunity to a higher state of consciousness called Spirit Self. The following seven-year segment is associated with Jupiter (49-56 years old), when wisdom is dawning and the ego needs to unfold the Life Spirit. The final seven-year period is associated with Saturn (56-63 years old) when Saturn completes its second "return" (e.g. comes back to its position it had at one's birth), and the soul can manifest an event higher element of Self called Spirit Man.  For more information, see Steiner's Karmic Relationships Vol. VII, lecture two.

Source:  Ceol agus Realta

The Stages of Life According to Ptolemy

The ancient astrologer/astronomer Ptolemy (83-161 C.E.), whose ideas of the structure of the universe (based upon spheres), dominated western civilization until Copernicus and Kepler in the 16th-17th centuries, associated different planets of the solar system with particular stages of life:

Moon:  Infancy - 0-4 years old

Mercury: Childhood - 4-14 years old

Venus:  Adolescence - 14-22 years old

The Sun:  Young Adulthood - 22-40 years old

Mars:  Mature Adulthood - 40-55 years old

Jupiter: Retirement and Wisdom - 55 to 67 years old

Saturn:  Old Age - 67+

Source:  Ceol agus Realta

The Stages of Life According to Medieval Islam

A map of the human life cycle that is associated with the Islamic middle ages and a philosopher/scientist named Al Biruni (973-1048 C.E.) is called Firdaria.  It is a system of astrology based upon specific planets that influence our lives at different stages of life.  The Sun rules the first 10 years of life (ages 0-10), Venus the next 8 years  (ages 11-18), Mercury the next 13 years (ages 19-31), the Moon the next 9 years (ages 32-40), Saturn the next 11 years (ages 41-51), Jupiter the next 12 years (ages 52-63), Mars the next 7 years (64-70), the North Node (a mathematical point that takes into consideration the relation between the Sun, Moon, and Earth at the time of one's birth) the next 3 years (71-73), and the South Node the next 2 years (73-75).  After this, the cycle repeats itself starting again with the Sun. This pattern applies to the astrological charts of individuals who were born during the day.  If the person was born during the night, the cycle begins with the Moon and follows the same sequence. According to the blog site Ceol Agus Realta, Al Biruni:  "made contributions to a very wide range of human endeavors, from chemistry to math to astronomy. He knew that the earth rotated on its own axis and knew about both heliocentric and geocentric perspectives. He developed special instruments for astronomical measurements and he is said to have written over 200 books. There is even a crater of the Moon called after him."

From a psychological standpoint, the sequence given above makes sense, at least with respect to most of the planets.  The Sun represents the ego, and the first 10 years of life involve the development of the child's self as it enters society. Venus rules the adolescence years, when romance and passion are at their height.  Mercury represents the mind, and early adulthood is a time when the mind is required to succeed at one's career, in one's relationships, and in becoming a good citizen.  Saturn, which is the planet of responsibility and discipline, rules the midlife years, when it is often necessary to work very hard to master the lessons of life.  Jupiter, which is the benevolent planet, is associated with mature adulthood, when financial and emotional stability make it possible to give something back to the greater community.

The Twelve Gifts of the Human Life Cycle

A guest blog I did appears today on Basil & Spice:

Which stage of life is the most important?   Some might claim that infancy is the key stage, when a baby’s brain is wide open to new experiences that will influence all the rest of its later life. Others might argue that it’s adolescence or young adulthood, when physical health is at its peak.  Many cultures around the world value late adulthood more than any other, arguing that it is at this stage that the human being has finally acquired the wisdom necessary to guide others.  Who is right?  The truth of the matter is that every stage of life is equally significant and necessary for the welfare of humanity.  In my book The Human Odyssey: Navigating the Twelve Stages of Life, I’ve written that each stage of life has its own unique “gift” to contribute to the world.  We need to value each one of these gifts if we are to truly support the deepest needs of human life.  Here are the twelve gifts of the human life cycle:

1.      Prebirth:  Potential – The child who has not yet been born could become anything – a Michaelangelo, a Shakespeare, a Martin Luther King – and thus holds for all of humanity the principle of what we all may yet become in our lives.

2.      Birth:  Hope – When a child is born, it instills in its parents and other caregivers a sense of optimism; a sense that this new life may bring something new and special into the world.  Hence, the newborn represents the sense of hope that we all nourish inside of ourselves to make the world a better place.

3.      Infancy (Ages 0-3):   Vitality – The infant is a vibrant and seemingly unlimited source of energy.  Babies thus represent the inner dynamo of humanity, ever fueling the fires of the human life cycle with new channels of psychic power.

4.      Early Childhood (Ages 3-6):  Playfulness – When young children play, they recreate the world anew.  They take what is and combine it with the what is possible to fashion events that have never been seen before in the history of the world.  As such, they embody the principle of innovation and transformation that underlies every single creative act that has occurred in the course of civilization.

5.      Middle Childhood (Ages 6-8):  Imagination – In middle childhoood, the sense of an inner subjective self develops for the first time, and this self is alive with images taken in from the outer world, and brought up from the depths of the unconscious.  This imagination serves as a source of creative inspiration in later life for artists, writers, scientists, and anyone else who finds their days and nights enriched for having nurtured a deep inner life.

6.      Late Childhood (Ages 9-11):  Ingenuity – Older children have acquired a wide range of social and technical skills that enable them to come up with marvelous strategies and inventive solutions for dealing with the increasing pressures that society places on them.  This principle of ingenuity lives on in that part of ourselves that ever seeks new ways to solve practical problems and cope with everyday responsibilities.

7.      Adolescence (Ages 12-20):  Passion -  The biological event of puberty unleashes a powerful set of changes in the adolescent body that reflect themselves in a teenager’s sexual, emotional, cultural, and/or spiritual passion.  Adolescence passion thus represents a significant touchstone for anyone who is seeking to reconnect with their deepest inner zeal for life.

8.      Early Adulthood (Ages 20-35):  Enterprise –  It takes enterprise for young adults to accomplish their many responsibilities, including finding a home and mate, establishing a family or circle of friends, and/or getting a good job.  This principle of enterprise thus serves us at any stage of life when we need to go out into the world and make our mark.

9.      Midlife (Ages 35-50):  Contemplation – After many years in young adulthood of following society’s scripts for creating a life, people in midlife often take a break from worldly responsibilities to reflect upon the deeper meaning of their lives, the better to forge ahead with new understanding.  This element of contemplation represents an important resource that we can all draw upon to deepen and enrich our lives at any age.

10.  Mature Adulthood (Ages 50-80): Benevolence – Those in mature adulthood have raised families, established themselves in their work life, and become contributors to the betterment of society through volunteerism, mentorships, and other forms of philanthropy.  All of humanity benefits from their benevolence.  Moreover, we all can learn from their example to give more of ourselves to others.

11.  Late Adulthood (Age 80+):  Wisdom – Those with long lives have acquired a rich repository of experiences that they can use to help guide others.  Elders thus represent the source of wisdom that exists in each of us, helping us to avoid the mistakes of the past while reaping the benefits of life’s lessons.

12.  Death & Dying:  Life – Those in our lives who are dying, or who have died, teach us about the value of living.  They remind us not to take our lives for granted, but to live each moment of life to its fullest, and to remember that our own small lives form of a part of a greater whole.

            Since each stage of life has its own unique gift to give to humanity, we need to do whatever we can to support each stage, and to protect each stage from attempts to suppress its individual contribution to the human life cycle.  Thus, we need to be wary, for example, of attempts to thwart a young child’s need to play through the establishment high-pressure formal academic preschools.  We should protect the wisdom of aged from elder abuse.  We need to do what we can to help our adolescents at risk.  We need to advocate for prenatal education and services for poor mothers, and support safe and healthy birthing methods in third world countries. We ought to take the same attitude toward nurturing the human life cycle as we do toward saving the environment from global warming and industrial pollutants.  For by supporting each stage of the human life cycle, we will help to ensure that all of its members are given care and helped to blossom to their fullest degree.

To read my other blog entries on Basil & Spice.

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Maps of the Human Life Cycle: The Riddle of the Sphinx

In Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, a monster called the Sphinx was killing travelers on the road to Thebes who could not answer its riddle:  "What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"  Finally, the hero of the play, Oedipus, came along and correctly solved the riddle:  "Man."  In doing so, Oedipus gave us one of our earliest maps of the human life cycle.   In the morning of life (childhood), the infant crawls on all fours.  In the afternoon of life (adulthood), the human being walks upright on two legs.  In the evening of life (elderhood), the senior citizen walks with help from a cane.  This riddle provides us with one of the most poignant images of the scope of human existence.  Of course in modern times, this riddle might well be modified to:  "What creature walks on ten legs in the morning (a high-tech infant walker), two legs in the afternoon, and six legs in the evening (a senior citizen's walker).  In any case, after Oedipus solved the riddle, the Sphinx was so upset that it jumped from a wall (or in some other versions, devoured itself), ridding the Thebean citizens of this tourist menace.  It didn't work out so well for Oedipus, however, since they made him king in honor of killing the monster, and he ended up sleeping with his mother the Queen (he'd killed his father unknowingly earlier in the play), thus providing us with another important human development concept:  Freud's oedipus complex. 

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Milton Bradley and "The Checkered Game of Life"

We've all played games produced by the Milton Bradley Company:  Battleship, Candyland, Jenga, Twister, Yahtzee, and many more.  But did you know that the first board game created Milton Bradley himself back in 1860, was based on the journey of life?  It was called "The Checkered Game of Life."   The gameboard was a modification of a checker board (see illustration), and instead of dice, players spun a six-sided top.  The game began in Infancy in one corner, and ended in Happy Old Age at the opposite corner.  Players accumulated points as they landed on squares, and the first to reach 100 points was the winner.  Each black square contained a life event that was either positive (e.g. "Wealth" - 10 points; "Happiness" - 5 points) or negative (e.g. "Crime - go to prison - lose a turn" ; Gambling - go to Ruin").  The journey of life consisted of traipsing one's way through these open doors to opportunity ("School - go to College"; "College - 5 points") or laundry chutes to perdition ("Disgrace"; "Suicide").  As Bradley himself warned:  "Happy Old Age is surrounded by many difficulties": land on Idleness, and you'll be sent to Disgrace, at the very bottom of the board, which means that you have to climb back up all over again. Here's another word of advice:  Don't enter Politics, if you can possibly avoid it. You'll go to Congress and earn five points, but you'll be carried away from Happy Old Age and you'll woefully increase your chances of landing on Crime and ending up in Prison . . . " (quoted in Jill Lepore, "The Meaning of Life, The New Yorker, May 21, 2007, p. 41).  To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first game, the company created The Game of Life that many of us played as kids, and that has been updated for the current generation as The Game of Life:  Twists and Turns.  In the newest version of the game,  each player has a Visa card that they insert into an electronic machine (called a LIFEPod), which stores financial data (yes, it's now mostly about money), as well as their status in the game.  Before Bradley's game, there was an earlier game called "The New Game of Human Life" created in London in 1790, where squares represented male individuals at the different stages of life who embodied Protestant virtues and vices (e.g. "The Assiduous Youth" or the "Drunkard" etc.). All of these games were themselves probably based on an ancient board game in India called Jnana Chaupar (the "game of knowledge), where if you landed on a virtue you got to climb a ladder toward the god Vishnu and karmic liberation, whereas if you landed on a vice --or karmic obstacle--you could end up being swallowed by a snake! 

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Erik Erikson

Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development model represents probably the most well-known and highly regarded map of the human life cycle in contemporary western culture.  This theory was first articulated in 1950 in chapter seven ("The Eight Ages of Man") of his book Childhood and Society, and further developed in later books and articles. Erikson adapted Freud's theory of psychosexual development (oral, anal, phallic, genital) to a wider social-cultural sphere, and extended it beyond adolescence into early, middle, and late adulthood.  He referred to his theory as epigenetic, meaning that it traced the development of the human organism from an undifferentiated state of psychosocial organization through successive levels of differentiation from early childhood to adult maturity.  He also characterized each of the eight stages in terms of a conflict, struggle, or crisis occuring between two opposing psychosocial orientations (e.g. intimacy versus isolation), which in turn gave rise to specific psychosocial outcomes.  The eight stages are as follows:

1. INFANCY: Basic Trust vs. Basic Mistrust - the infant struggles with dependency on its mother for love, nurturing, and (oral) sustenance, in the course of which he may develop an underlying sense of hope concerning his place in the cosmos, or failing this, may withdraw from the world of relationships altogether.
2. EARLY CHILDHOOD: Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt - the young child experiences a conflict related to other people (e.g. parents) controlling its bodily functions (anal, urethral), and may come out of this crisis with a developed sense of will or autonomy (the ability to take charge of one's own life), or alternatively, because of deep shame (a sense of being exposed), develop a defensive structure of compulsiveness that tries to control self and others in a manipulative or obsessive way.
3. PLAY AGE:  Initiative vs. Guilt - the child is now a part of the family matrix and struggles with oedipal desires (locomotion aggression toward the same sex parent, genital attraction toward the opposite sex parent), which may be channeled into a positive drive to take initiative in the social world, or alternatively, may turn in on itself and develop into a sense of pathological guilt related to sexual and aggressive feelings.
4. SCHOOL AGE:  Industry vs. Inferiority - here the psychosocial world expands to include the neighborhood and the school environment, where the child's efforts to sublimate the drives of the previous stage through work and enterprise (e.g. hobbies, schoolwork, projects, chores etc.), may result in the construction of a personality that feels a sense of competency and ability, or alternatively, may develop into a pervasive aura of inferiority in relationship to the efforts and achievements of others.
5. ADOLESCENCE: Identity vs. Identity Confusion - with the advent of puberty, the psychosocial scene focuses upon the teenager's peer group and other groups that model a range of possible identities, which the teen will try on (through intense one-to-one relationships and/or membership in cliques), and through which he will ultimately develop a coherent sense of identity, or alternatively, experience a diffused, undefined, or fragmented sense of self that may result in delinquency, psychosis, or more commonly, the inability to settle upon a occupational identity as he moves into adulthood.
6. YOUNG ADULTHOOD:  Intimacy vs. Isolation - now that the individual has hopefully developed a stable identity, she moves into the adult world seeking a partner with whom to share work, sex, friendship, and intimate feelings, failing which, she sinks into exclusivity, elitism, isolation, or other forms of non-intimate social relations.
7. ADULTHOOD: Generativity vs. Stagnation - once the adult has found a partner to share intimacy with, he now is faced with the challenge of raising a family, making positive contributions to the workplace and the community, and engaging in other forms of generativity and care, failing which, he will become rigid, inert, and rejecting on the job, in the family, and/or as a citizen, or fall into other forms of stagnation.
8. OLD AGE:  Integrity vs. Despair - as an adult reaches the end of her life, she looks back at what she has or hasn't accomplished, and feels a deep sense of fulfillment or at least an acceptance of the life she has lived (out of which will come wisdom), or alternatively, she descends into anguish or despair at having not lived a full and vital existence.

In Erikson's last book on the subject, The Life Cycle Completed, his wife, Joan M. Erikson, added a "ninth stage" that applied to people who had become very old (as they had).  In the book, she wrote:  "Old age in one's eighties and nineties brings with it new demands, reevaluations, and daily difficulties" (The Life Cycle Completed, p. 105).  According to Joan Erikson, in the ninth stage, the despair of stage eight is magnified by the experience of one's deteriorating body and mind, which results in a lowering of self-esteem and confidence. "To face down despair with faith and appropriate humility," she wrote, "is perhaps the wisest course" (The Life Cycle Completed, p. 106).

It should be emphasized that Erikson saw each polarity in his theory (e.g. integrity vs. despair), not as a "one side must win" battle, but rather as a necessary tension inherent in that stage of human development, through which struggle an individual would become a more integrated and whole human being.  As Joan Erikson noted: "It is important to remember that conflict and tension are sources of growth, strength, and commitment"  (The Life Cycle Completed, p. 106).

Click here to see a list of Erikson's books.

Click here to visit The Erikson Institute at Austen Riggs Center, where Erikson did much of his research.

Click here to visit The Erikson Institute:  A Graduate School in Child Development

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Tibetan Buddhism

In the tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the human life cycle is just that:  a cycle.  An individual soul is born, dies, and is reborn over and over again until it achieves liberation from all future rebirth.  At that point the cycle ends.  Until then, however, the cycle consists of six bardos or "transitional states."  The first three bardos occur "between" lifetimes (from the moment of death until the time of rebirth).  The Bardo Thodol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead) is essentially a guidebook to help the dying individual achieve liberation (or a favorable birth) as it moves through these "in between" states. The last three bardos occur after we have been reborn and are living as human beings on earth.

• The Chi-Kha Bardo - this state occurs at the moment of death, when the dying person has the potential to perceive The Clear Light of Ultimate Reality, and recognize it as his own ultimate being.  If the soul does this, it merges with the light and no longer has to be reborn.  This encounter, however, is quite an overwhelming experience, to put it mildly, and the individual may shrink back from this Light in fear.   If it does so, then the weight of its own karma will pull it into the next bardo.
• The Chhos-Nyid Bardo - this part of the journey is where the soul encounters "Peaceful Deities" and "Wrathful Deities," which are outer projections of its karma, or past experiences over innumerable rebirths.  The soul is counselled not to become attracted or repulsed by these deities, but to regard them as emanations of its own illusory self.  If the soul can do this, it achieves liberation.  However, if the soul ends up getting "caught" by one of these entities, it may end up hanging out in one of six possible "lokas" or "worlds," including those of the hungry ghosts, the warrior demons, the devas (or angels), the hell dwellers, the bestial world of animals, or back into the world of human beings (see next bardo).
• The Sid-Pa Bardo - this is the state where the soul, driven by the winds of its own karma, begins to seek rebirth.  It encounters the Lord of Death, who subjects the soul to a kind of "Judgment Day" that can be quite a painful ordeal.  Eventually it observes pairs of couples copulating (potential future parents), and goes through a kind of pre-birth Oedipal complex where it feels anger toward the same sex parent and lust toward the opposite sex parent.  Since there is no chance for liberation at this point, the soul is counselled to choose a "womb" that will optimize its chances of getting a favorable incarnation for future attempts at freedom from rebirth.
• The Skyes-Nas Bardo ("Life" ) - this is the bardo of ordinary waking consciousness experienced by a soul during its incarnation as a human being.
• The Rmi-Lam Bardo ("Dream") - this is the bardo of dream consciousness that occurs when we are experiencing rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep, or when we are in a semi-waking state of active imagination during our waking hours.
• The Bsam-Gtan Bardo ("Meditation") - this is the bardo of "trance consciousness" when we are in a deep state of meditation during our waking hours.

For more information, there are any number of translations of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, including those by:

Gyurme Dorje

Robert Thurman

Frencesca Fremantle and Chogyam Trungpa

W.Y. Evans-Wentz

See also, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

See an online exhibit at the University of Virginia based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: The Talmud

The Talmud is a body of written literature from Judaism that records the discussions of rabbis concerning law, ethics, customs, and history.  It emerged after the second destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 C.E., an event which deprived Judaism of its sacred center.  As a result, rabbis began to write down the oral tradition that had been transmitted from generation to generation for over a thousand years.  The first part of the Talmud, the Mishnah (literally "redaction" or "putting into writing") in 200 C.E., is a compilation of legal opinions and debates. The second part of the Talmud, the Gemara (literally, "to complete" or "to study"), written around 500 C.E., consists of rabbinical commentaries and analysis of the Mishnah.  One of the tractates or treatises, of the Mishnah, called Pirkei Avot (Chapters of the Fathers), consists of ethical maxims of the rabbis during the Mishnaic period.  One of these maxims concerns the human life cycle:

He used to say:

• At five years old a person should study the Scriptures
• at ten years for the Mishnah,
• at thirteen for the commandments,
• at fifteen for the Talmud,
• at eighteen for the bridechamber,
• at twenty for one's life pursuit,
• at thirty for authority,
• at forty for discernment,
• at fifty for counsel,
• at sixty to be an elder,
• at seventy for gray hairs,
• at eighty for special strength (Psalm 90:10),
• at ninety for decrepitude, and
• at a hundred a man is as one who has already died and has ceased from the affairs of this world.

Source:  Pirkei Avot 5:24

For information about the different life cycle traditions of Judaism (circumcision, coming-of-age, marriage, death, mourning etc.) click here.

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: William Shakespeare

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare was acutely aware of our passage through time.  This theme interpenetrates virtually all of his work. In Sonnet 60 he writes:  "Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore/So do our minutes hasten to their end."  In Sonnet 64 he writes:  "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd/The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age..."  In MacBeth (V, v, 19), he has his eponymous hero saying: "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/To the last syllable of recorded time;/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death."   But it is in his play As You Like It (II, VII, 139-166), that Shakespeare reaches his height in articulating a vision of the human life cycle, when the melancholy Jacques delivers one of the most famous speeches in western literature:

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

 

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Ancient Greece

Solon (ca. 638 B.C.E. - 558 B.C.E.) was one of the great law-makers of ancient Greece.  Among his many accomplishments were the repeal of draconian laws (literally, laws instituted by the Greek legislator Draco), the holding of a national census, the redistribution of political responsibilities, and the institution of the Aeropagus (Athenian Senate).  He was also something of a philosopher, and gave the western world one of its first stages of life models (alas, focused only on males; females were not accorded much liberty or identity in ancient Greece).  He divided the human life cycle into ten stages of seven years each:

0-7     -  A boy at first is the man; unripe; then he casts his teeth; milk-teeth befitting the child he sheds his 7th year;

7-14   -  Then to his seven years God adding another seven, signs of approaching manhood show in the bud;

14-21 -  Still, in the third of the sevens his limbs are growing; his chin touched with a fleecy down; the bloom of the cheek gone;

21-28  - Now in the 4th of the 7's ripen to greatest completeness the powers of the man and his worth becomes plain to see;

28-35  - In the fifth he bethinks him that this is the season for courting, bethinks him that sons will preserve and continue his line;

35-42  - Now in the 6th his mind, ever open to virtue, broadens, and never inspires him to profitless deeds;

42-56  - [Two stages combined] Seven times 7, and 8; the tongue and the mind for fourteen years together are now at their best;

56-63  - Still in the ninth is he able, but never so nimble in speech and in wit as he was in the days of his prime;

63-70  - Who to the tenth has attained, and has lived to complete it, has come to the time to depart on the ebb tide of death.

For more on ancient Greek perspectives on the life cycle, see:  The Eight-Fold Year and the Stages of Life

Maps of the Human Life Cycle: Confucius

In ancient China, the philosophical, religious and moral tone was set primarily by Confucius (551 B.C.E. - 497 B.C.E.) and his disciples.  Confucianism emphasized morality in government policy, proper social relationships, love of learning, and an attitude of kindness and sincerity.  His work is known to the modern world largely through The Analects (my favorite version is translated by Simon Leys), a collection of his aphorisms put together by his disciples.  In The Analects, Confucius provides us with one of the earliest maps of human development. 

The Master said, at 15 I set my heart upon learning

At 30, I had planted my feet firm upon the ground.

At 40, I no longer suffered from perplexities.

At 50, I knew what were the biddings of heaven.

At 60, I heard them with docile ears.

At 70, I could follow the dictates of my own heart; for what I desired no longer overstepped the boundaries of right.

Confucius had it good.  Alas, if only it were that easy for the rest of us!