1. One must keep in mind that there can be no guaranteed standard formula for an initiation into adulthood that is also authentic. Authenticity is not standardizeable. Even with long-practiced and well-informed skills, the elders leading indigenous rites of passage lose about ten percent of their candidates – yes, 'lose' – meaning 'dead.'
2. An Initiation must be unique so as to ignite each individual’s unquenchable inspiration for providing their unique contributions to humanity.
3. At the same time, next culture rites of passage have some common characteristics. To begin with, the bubblenet of websites in StartOver.xyz is a fairly decent map of what is, in reality, involved in a workable Path for escaping the 8 Prisons along the journey from childhood to adulthood.
4. This is not a nice story. This story requires you to start where you are with a clear assessment of what you are up against right now if you are going to try to grow up. So, build as much Matrix as you can during the next few years using the hints and challenges of StartOver.xyz. If some of the experiments, thoughtmaps, or information makes you scared, sad, or angry, your Box or Gremlin may try to give you 'REALLY GOOD REASONS' to stop. Suggestion: do not believe the Reasons.
5. The reason is not the cause.
6. You will see what I mean as you get into other Experiments... After doing an Experiment, consider doing it again. The second time through seems to significantly help in digesting, integrating, and practically applying the Matrix that you build during the first time.
7. You might even form a Possibility Team for exploring and implementing the ideas suggested in StartOver.xyz.
8. A rite of passage is a period of time during which you will undertake certain experiences or Experiments to change your relationship to the world, to yourself, to your community, and to what is possible for you. The changes involved are not merely changes in intellectual understanding. The changes will include shifts of context, meaning shifts in where you come from (your 'Point Of Origin'), and shifts in what you perceive with (your Thoughtware, your Box).
9. These kinds of changes can take long periods of preparation and then occur quite suddenly. Although some of your Initiations will be minutes, hours, or days long, plan to spend at least two to five years seriously engaging Phase 1 Adulthood Work for yourself. What gets initiated during those years could involve commitments or practices that continue for the rest of your life.
10. Adults are made by other Initiated Adults.
11. The Authentic Initiatory Path from girlhood to womanhood or from boyhood to manhood is a Journey. It is not a lone journey. Initiations are most often done in the company of peers, and are Navigated by older, more experienced women or men whose Archetypal Lineage includes being some kind of Initiator. Most of you reading this website may not even remember your eighteenth birthday party, yet human beings are structured for Adulthood Initiations to begin at around 18 years of age. I have had the honor of being-with eighteen-year-old females and males in training spaces where they make leaps to enliven particular Archetypal aspects in themselves far more efficiently than older folks, and the rapid unfolding experience can be exhilarating.
12. The sudden transformations that happen during properly conducted Initiatory processes are clean and complete, far exceeding anything that we know of from ordinary school education, psychotherapy, and even what is shown in the most inspiring of films!
13. Most of us are probably thirty to fifty years old, and unlike eighteen-year-olds we have some seriously crystallized habits to contend with. Our thinking-joints do not flex as noiselessly or painlessly as they once did. There is more sludge built up in the nervous system. Our emotional arteries are clogged with sludge and we are slower and heavier than we once were. This is as it is. It is not too late to begin the Initiatory Path.
14. At those times when contrary forces exert their resistance to your evolutionary steps, try to remember this: Galileo Galilee was fifty-one years old when he wrote Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the book that got him arrested for heresy, but it was his second book that reordered the world of science. Irina Tweedie was fifty-two years old when she first met her guide and started on her Initiatory passage that has helped so many people start on theirs. (See her book, Daughter of Fire, which exquisitely describes her journey.)
15. To begin your Initiations, formally Declare that you are now beginning your Adulthood Initiations. This may seem ridiculously simple, yet it can be the challenge that stops 90% of people from succeeding. If you want to do this right now, it goes like this: Stand up, wherever you are, make eye contact with whoever is around you, and out loud (really LOUD, meaning, loud enough that others can actually hear you, loud enough that it disturbs sleeping Zombies...) say: “I (state your full name) hereby declare that I am beginning (or taking my next step in) my Authentic Adulthood Initiatory Processes.” Without smiling or further comment, receive any acknowledgement given to you by the others in the space. Then sit back down again and continue with whatever you were doing.
16. It is best if you make no Assumptions about already knowing what entering a lifelong Path of Authentic Adulthood Initiations could possibly mean or how it might go for you. Know How is only given to those who are already Committed.
17. Start regularly meeting with others in the name of Initiations. If you are a woman, get together with a few other women, men gather with a few other men, and in your coming together, try to discover what bonding is. These people you meet with do not need to be your friends. In fact it may be best if most of the others are complete strangers to you. Your friends could well be in a completely different evolution cycle from you, and perhaps you have used your feet-dragging friends as an excuse to procrastinate long enough, eh?
18. Men who were born and raised in the Patriarchy (meaning: all of us...) have a difficult time even understanding the need to get initiated into authentic adulthood because we forgot making the choice at birth to join the Patriarchy. The other option that boy babies have is to die. Doctors cannot explain this, and have called it Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).
19. In Patriarchy, men don't have to grow up. Men are trained by the Patriarchy to think that 'success' is getting away with making huge messes, externalizing your costs, and not having clean up.
20. In Patriarchy, women have particular difficulty in bonding – a phenomenon that is easily dismissed in a patriarchy. Women cannot trust each other enough to bond, being far more committed to competing against each other for power and favors from men. For women, getting through your deep-seated fear and hatred of your seductive sisters will involve breathtaking feats of courage. You will never encounter by accident the immense quantity of trust required, no matter how long you wait. You will need to generate whole new dimensions of trust out of nothing. Shadowy fears will always lurk in the dark recesses of your imagination – storing fears is what imagination is for.
21. Going through your Initiatory Processes together will involve women trusting the other women in spite of your fears. Trust is not some warm safe feeling that you get. Trust is a Decision that you make. After learning to consciously feel, to communicate, to Make Boundaries, to say what you want, to negotiate 5 Body Intimacies, your new decision might be: "I trust myself to take care of myself around other women." It can be particularly touching for women when your ritual of coming together includes speaking your trust out loud to each other. “Jane, I trust you. Petra, I trust you.” Then keep dealing specifically with each button, hook, trigger, or trauma that comes up for each of you in this process with Emotional Healing Processes (EHP).
22. There will always be fear. Trust is the decision that something else – in this case your Authentic Adulthood Initiations – are more important than your fear. Take a breath. You can manage this. Conscious Fear is a crucially important resource for navigating Adulthood opportunities and challenges.
23. We have only vague ideas what it might mean to bond with each other in our own gender/trans-gender cultures. Go ahead and bond anyway.
24. Bonding does not mean go drinking. Then again, neither does it mean not to have tea together. Just do not center your group about drinking alcohol or you will have very fat Gremlins and no Initiations to Adulthood.
25. These days, men’s or women’s groups are often confused with homosexual or LGBGTQ+ men’s or women’s groups. Making your group about being gay, touchy-feely, flirting, and finding your next 'lover', will divert you radically away from your Authentic Adulthood Initiatory Processes.
26. On the other hand, do not avoid being in a group just because someone is homosexual. For example, of the four men in my first men’s group, one man was gay, one was alcoholic and gay, and the third man was confused, angry, punk, and occasionally gay. I met with these three men every week for three years and it changed my life in a profoundly sane way - they literally saved my life. I am inexpressibly glad of this today because my life so far has been utterly exquisitely amazing. Together these men helped build a foundation in me that I still stand on to live from, and for their work with me I will remain forever grateful.
27. Create a Team of two to five women or men, meet consistently every week no matter what, and go through your Initiations together for the next years. Consider using the resources at Go Explore as study materials for supporting your group.
28. Because Authentic Adulthood Initiations upgrade ways that you think, feel, act, and are, it is self-deceptive to think that you can design and manage Initiations for yourself by yourself. I do not like telling you that anything is impossible. Promoting impossibility is against my nature. And, I have to say here that, based on my experience, when it comes to navigating your own unfolding, it is far too easy to fool yourself.
29. A central component of successful Adulthood Initiations is persistent, clear, direct, and honest feedback from other members of your Team. This is Torus Technology Teamwork: using group intelligence for the benefit of each person.
30. Thinking that you can give yourself accurate feedback is like leaving a kleptomaniac to guard a jewelry store, or a nymphomaniac to babysit your nine-year-old son. You might not get the results you hoped for...
31. In addition to exploring Study Materials, exchanging Feedback and Coaching, sharing stories, and giving and receiving support with your Team, the suggestion here is to also obtain the help of several Initiators. An Initiator can be anyone who is more experienced and further along the Path with more Matrix in their Initiations than you have, plus they need to be Responsible and Clear enough to Hold and Navigate Transformational Space.
32. Since Authentic Adulthood Initiations are not sponsored by modern culture, your Initiators will need to be Riftwalkers, Edgeworkers, or Possibilitators who have already gained access to a greater Context than delivered by modern culture. In other words, they will need to be Archans, residents of Archiarchy.
33. This does not mean that you should commit to the first Kabalistic Shaolin American-Indian Psychic Tibetan-Buddhist Tantric Sufi Shaman Kundalini Priest Healer from Africa who comes along. Stick a feather in your hat these days and advertise sweat lodges, Tantric-Whatever, vision quests, firewalking, outdoor drumming, or meditation retreats and you can fill your pockets with gold from the gullible. Let the buyer beware. Being ripped off and betrayed a few times does not necessarily need to be part of your Authentic Adulthood Initiation. Then again, maybe it does...
34. You will most likely end up with numerous Initiators along the way. But again: Beware! The tendency of your mind to come up with reasonable arguments for jumping from Path to Path, or Initiator to Initiator, the instant before an important shift is about to happen for you is an uncanny, irresistibly tempting, and classically ineffective Gremlin Survival Strategy. Jumping from Path to Path will only make you good at jumping.
35. Perhaps the best way to find an authentic Initiator is to speak with other people who are already participating in what the Initiator is delivering. Look for Initiators whose participants tend to stick with her or him for a long time. Then, you plan to stick with that Initiator for just as long.
36. A worthy Initiator will be surrounded by collaborators who are Grounded, Centered, balanced, resilient, healthy, Vocal, interested, vibrant, humorous, kind, generous, informative, vulnerable, intelligent, patient, well-rounded, and not only able to speak about what they are doing with Clarity and enthusiasm, but also able to listen to what you are looking for with respectful attention.
37. The way to have the Initiator commit to you is to commit to the Initiator first. Committing first - even before you know how - is a little-known and extremely effective nonlinear collaboration and creation strategy.
38. Find out what the Initiator expects in practical terms as a commitment from the people she or he works with, and then commit in exactly those practical terms. The Initiator for a man’s initiation into manhood will not be a woman. And vice versa. (Just being clear about this. It does not go without saying or I would not have to say it... You'd be surprised at how many otherwise intelligent people are fooling themselves about their real agenda...)
39. Preparing yourself for the various stages of Authentic Initiation into Adulthood involves developing internal disciplines, rigorous vigilance, various kinds of attention, Noticing, Self Observation, consistency of practice, enduring various discomforts and challenges, perhaps feeling embarrassed or overwhelmed, an ability to persist in the face of unforeseen or unimaginable difficulties, paying certain participation fees, attending particularly nonattractive gatherings or work projects, accepting with equanimity your own and other people’s lacks and insufficiencies, and so on. This can be a serious roller coaster ride.
40. For dignified Initiations it helps when you decide from the start to do whatever it takes to proceed with integrity and whole heartedness. Swâmi Prajnânpad, a little-known but skilled guide from India, was famous for telling his students, “It is not a joke. You will have to pay the full price.”
41. Your Initiator will suggest specific practices that either prepare you for, or actually take you a step forward on, your Initiatory journey. These practices could well include reading certain Books, watching certain Films, listening to certain music, doing certain physical movements or exercises, making certain restrictions or enhancements to your daily diet, engaging some kind of meditative or sitting practice, attending certain talks, presentations, workshops or trainings, exposing yourself to certain environments, and developing specific inner faculties that allow you to perceive various energetic relationships and spaces.
42. If an Initiation does not challenge your cultural addictions, or does not include most of the above listed practices, your Initiation may not be strong enough to actually help you escape you childhood survival strategy, unify your parts, and bridge you to Archiarchal adulthood.
43. Become acutely aware that you will be facing 4 Enemies on the evolutionary Path. Face them head on, and practice whatever is necessary in your case to defeat the 4 Enemies.
44. Become an expert at Liquid States. Learn to experientially distinguish between when you are in a Liquid State and when you are merely feeling an emotion that is a gateway to an Emotional Healing Process (EHP), then go do your EHPs! If it is a Liquid State, detect which of your 5 Bodies are involved in the Liquid State and surf on the symptoms rather than trying to make them go away. Let the transformation occur. Look forward to meeting who you are becoming next!

I (Clinton Callahan) was thirty-seven years old when I took my first step toward becoming an adult man. Even though I was graduated from the university, had traveled around the world for two-and-a-half years working in Australia and Japan, was happily married, had two wonderful children, owned a house and a car, and was running my own home-based electronic production company in northern California, I was still a boy.

In 1989, at my wife’s suggestion, I participated in a weekend training near Los Angeles called The Event. I had 'some' resistance to attending this training because I was a 'scientist' - at least I carried pens in my shirt pocket... and I imagined that I already had everything figured out.

How could I have problems that required a transformational training? Everything already worked – from my point of view.

The training experience was not what one might typically imagine a seminar to be: a few days where you learn something new. This was a Training: a few days where you become something new.

This particular training was born in the 1960s in the bowels of the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. It was developed through a creative collaboration between one of the prisoners, Ken Windes, and the prison psychologist, Dr. Martin Groder. The style of the Training was radical, transformational, guerilla street theater – quite confrontational and immune to manipulation, definitely originating far outside my mainstream-culture background. Participating in this Training formally started my initiations into adulthood.

During this Training I realized with serious dismay that, contrary to my previous self-concept, my highest priority and commitment in life was to defend the façade that I was a 'good boy'.

This shocking realization propelled me through a Doorway into the expansive evolutionary journey that I am still on today. Perhaps you too will find that a transformational training contributes important ingredients to your Authentic Adulthood Initiation.