Life as a Process

Life is an active and organized process. As you move through your environment, you learn and grow, automatically, with each adjustment you make to meet your internal needs. Your physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual needs are as unique as you are. Life, for you, is the sum of all your responses to events, people, and the greater natural forces beyond your control. How you move through life can describe your continuing development.

What is Life?

Even in a person whose body is still, the sign of life is what is happening inside that person. You can start with how your body functions, performed in your body without your direct involvement. Your body is a whole system. Your veins and nerves are active; your muscles are still or contract when you move.

Breathing is automatic. Your senses deliver vision, hearing, smells, and the sensations of taste and touch. This is how we experience the external world. Your body responds to what it perceives through the senses; there’s an automatic response, from unconscious gut reactions to movement of muscles. In this incredibly short period, your intuition guides your survival.

Actions have consequences. As you grow from child to adult, your body builds a history of your responses to the external environment. Repetition in circumstances allows the body to build systems of knowing how to respond in a way that benefits your life. You learn what works for you. This begins when you are born.

The Human Organism

The term epigenesis describes the discovery in the 1950s of how babies develop in the womb by Nature’s whole, self-directed way. The cellular growth that begins to form you at conception is an unbroken process that carries traits of your individual identity. Your DNA identifies you as unique by your specific traits, a mere 0.1% difference from other people. By studying your nature as a human organism, you can understand the force that keeps you alive.

The natural process of living and growing sustains your specific DNA and it continues through your life cycle until your life ends. How you live and grow, throughout your life, is a simple repetition of the process that formed you. When you are born, you begin a life cycle.

The process of your development is common to all of us. The shape of your life is yours alone. Your development continues until your life ends, following your DNA. New cells replace old cells in the body, but development also continues internally.

Life's Phases

You learn about life and its unavoidable unpleasantries. You shed childhood, take on roles and goals, establishing leadership as you select from circumstances what works for you and reject what works against your nature.

How you feel about your life becomes increasingly important. Feelings in your body send messages to your brain. The automatic responses of your body guide you toward what you want and withdraw you from what is uncomfortable or threatening. Over time, consequences appear in your life; you don’t know why, only that they do. You learn through the way life supports or discourages your choices.

Early Childhood: Navigating with inborn resourcefulness.

During your first twelve years, life is simply presented to you. Previous to being born, your environment was close and secure. Now you adjust to the world having only what you were born with. You must learn everything, from how to see to how to touch and then to use your voice. Each year you learn something larger than yourself and you must respond.

As a young child you have no control over your life and by age nine, you begin to form a sense of your world, as far as you know. Between 10 and 12, you take a position toward life - as it was presented to you. Through your experience, you form an individual perspective, an opinion that you choose about life.

Early Adulthood: Personal Priorities

From age 12 to 23, you build a system that places values in an order that works for you. This is a natural and intuitive process, built from the inside out, sorting what you prefer to keep out of situations. Your survival as an autonomously self-regulating person depends on having priorities that serve as you mature; you are becoming who you are.

Relationship Choices in Adulthood

Having set your life priorities in order, you intuitively look into situations to find matches to your priorities. This is a bit of trial and error. Your internal confidence is tested as you are attracted by what you perceive and attract the attention of others. You may not be able to get as solid a match as you hope for but the experiences help you refine your goals. This is also a process of maturity. From age 24 to 35, your choices are shaping a life position.

Maturity in Adulthood: Making Your Place

At age 36 and through age 47 you work out in real time the position you imagined as your own. The determination you will feel comes from a natural desire to be recognized and acknowledged as a person distinct from all others. The progression from early childhood to this phase has been steady; you know yourself and how life has proven what works for you. With unconscious clarity, you carve out your place in the world, one that identifies your natural resourcefulness and skill.

Meaning

The internal development of an individual is uniquely formed in responses to life and changes that impact you. From early childhood to old age, you learn about life, attaching yourself to what gives your life meaning. Meaning is private and highly personal to you. You feel it in what seem to be random occasions. Building meaning is Nature’s domain; the way you live as a unique person in the external world is an unseen internal process, first.

You are autonomous; you choose to build yourself up. The way life supports you in this effort tells you whether you are finding the right place according to your life’s work. A good way to see your connection with Nature is to notice when life comes together for you and you succeed in an effort. These times create the feeling of satisfaction, and that feeling is one you want to feel again.

When life works for you, it feels good. More often, life seems to work against your best intentions. Rather than being two separate forces, these two are working together. In humans, growth is a natural process that moves beyond physical development toward meaning. Without meaning, life discourages; with meaning, life encourages.

The Science of Individuality

Albert Einstein described individual perspective in his theory of special relativity. Your view of some external event is different from all others, based on your unique physical position. Every person has that same uniqueness, fed by our life experiences.

Your body responds in different ways to your environment. Eminent neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes the paths from the nervous system, the body, and feelings sent to the brain - how all that energy in you creates images in your mind. These images communicate information about your unique state of being. You solve problems for yourself based on this internal knowledge.

Psychologist Erik H. Erikson used the discoveries about gestation, extending the principles of epigenesis as a key point in his psychology. He recognized epigenesis as a natural process in the development of individual autonomy and the formation of identity. Erikson was the first to contrast positive and negative tendencies that change during human development from birth to old age.*

Conclusion

Positive psychology in social responsibility grew stronger through Erikson’s influence in the following decades, used in education. In the twenty-first century, growing interest in self-awareness, mindfulness, and acceptance of diversity can be considered a trend in the same direction. Every internal experience is unique.

Natural development is a life system, not something created or imagined but observed, such as we observe the biological systems of the body. In my paper,** I refer to Erikson’s use of the term epigenesis as a principle of natural development and how it applies in the Theory of Unconscious Response™, a study of the twelve phases phenomenon. The 12 Phases™ system can be understood as the rhythm of life, beneath your external experience.

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* Erikson’s psychology found a home in education as the government took an interest in promoting Erik and Joan Erikson’s theories presented in his book of 1950, Childhood and Society.

Erikson’s “Eight Ages of Man”:

Stage 1 Early Infancy: Trust vs. Mistrust

Stage 2 Toddler: Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt

Stage 3 Early Childhood: Initiative vs. Guilt

Stage 4 Middle Childhood: Industry vs. Inferiority

Stage 5 Adolescence: Identity vs. Identity Confusion

Stage 6 Young Adulthood: Intimacy vs. Isolation

Stage 7 Middle Adulthood: Generativity vs. Stagnation

Stage. 8 Older Adulthood: Integrity vs. Despair

My work:

** "Qualitative Study of the Theory of Unconscious Response," Elizabeth Diane Garcia Martin (aka, Elizabeth Diane). Available on ResearchGate.net.