This morning, coffee in hand and watching the light change outside my window, I found myself thinking about alchemy—that ancient pursuit of transforming base metals into gold. Most dismiss it as medieval wishful thinking. But Carl Jung saw something deeper.
In Richard Rohr’s latest book, The Tears of Things, he unpacks Jung’s radical reframe: “Alchemy was an early, prescientific form of chemistry by which people sought to create gold by mixing the right elements, for the right amount of time, to the right degree, and at the right temperature. While the practical results were mixed, Jung nonetheless applies it as a helpful metaphor for human transformation.”
What if those alchemists weren’t really after gold at all? What if they were unknowingly mapping how we become whole?
The Seven Stages of Becoming Human
Jung identified seven alchemical phenomena most experience during our lives:
- conjunctio: combining contrary ingredients
- solutio: loss of one substance to create new admixture
- sublimatio: refining lesser ingredients into higher ones
- coagulatio: turning something ephemeral into concrete
- calcinatio: hardening needed to coalesce into substance
- mortification: necessary dying for movement between stages
- putrefactio: changing to the point of appearing unattractive
The first four sound almost pleasant—combining, refining, making concrete. But those last three? They sound like what life actually feels like when it’s changing us.
When Life Becomes the Laboratory
Recently turning 60, I find myself living in those final phenomena. The last few years have been my alchemical experiment: a painful divorce, running a business through COVID’s chaos, selling that business and stumbling into liminal space, and receiving a bladder cancer diagnosis.
None of this felt like transformation while I was in it. It felt like dismantling.
This reminds me of another Rohr insight: profound growth comes through great love or great suffering. We’d all choose love if we could. But life is a more practical alchemist. Some hardening, dying, and becoming temporarily unattractive to ourselves is par for the course.
Have you noticed this? How the changes that matter most rarely announce themselves as gifts?
The Courage to Stay in the Soup
Jung’s genius was recognizing that the alchemists’ search for gold was really a search for human wholeness. But here’s Rohr’s challenge: we must resist our ego’s desperate need to control everything.
Think of the caterpillar in its chrysalis. There’s a stage where it’s neither caterpillar nor butterfly—just soup. Undifferentiated cellular matter reorganizing itself into something with wings. The caterpillar doesn’t manage this process. It surrenders to it.
Our egos hate this stage. We want to skip the soup and get to the wings. We want to direct our transformation, maintain dignity, maybe even look good while changing.
But what if the soupy liminal stage isn’t a bug—it’s the feature?
What the Heart Knows That the Head Doesn’t
Rosemary Wahtola Trommer’s poem captures this:
“The heart understands swirl, how the churning of opposite feelings weaves through us like an insistent breeze leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves blesses us with paradox so we might walk more openly into this world so rife with devastation, this world so ripe with joy.”
The heart understands swirl. While our minds want clear categories and linear progress, the heart knows how to hold contradictions. It can be broken and grateful simultaneously. It can grieve and hope in the same breath.
Maybe this is why the alchemists’ literal experiments failed but their metaphor endures. They were onto something true about how change actually works—messy, mysterious, requiring more trust than technique.
The Gold We Actually Find
At 60, having been through calcinatio, mortification and putrefactio stages, I’m starting to glimpse what the alchemists were really after. Not literal gold, but wholeness that can only come from being thoroughly broken down and reassembled.
The divorce taught me about letting go of scripts I’d built my identity around. Cancer realigned my priorities with the knowledge that any day could be my last. Selling my business meant releasing control of something I’d poured years into building.
Each experience felt like dissolution. Each felt like death. But now, on the other side, I can see the strange alchemy at work. The base metals of my various catastrophes are slowly revealing something that looks less like the life I planned and more like the life I might actually be meant to live.
What about you? What base metals is life asking you to work with right now? And can you trust the process even when it looks nothing like transformation?
I’d love to hear about your own alchemical moments in the comments—the times when life’s laboratory produced something you never could have manufactured on your own.
-Ray
Ray Kennedy is a 2nd half of life seeker who’s wisdom-in-progress and working on a purpose portfolio. He’s had corporate and entrepreneurial careers, and is currently mentoring, coaching, and involved in glamping. Lastly, he’s a beginner writer and poet. Check out his Substack “Wisdom-in-Progress”: https://raykennedy.substack.com/