Dr. Thomas Balistrieri is the Director of Student Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the founder of a unique and revolutionary program called Passage. As a longtime counselor and mentor, he noticed the widespread phenomenon of students who had become "stuck in their youth." He founded Passage eleven years ago with the intent of assisting students in their transition into adulthood and full maturity. Passage is greatly influenced by Dr. Balistrieri's personal experiences with the mentors of both his youth and of his older years, including a Catholic nun, many professors, several Native American medicine men, and an Australian Aboriginal wise man.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Balistrieri, and I found him to be an incredibly compassionate and understanding person. More importantly, he has stood his ground in an increasingly money-oriented society and asserted himself as one of a rare breed of individual, a man of character. Dr. Balistrieri embodies the spirit of the person whom I aspire to be, because I believe he has attained the ultimate aim of the spiritual path: "A condition of complete simplicity . . . not costing less than everything" (T.S. Elliot).

Can you explain the basic premise of your program, Passage?

It used to be that cultures initiated their young people, so that young people worked with older people to learn about themselves and about living in balance with themselves, with others, and with nature. They learned about relationships, they learned about what it meant to be a man or woman, and they learned about dream interpretation, their role in life, their gift. They learned about art, and simple things like cooking, and how to get along with the other gender. Passage is a one-year process where a group of people commit to meeting once a week for about an hour or two, and they meet with various elders, various older people, and they have a mentor, and they simply learn about what it means to become an adult.

Why is initiation important in becoming an adult?

I think that initiation is extremely important because I think it's a time when young people and old people get together to talk about life, and then, of his or her own volition, a young person stands and chooses and says, "On this day, I leave childish things behind." I'm always in a state of becoming even though I am fifty years old. But at least I had a point in my life where I said that I freely choose to live the life of balance and of a wiser person. And without that, no one knows when they leave childish things behind. Everything is the same now. Everybody dresses the same, goes to the same places, does the same things. There is no delineation of the phases, or passages, or times. The graduation that is coming up now for seniors in college is a very important thing. If they just put on their little suits, go get drunk, and go get their degree, it means nothing. But if they had a few days where they thought about the past four years and what they learned, and they said goodbye appropriately to their friends and their professors—if they really thought about what's the next phase—then graduation would be a really important ceremony. But as you know, at many colleges graduation is just an opportunity to get drunk and to pick up a piece of paper with no understanding of the passage of graduation. That's sad.

What happens when we don't undergo initiation?

If we don't, we feel very disconnected and very isolated, and I think that's why so many people nowadays drink and do drugs and are depressed. Because they have nobody to help them find out what spirituality really is, they turn to spirits and they get drunk and then they feel like they can talk and relate to people, but all they are really doing is destroying their own bodies and their minds and their own spirits.

You mention in your book that much of society has become obsessed with the philosophy of, "He who has the most toys wins." Does Passage help individuals transcend this materialistic philosophy?

When we live in a world of toys, it's really a world of fear—fear that someone is going to take my toys or that someone is going to have more toys. The Passage program tries to get people to understand that we're never going to get out of this culture of toys, but that there is also something else, there's this other half. And once they find who they are and how they can bring meaning to their lives, their true decision-making will come.

How did our culture lose touch with rituals of initiation?

When you had specific cultures living by themselves, I guess you might say they were purer, and I'm not saying that was the right thing, but that's the way it was. As cultures began to meet, for example in the United States where Italians and Poles and Germans and everyone came over, I know that in my family, for example, my parents said, "We're not going to teach you Italian, we're not going to teach you Italian ceremonies. You are now American." Well, that doesn't mean very much. We don't have any true initiation ceremonies. I think that cultures getting together, the whole melting pot thing, killed them off.

Do you see any examples in present-day society of initiation ceremonies that still exist?

Well, people wrongly think that going into the military or those types of things are initiation. Initiation is not an event. Initiation is a long process of focused learning about becoming a balanced person, so no, I don't feel a lot of that. At colleges, if you were to take the spiritual, the physical, the emotional, and the intellectual, you might have it. We all know that at the university we focus on the intellectual, that students on their own might learn about emotions, and on their own might go after a sport, and spirituality is left behind. Fraternities could be wonderful opportunities if the men allowed older men and older women to help them learn what it means to be a man, but I think that a lot of their initiation ceremonies have simply turned into, "Now you're one of us," and a hazing mentality that, "I got paddled so now I'm going to paddle you." It's lost the meaning.

Take the movie Fight Club, for example. I understand that young men are attracted to the movie because of the fighting and all of that, but I think that that movie is the shadow side of what true initiation is. I think what you're seeing is a group of men that archetypally knew that something should be happening to help them, and they went to the violence side of it. So I think that the movie touched a lot of people archetypally, and what scares me is that a lot of people say, "Ah, this is what it is," and it is not. It is that, but it's not that. The things that you don't recognize, the things that you ignore, the things that you pretend aren't there, if you don't acknowledge them, they'll mutate and turn into really uglier and creepier things. The young man who refuses to acknowledge that he has feminine tones will abuse women, or the person who is very depressed and doesn't acknowledge it will go out and drink a lot and self-medicate. A person who thinks they might be gay will go and beat up gay people. And it usually means that we haven't looked deep inside of ourselves to see what is there. Including the good stuff.

What should the experience of initiation be like?

It's about thriving. Often when you hear people talking about a fraternity initiation, you hear people say, "I hope that I survive this." When you go through a true initiatory experience, you don't worry about surviving it. Your understanding of it is that you're thriving, that you're being enhanced, that you're growing.

I imagine that a big part of this process is building character. What is the role that character plays on the path towards maturity?

Character is the core of it. Character is about truth, and God-truth. Character is about what you do when no one is looking. If you look in a mirror, you might be lying to the world, but you can't lie to yourself. Character is at the core; it's what you're about. There's a wonderful book out now called the Death of Character by James Davison Hunter, and he thinks that it might be too late for us. We are such a world without character, we're a world that has toys as God—you know, the most expensive this, the best-looking that. And that's characterless. Character is found in doing the tough thing, the right thing, examining things, helping others to find their character, but nowadays life is so much about pleasing other people or pleasing oneself, finding the easy way out. It doesn't build character.

In modern society, so much emphasis is placed on personal freedom.

I don't think most people know what the definition of freedom is anymore. When I travel the country, the first thing I ask people is, "How do you define freedom?" Everybody is very "I" oriented, when freedom is really "you" oriented. But because of that "He who has the most toys wins," and "I can do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it" philosophy, you're forgetting the most important question, which is not, "What about me?" The most important question is, "How can I help you?" And if everyone is asking that question, then you have true freedom, you have true character, you have true balance, because then everyone is considering everyone else. If you look up the words in the Pledge of Allegiance, where it says, "liberty and justice for all," that's where you find what freedom is about. Freedom and liberty and justice, they are about compassion, about equality, about character. So, freedom does not mean that I can do whatever I want to do whenever I want to do it. It's about how can I help other people find their gift, how can I make sure that justice is being done, that people are being treated with truth and honor. It takes great courage to live with character. It's pretty easy to just be a pleaser.

Isn't one's personal happiness an important consideration during the maturing process?

Happiness is one of those pretty tenuous things. You can be happy eating two pieces of pizza for a few days in a row, and then you're going to get sick of pizza. Or you can be happy having two beers, but then you're going to need three. That's also selfishly oriented, that I can do whatever I want to do as long as I don't hurt anybody and as long as I'm happy. You can have a bunch of happy people living around a concentration camp, but as long as you know that someone on the other side of the barbed wire fence is being tortured, that's not liberty and justice for all. So, it's not about me, myself, and I. It's not about "I'm happy." I think it's about meaning, it's not about happiness.

So then how do we find and integrate meaning into our lives?

The key is to live in the present, to every day ask oneself: "How am I doing? How am I helping others? What meaning did I get today?" When you lay in bed at night, ask yourself, "What did I learn today? Who did I help today? Did I make the world a better place or a worse place?" Just like a campsite that they tell you to leave cleaner than when you arrived, every day live that way. That's spiritual work, that's the work of being a person of character, a good human. It may not be easy fasting for a couple of days, knowing that maybe you're going to gain some wisdom or that someone who's starving is going to be able to eat because you're not. That doesn't necessarily make you feel happy, but it will make you feel fulfilled, and bring some meaning into your world.

What does it take to do that?

It takes courage and character. It's also the company you keep. It takes constantly talking with wiser people. I heard a speech in which the speaker said that in order to become wise, what you need to do is to meet with wise and great people, to attend great events, read great books, and go to great places. I think what that does is, that you understand the energy and electricity and the wisdom of greatness. If you go to a sleazy movie tonight, and then you go get drunk, and you're with a sleazy person, then you're going to wake up and feel pretty sleazy. But if tonight you were to talk to a great person, or read a great book, or attended a great event, tomorrow you're going to wake up feeling that. That's the mirror law. So every day you could do something meaningful, read something meaningful, write something meaningful, do artwork; it's a combination of not doing yucky things and doing important and wonderful things, staying connected with nature and people. Yes, you have to live in a world where you want a nice computer or a good car or nice clothes. There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing wrong with having a couple beers, but as soon as you have to have five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten beers—it's always the extremes that get us into trouble. Balance is about just that. It's not about becoming a teetotaler or becoming an aesthetic on a mountain top with no clothing. It's about living the life and living in balance.

Where does self-knowledge fit into this?

It's the first step. The first step is finding out who you are, looking at the mirror at yourself, and then it's finding the other connections from there, with family and nature, with the Creator, with all things.

What is the role of the mentor in this process?

What I do is hold up the mirror so that they can see themselves, and then I ask them, how may I help you? How can I help you become wiser so that you can fix yourself? How can I help you to find your own gift, to find the meaning in your life, to find how you're going to bring meaning to your life?

Eric Fountain is a freshman at Duke University. Special thanks to Doug Friedlander who assisted in putting together this interview.

With Self-Knowledge Comes Power (top)
Stuart C. Higginbotham

What does it mean to truly know yourself? To look deep down inside and see beyond the outer representations? Past the possible façade? I believe this question is one that all people should ask themselves at some point in life. Only when a person finds their true identity can they both proceed further into life and become powerful and able to affect society. Only with identity can experiences, aspirations, and all endeavors carry true meaning. Without self-knowledge, then, life offers only hollow contributions to a shell of an individual.

At Lyon College, we began a program called Passage in the fall of 1998. This program offered the means to help us learn how to discover our true identity in ways on which we had never focused. The program was as broad as it was deep.

On an outermost level, the program focused on the physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual aspects of each of the individuals involved. Thus, the whole person was investigated. This holistic attitude was very beneficial in developing a sense of connection and forming a broad foundation for future relationships and study.

After developing this background, more investigations were made into specific archetypes of individuals, as well as feminine and masculine tones. These studies were very profound as some, if not most, individuals had never thought of themselves as having traits of the opposite sex. Discovering that it was normal to have such traits, everyone learned a great deal about himself or herself. We found that only by identifying our complete characteristics do we have the potential to be balanced. True self-knowledge was gained by researching into the whole person—not just the person thought to exist through the exterior.

For instance, the group focused on four major personality archetypes: the magician, the lover, the warrior, and the monarch. All people have characteristic traits of each of these types, including known and unknown or shadow traits. Over the two years since we began this program, we discussed these archetypes both in terms of the realized or known and in terms of the shadow. As a group and individually, we came to realize that the shadow traits of the archetypes were not negative, just under-investigated. All essences of our characteristics are important for who we are as people—even characteristics previously thought to be detrimental. The shadow was not a "shadow" in the sense of being dark and forbidden. Instead, it is a shadow because it's always there, following us even when we do not acknowledge its presence. A balanced individual learns that the shadow characteristics have essential effects on the known; one cannot exist successfully without the other.

On another occasion, the group met only to find that we were to sit in complete silence. We said nothing other than our usual greetings to each other. We sat and meditated for over half an hour on no set topic. After that time, we discussed what we had experienced during our meditations and thinking. For each person it was distinct and exciting. Everyone had traveled to different places, experiencing very different things. Some had conversations with relatives, trees, or animals, or had seen a mysterious light from inside an oak tree, while others just listened to the rustle of the drying leaves outside the window. The key here, then, was to experience this moment alone. What did we learn while we were alone in our meditation? How did the lessons and discussions we had help us understand ourselves? And finally, what self-knowledge did we gain? The answers to each of these questions formed from individual experience. In this circumstance we were each fully vulnerable to whatever stimulus we encountered.

Having briefly summarized our process of self-knowledge realization, I will turn now to the power it offers. How do we use this knowledge? Where does the power come into play?

In life, we begin our experiences through group process and relation: we learn from teachers and from each other. As we get older, most importantly in terms of maturity and experiences, we begin to reach out individually to new adventures. Thus, after we learn how to discover who we truly are and how we fit in this world, we are better able to be alone—not physically, emotionally, spiritually, or intellectually, because we are interconnected—but alone in our capability to discover, explore, investigate, and eventually apply our knowledge to society. Thus true power from self-knowledge brings the ability to contribute effectively to society. Making an impact. Leaving your mark. This is how one is powerful through knowledge.

The Ancient Egyptians were obsessed with immortality. They built unfathomable projects to enable their pharaohs to live forever. Indeed, they have lived forever, at least in the eye of history. Why can't we do the same thing? We truly are powerful when we have a lasting impact on even one person. Our history, actions, and knowledge become intertwined with theirs. In a sense, it is immortality. But the world can truly know us only if we truly know ourselves.

An Educator's Passage Story (top)
Diane Ellis

Passage speaks to your soul. It is real life. It makes sense. It connects. As I thought about how to write about my experience of Passage, those were my first thoughts. This article is not about Passage itself, but about how Lyon College implemented Passage. It is important that you, the reader, understand that although Passage's primary purpose is to take students through a multi-faceted process toward becoming adults, it can be implemented in many different ways depending on your campus climate.

I first heard Dr. Tom Balistrieri present the concepts of Passage at a small conference for college counseling center personnel. What I heard made a real connection for me. I immediately knew that we had to have Tom come to our campus. For anyone who has been involved with what are often thought of as "fringe groups," you will understand that it was a big risk to bring someone to campus to discuss the idea of masculine and feminine tones, initiating students into adulthood, Native American symbolism, and much more. It was also very exciting.

Tom did come to our campus and was a real hit with our staff and students. During that first visit, Tom spoke several times on campus. He offered a variety of lecture styles from storytelling, to drumming, to running a weekend "mini-Passage." Faculty and staff were asked to nominate students they believed might be interested in spending two days with Tom for a brief preview of Passage. We then sent letters to those students and asked those interested to reply by a certain date. This letter did not give a revealing description, and many were intrigued with what this weekend might hold for them. Seven students replied and committed to that weekend. Though the group was small, the experience turned out to be great for those attending. This was in January and for the remainder of that year, the Director of Student Activities and I met with some of those students plus a few others to discuss "Passage-related" topics.

My boss, the Vice President of Student Life and Dean of Students, was so supportive of Passage that he made it possible to bring Tom back the next year to carry out a full Passage process. (This is really a misnomer because Passage can include so many other things besides meeting and going through Passage, but those things have not yet happened at Lyon.) This time we decided to have faculty and staff also go through the process, so that they could then offer Passage the following year, having gone through the process themselves. Seven students and six staff committed to this yearlong process.

Tom came four times throughout the school year and assisted me from a distance in leading students and staff between his visits. The students and staff met separately throughout the first semester. We would meet weekly, or every other week, to discuss things such as: What does it mean to be . . . a man . . . a woman? What are your wounds? What is your gold? What is sacred to you? We would discuss the tempering project that they worked on throughout the year. We would share stories, poetry, and beliefs. Sometimes there were writings done between meetings that were later shared. All of this not only created a bond between each of the members of the two groups, but it also began each person thinking about and feeling what it meant to be an adult and a responsible human being. I would share with each of the two groups some of the things that were happening in the other group to begin to connect them.

Both groups were very eager to meet together. Once this took place, there was an immediate connection and lots of sharing. The "elders" of the group commented about learning as much (or maybe more!) from the students as the students learned from them. As I can hear Tom saying, "This is the stuff of Passage."

The Passage participants met twice with Tom in the second semester. Anticipation grew for the final Passage meeting. There were mixed emotions and mixed opinions about what the final weekend would include. Tom always insisted that we make it what Lyon College wanted it to be, as long as there was some final ceremony. The details were finally worked out after many discussions. Tom traditionally ends his yearlong Passage process in one way; however, he was very flexible in making our ceremony a special event geared toward our group.

As I have heard Tom say many times, "This end is really a beginning." This became true as we discussed with participants what Passage next year at Lyon would look like. Many offered to help us modify Tom's Passage notes and make it applicable to our own Passage process. Some offered names of people who really wanted to be in Passage the next year. Some continued adding to their tempering projects. Many continue to share their personal learning while involved with Passage.

We are planning for next year and looking into how we will continue to make Passage a worthwhile and meaningful process for our students. Although some of the magic from Passage came from having an outside person come to our campus, we believe that the concept of Passage goes much deeper. There are certainly many pathways toward becoming an adult. In today's world, however, we are lacking both in connections between elders and young people and in ceremonies which outwardly show the movement from one phase to another and the responsibility that must go in tandem. I believe that Passage does a great deal of that and more. You still don't know what Passage is? It is spiritual. It is philosophical. It is mystical. It is connection. It is soul stirring. It stays with you.

Return to top of this issue