"I have come to use the word 'soul' to express...the core consciousness in each of us that holds the potential and pattern of our full unique, maturity. This soul is seeking realization and expression in everyday life and its presence is within us from birth - death. I am...using the word in its existential meaning of human vitality and depth, core qualities and values"and particularly life... purpose/direction." Tom Yeomans

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World renowned psychologist Abraham Maslow said:

"What [psychologists consider a well-adjusted person or] call normal is really a psychopathology so undramatic and so widely spread that we don't even notice it..."

Introduction

In this essay I will be suggesting that the core problem facing our world is not global warming or even the possibility of a nuclear holocaust; it is a lack of human maturity.

Is maturity staying married (or divorcing our first spouse and finding one more suited to us), caring for three healthy children, living in a four-bedroom house, driving a popular brand of car, finding and keeping a lucrative career, etc.? Is it having the clarity to remain single if this path feels right?

Is it learning to delay gratification? To balance short-term gains with a long-term view? Is it everyday responsibility? Knowing when to be truthful and when to withhold truth? Discerning the difference between actual love and narcissism?

Is it being a "moral person" (although this definition can vary from culture to culture)? Is it worshiping "God" as we are taught to understand this Higher Being? Is it having the courage to choose atheism? Is it being a responsible community member?

While some of these can be indications of mature functioning, I will note an additional criteria which Scott Peck calls "dedication to the reality." He states:

"..if our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow we must be committed to a dedication to the truth.

"Our view of reality is like a map with which to negotiate the terrain of life. If the map is true and accurate, we will generally know where we are; if the map is false and inaccurate, we generally will be lost."

"First of all, we are not born with maps; we have to make them, and this making requires effort, but many do not want to make this effort. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading.

By middle-age [or even the end of adolescence] most people have given up the effort. They feel certain that their maps are complete, and they are no longer interested in new information.

"[Yet to be healthy] we must continually revise our maps.The process of making revisions, particular major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful. The painful effort [to redraw our maps, beliefs, or premises] seems frightening and almost overwhelming. What we do more often than not - and usually unconsciously - is to ignore the new information."

Maturity Re-defined

I will argue that, at this historical time, full maturity involves the criteria I've mentioned and much more: living a conscious experience (rather than an intellectual realization) of being at one with the universe or being a citizen of the cosmos. The solid sense of separateness we carry is transcended.

Gandhi, who managed to defeat the British Empire's occupation of India, said,

"When you reduce yourself to zero, your power becomes invincible."

This entails a long-term view and means making the separate ego-sense transparent, so that the light and power of the Conscious Multiverse can shine through us. It also entails both supreme patience and persistence. Duane Elgin, though fully cognizant of the period through which we are passing, estimates that if we engage in the growth process that is possible, we will reach our initial planetary maturity within five hundred years.

Meanwhile, we should know that maturity, which can be described in terms of love and awareness (loving-awareness) can be contagious.

We are at the beginning of a highly consequential moment in the development of humanity. Each one of us, and each growth step counts. Those who are even the least bit ripe can be supported in the growth of greater awareness and motivation. Will we make the effort to first establish within ourselves - and then discover the skill of sharing with others - our growing maturity?

Current Challenges

The path to Oneness involves honesty re- the challenges we face as human beings. The sociopolitical situations we currently face include a series of intense lessons in discernment. We are challenged to see through the well-crafted business of fear that has overrun our planet. While this is often not easy, we would do well to recall that difficult and challenging experiences often precede worthwhile achievements.

The choices we make and the risks we are willing to take are essential to the process of strengthening our resolve and waking up to the recognition and application of our personal power.

We are being offered the opportunity to achieve a profound deepening of awareness and sensitivity, which in turn, is driving us to feel, heal and deal with our personal and planetary life situations. We are challenged to create a unified-differentiated humanity and a world that works for all.

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Due to their reckless indifference, extreme hubris, foolish selfishness and ignorance, world leaders are like pied pipers, guiding humanity into a period of vast disruptions of the earth's ecosystems and social institutions. Many of us are already experiencing severe trauma, amnesia, and dissociation regarding our predicament.

Threats of war and the creation of enemies serve to keep the masses under control by gridlocking trauma and dissociation. War releases thought forms of rage, bloodlust, victimhood and disempowerment, even among those not specifically engaged in conflicts. Violence, hostility and predictions of impending crises create intense negative energies of fear, which can immerse all of earth in collective stress.

Hermann Goering:

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany...But after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament or a communist dictatorship.

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Humanity in Crisis

Humanity is in a crisis, which in large part stems from a deeply ingrained fear of knowing the truth.

Two truths, which we invariably respond to with denial are the realities of the event known as "9/11" and the presence of extraterrestrials on our planet. Both have and vast implications. (9/11truth.org and Siriusdisclosure.com).

There are others:

We are facing the persistence of a global nuclear threat and bioweapons, environmental degradation the world over (huffpost.com/ entry/ un-report- ipbes- wild- species- extinction_ n _62c992fae4b0359fa47c13ce), overpopulation and a possible de-population strategy, the rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor across the world, the destructive role of malignant-narcissist political, military and business leaders, and the rise of authoritarianism/fascism the world over.

All of these threats stem from human greed/avarice/grasping, anger/hostility/aggression and ignore-ance.

All these need to be considered in light of the inter-retroactions between these and other problems, crises, and threats. When taken together this state of affairs can be accurately labeled a "poly-crisis."

Will humanity allow the few to control the world, or will the many create the world they want? Will the few succeed in their desperate despotic game plans to divide humanity and destroy the majority human beings and much of the Biosphere?

Can we treat the current and upcoming crises, as initiations leading to a new human alloy?

Can we remind ourselves that the force of health and the potential for growth toward wholeness exists in every being, just waiting for blocks to its expression to be dissolved?

Can we become willing to know ourselves as essential nodes in the multi-verse and draw on its power to establish freedom and prosperity on earth?

As Edgar Morin declares, maturity involves seeing the parts, the Whole and the relationship between them. This requires much inner and outer work.

Morin:

Reduction and Disjunction

"Up to the mid-twentieth century, most scientific disciplines obeyed the principle of reduction of the knowledge of a whole to knowledge of its parts, as if the organization of an entity did not produce new qualities or properties with respect to the parts taken in isolation.

"The principle of reduction inevitably results in reduction of the complex to the simple. It applies to living human complexities the mechanical determinist logic of artificial machines. And it may obscure the truth and eliminate all elements that cannot be measured and quantified, taking the human out of what is human, the passions, emotions, sorrows and joys. Further, when the principle of reduction is applied in strict obedience to the determinist postulate it obscures what is fortuitous, new, inventive.

"Because we were taught to separate, compartmentalize and isolate learning instead of making connections, the whole of our knowledge forms an unintelligible puzzle. Interactions, retroactions, contexts and complexities, lost in the no-man's land between different disciplines, become invisible. The major human problems disappear, obscured by specific technical problems. The inability to organize scattered compartmentalized learning leads to atrophy of the natural mental disposition and globalize.

"Fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanized, disjunctive, reductionist intelligence breaks the 'world-complex' into disjointed fragments, fractures problems, separates what is connected, makes the multidimensional unidimensional. This intelligence is nearsighted and often goes blind. Possibilities of comprehension and reflection are nipped in the bud, the chances of corrective judgement or a long-term view are drastically reduced."

Conclusion

As Sri Aurobindo made lucidly clear, our current level of being is by no means the final stage of potential human growth. If we avoid the "Armageddon Bypass" (and it is by no means certain that we will) many further levels of seeing and being await us. Regular spiritual practices, conscious, politically aware, selfless service to others, and savvy, intuitively valid political action can make the possible into the actual.

Jose Arguelles, Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness (Illustrated).

Roberto Assagioli, Psychosynthesis

Duane Elgin, Awakening Earth.

Edgar Morin, Homeland Earth

__________, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future

Thomas Yeomans, Holy Fire. the Process of Soul Awakening.

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Authors Bio:

I work as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on transformational learning - a blend of psychoanalytic and transpersonal approaches, and am the author of Self Actualization and Unselfish Love and co-author of Families Helping Families: Living with Schizophrenia, as well as Mental Illness as an Opportunity for Transformation. My interests and life have taken parallel courses, which together have woven a complex tapestry: spirituality and meditation on the one hand, and political psychology on the other. I have studied and practiced with Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Mata Amritanandamayi and Gurumayi Chidvilasanda, and continue a daily practice of meditation. My early political education began with the writings of the founding fathers. Over time this led to involvement in the anti-Vietnam war and anti-nuclear movements. I was interested in the powerful molding of prevailing political and economic dynamics by what C. Wright Mills called the military-industrial complex. In time I have come to the conclusion that, despite various interest groups' attempts to minimize or trivialize the concept, the deep state is a reality - decisively and covertly shaping events on both the domestic and international fronts. I am interested in an exceptionally promising alternative source of energy that has yet to see the light of day. I see the current period as a precarious form of initiation rite into the beginning of adulthood for our species, and hope to do whatever I can to help us reach this goal. Meanwhile, I seek daily to recall the reality that the same awareness (the Ever-Present-Origin) looks out through all of our eyes, and actualize this in my relationship with other beings.