Human Child & Human Adult Stages – Jed McKenna
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it‟s
going to be a butterfly. – R. Buckminster Fuller
There came a time when the risk to remain tight
in the bud was more painful than the risk it took
to blossom. – Anais Nin
―Human childhood is the ego-bound state. It is, in human children, a healthy and natural state. In human adults, however, it‘s a hideous affliction.
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The only way such an affliction could go undetected and unremedied is if everyone were equally afflicted, which is exactly the case. No problem is recognised and no alternative is known, so no solution is sought and no hope for change exists.
We live our entire lives under false pretences, in the case of mistaken identity.
Think of a grasshopper caught in a spiders web, injured with non-lethal poison and then cocooned in layer upon layer of silk thread, kept alive for freshness but tightly bound to prevent thrashing or escape. It is still alive, but bears no resemblance to its authentic grasshopper self. That state of immobilised, narcotised stupor fairly represents the state of the chronic human child, misapprehended worldwide as a normally developed adult.
And the spider fairly represents ‗Maya.‘ (1)
Most human beings cease to develop at around the age of ten or twelve. The average seventy year old is often a ten year old with sixty years time-in-grade.
Our societies are of, by and for human children, which explains the self-perpetuating nature of this ghoulish malady, as well as most of the silliness we see in the world.
Any of the negative things we might say about people in general – that we are greedy, corrupt, apathetic, stupid, hateful, violent, etc – are not symptoms of the human animal or the self-aware being, but of human childhood. Human childhood, though, is itself just a symptom of the one core disease from which all others radiate; fear. ‗Fear‘ (2) is the natural and certain state of one who lives with eyes closed. Ignorance is the condition of thinking ones closed eyes are open and that the world of one‘s imagining is the world as it exists.
The individual who wants to achieve change and growth in his/her own life, who wants to move beyond the state of developmental retardation imposed by a developmentally retarded society, can probably do so.
There‘s no saying what‘s possible for whom, but I feel pretty confident in saying that anyone who can understand their captivity and desire their freedom would find it possible to bring about a dramatic change in their condition.
We must learn to see the difference between a human adult and a human child as easily and unmistakably as we see the difference between a sixty year old and a six year old.
This may sound a little weird, but your ‗Ego‘ (3) is smarter than you, WAY
smarter, and if you don‘t recognise that and respect it, you stand very little chance against it.
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Ego doesn‘t need to be killed because it was never really alive. You don‘t have to destroy your false self because it‘s not real, which is really the whole point.
It‘s just a character we play, and what needs to be killed is that part of us that identifies with the character.
Once that‘s done – REALLY done, and it can take years – then you can wear the costume and play the character as it suits you to do so, now in character but not of the character.‖
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My Impression On Above Chapter: „A Computer Analogy‟
As a contemporary analogy, we might liken the ‗Delusion‘ (4) to the image created on a computer screen. Within the central processor of the computer are numerous bits of information, encoded as electronic states in the circuitry of the chips. Software in the computer processes this data, putting it into a form that when sent to the monitor causes it to light the screen in particular ways.
The image that is created may be derived from the data in the central processor, but it is not the same as the data. The computer is not producing some faithful imitation of an image held in memory. All there is code; microscopic electronic switches that are either on; or off (o‘s or x‘s) There is no colour or light in the computer code, and the spatial layout of the data on the chip bears very little resemblance to the layout of the final image.
If two monitor screens are connected to the computer we expect them to show similar; but not absolutely identical images. If not, then it is probably because they are adjusted differently, or there may be a fault in one of them or in the software, or perhaps one of them is near a strong magnetic field. But no particular image is intrinsically right or wrong. We may desire the picture to have a particular colour balance, and we adjust the software and the monitor screen to match these expectations and conventions. But there is no right way. It is just how we agree to interpret the data. A monitor showing a different interpretation is not wrong, just different.
When we interact with the computer it is easy to think we are interacting with the image on the screen, but we are not. When we select a part of the image with the mouse and drag it across the screen, it appears as if we are moving the image around. In reality we are sending messages to the computer to modify the state of its memory chips, and we see the effect of that on the screen.
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Current computers (year 2011) are so fast that we do not experience any lag between the movement of the mouse and the movement of the image on the screen; although thirty years ago, when computers were first connected to monitors, there could be a delay of many seconds, or even minutes, between giving a command to the computer and seeing the effects on the screen.
It is the same with the world we observe around us (except that instead of being a picture on a two-dimensional screen, our image of reality is three-dimensional, super high-resolution, with high-fidelity surround-sound, and tangible, with odours, tastes, sensations and other qualities).
We think we are interacting with the world we see, but in reality we are interacting with the ‗underlying physical world‘ and seeing the effects of that in the image of reality created in the mind.
When I pick up a cup there should be a delay of about a tenth a second between the movement in ‗Physical Reality‘(5) and my experience of that movement (that is the time it takes for the brain to process the sensory information and create the experience). Therefore my experience of reality should always be about a tenth of a second behind physical reality.
We never notice any lag, however, because the brain cleverly compensates for the delay, leaving us with the impression that we are interacting directly with the world as we experience it.
FOOTNOTES
1. Wikipedia – Maya;
2. Wikipedia – Fear;
3. Wikipedia – Ego.
4. Wikipedia – Delusion; and
5. Wikipedia – Physical Reality.
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