REFLECTIONS ON THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HUMAN LIFE By Observers In the complex global society of today, most of us are inevitably confused much of the time. This comes from a lack of understanding of what is going on. The human race is now in the midst of one of its more profound transitions. With all of Life, we are Evolving. There is a never-ending debate in our world today between those who believe in Intelligent Design and those who believe in Evolution. We will eventually come to accept that both are true. Intelligence can be defined as 'the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations'. Isn't that exactly what Nature (Life) does as it evolves? It learns what works and what doesn't - and only what works survives, a part of the Unity of the Universe. The intelligent all-pervading Unity in the Universe, (Nature/Life) is an evolving power we as yet don't and cannot comprehend. As Larry Cohen so aptly put it, "We are Created by a powerful Life-giving Force with an intelligence we have no ability to analyze. It is a waste of time for us to try, much like an insect trying to analyze a human being from its very limited point of view." The theory of Evolution, as expressed by Darwin, does not try to explain the origins of Life, which is as yet unknown, but the origin of species. "There is," wrote Darwin, "a grandeur in this view of Life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been and are being evolved." The very first step in making the Change to twenty-first century thinking is to acknowledge that we human beings not only have Evolved but that we, (and all else) are still very much Evolving. Our Evolution is naturally not apparent to us as we live our lives from day to day, just as we don't really observe ourselves, or others, getting older on a day to day basis, but we all grow older anyway. And so we Evolve. While it could be argued that emotionally we still think very much like our ancestors of the distant past, one would have to admit that our technical thinking has greatly Evolved. We have Evolved from ignorant cave dwelling animals to knowledgeable and mobile space travelers. Unfortunately, though we have now Evolved to the point that we can actually control, at least to some degree, the direction of our own Evolution, it appears that we are headed in the wrong direction.We are being driven, like an automobile with its accelerator stuck down, on an inevitable collision course, head-on with our own selves and we are gaining speed. We are not careening madly, but steering studiously and deliberately, straight toward our own pretentious image of ourselves, the mirage in the mirror, our self-centered attempt at self-embracement. So what is our problem, anyway? "Persistence in error," advises Barbara Tuchman, "is the problem." We continue going down the same wrong road as if in thrall to some Merlin with a magic power to direct our way - we seem to just follow along as though we're in some sort of racetrack trance. Or, maybe, being the unconscious creatures of habit that we are, we are so busy looking at ourselves in our own rear view mirrors that we are just blindly racing down the road, going as fast as we can go, the crown and curve of the pavement providing our only guidance. Either way, we are terribly misguided in our direction and totally our of reasonable control. Anyone who cannot see the misery in today's world is looking with a blindfold on. Anywhere and everywhere we look in our great global society, floating like a shark just below the surface of our daily living is a virtual sea of agony and despair. Poverty and malnutrition are everywhere. Greed and violence run rampant, and many of today's people feed on it. We create movies, television shows, and video and computer games that are filled with the very essence of the worst of our nature, and then we feed on this abomination we have created, thereby perpetuating it onto the next generation. What goes in, comes out. As someone has said, "A man is what he thinks about all day."In today's ever more violent world there really are a lot of things you and I could, and probably should, be rebelling against. "There is much in our society," decries Paul Turner, "that deserves a good rebellion: legislation that favors the rich and punishes the poor, the appropriation of funds for weapons of defense instead of the world’s hungry, materialism that creates an insatiable appetite to own things and a disregard for the feeble and unemployed, the production of disposable items that fosters a spirit of disposable relationships, racism that disguises itself as mobility, the glorification of sports, the marginalization of the arts, and the cult of selfishness - - ." And the list just goes on and on and on and we don't ever even bother rebelling. Just too much trouble. We have become the laziest of animals.We just plain refuse to grow up - we seem to think of maturity as only a physical thing. Whoever heard of growing your emotions? Emotional maturity in today's world is so rare it is almost nonexistent. But that's OK, as we all go along on our merry, merry way just as though we don't have any better sense. Unfortunately, this speaks of all of us, yes, every one of us. That is, if we have the guts to admit it.We are daily told, "Don't worry. Be Happy!" So everything seems under control. And it will seem so, right to the moment of impact. As that moment draws nearer and nearer every day, now would be a good time for us to Change our thinking and thus Change our direction. It is time for our thinking to catch up with Life here in the twenty-first century. This Change in our thinking will be the catalyst which will allow us to Evolve forward to the next step of Life.Before we can go about thinking differently, evolving forward and developing our new direction, we have to consider how we began, where we have Evolved to and what could lie ahead.Writing in the Introduction to 'A Brief History of Time' by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan tells us that, "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes Life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend." He goes on to say that few of us spend much time wondering why Nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from or whether it was always here, or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know."Where did the Universe come from?", asks Hawking. "How and why did it begin and where is it going? Did the Universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these long-standing questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the Earth orbiting the sun. - - Only time, (whatever that may be) will tell." To get answers, we have to ask questions, and then look for the answers.We humans might liken ourselves to a car's motor, which needs fuel to run, water and/or air for cooling, and lubrication to ease friction. The human race, (and at this point it does seem like a race, a race to our own annihilation), is multiplying now so fast that, just to support ourselves, we are systematically destroying the natural resources that provide us with our fuel. We are, at the same time, consciously polluting our precious water and air, and we are, it seems, intentionally creating an emotional friction greater than any presently known social lubricant. What is coming at us in the times ahead is something that none of us are prepared for. We had better be about making some Changes in the way we think before we run out of fuel, suffocate ourselves, or overheat and explode.If we are going to avoid the coming catastrophe, we will need to act quickly. Unfortunately, this does not appear likely, as we all sit passively by and watch our future unfold before us. We remain unChanged. Our refusal to act stems from having become rather emotionally lazy. And Oh, how we love to procrastinate, hoping maybe someone else will solve our problems for us. Again, procrastination is a luxury we can no longer afford. Those who can must immediately begin the process of self-Change, which will allow them to develop a Positive New Direction, and then they must stay true to the course. We must begin to Change our thinking. And the thinking we must Change goes to the very heart of every one of us. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he!" We truly are what we think. But with all that goes on in our twenty-first century lives, with the 24 hour radio and television and rental entertainment, with our evolving computers and the internet, with video games, mobile music and a bevy of sports to choose from, with all the activities we submerge ourselves in, we seem to have little time to just think, even if we really wanted to (which, evidently, we don't). Unfortunately, we people of today don't really much like to think, but oh how we love to escape. As Sharon Faris tells us, "Our escapes are incredibly numerous and we are all artists in this department." Every person develops their own, individual, personalized, especially made for them, escapes. I have my own escapes that I have unconsciously developed over my lifetime. And though I am sure they are both similar and dissimilar, I know that you must have your own personally developed escapes as well. I know what mine are. You know what yours are. It is something that we all do. It is also one of the ways we keep ourselves from growing up.Our body, the outer person, matures, but the inner, emotional person does not. The average adult is grown in body, but remains a teenager is spirit.We know this because of the childishness we all display. We see it every day - a supposed adult somewhere doing some childish, immature thing - news reports are full of it. Fully grown men and women acting like juvenile delinquents. Age doesn't seem to matter, as a point of fact, many older people actually act more childish than many children do. The world is full of emotionally impotent adults who have not learned to think in a way that will allow them to control their own emotions, and there is no emotional viagra. As our feelings are created by our thinking, then we truly are what we think. Looking at the world around me, it appears there must be some very primitive thinking going on in the minds of many of my contemporaries. Unfortunately, what we see is what we get, whether we like it or not.Sometimes it is enough to make one feel ashamed of even being part of the human race. Again, this wouldn't be so if we didn't keep our emotional inner world in the realm of a child. Again, Sharon Faris has such wonderful insight when she says, "We fight the development of the inner person with every conceivable weapon. We have to fight the inner growth, which is natural, but our favorite escape is not admitting it. If we do, we have seen and accepted a truth and that means a step toward maturity, which in turn means a step toward responsibility and that we will avoid at almost any cost." A good part of everything we do, we do as a way of escaping from the reality of our actual existence. Someone has said, 'With great consistency the mature soul has little to do.' Could this be due to the fact that the mature person has renounced, or at least subdued, the multitude of things we force ourselves to do in an effort to escape from the emotional impotency most of us find within our own selves?We mature through inner conflict. For instance, to accept anger, or any of our negative emotions, as a present feeling, yet at the same time, to force our self to use this feeling constructively is often most difficult and it usually also means an internal tearing. It means going against the grain - going against our nature - changing our thinking - growing our emotional character (maturing). It also means the vigilance of our thinking: a vigilance that automatically creates tension. We must accept the emotional conflict created by immature thinking as a part of our existence rather than as a tragedy or an accident from which we try to escape. We either accept this conflict or it will force itself upon us in any number of ways, for no amount of drugs or any other of our many methods of avoidance can shut us off any longer - we are surrounded.We have little choice but to mature. Unfortunately, the word 'mature' has lost its meaning and is now used to describe things we find offensive to our own youth. Accepting sorrow and disappointment, accepting frustration and loneliness, accepting mental and emotional pain that we can't kill with pills, or liquor, or tobacco, or dope, or any of other ten thousand methods of escape we have, is the act of the mature person. The keyword is acceptance, the wise knowing that suffering is not negative just because we hate it. If we acknowledge it and accept it, then we can Change our thinking and grow. Emotional growth is sort of a 'No Pain - No Gain' type of thing, much like building physical muscle when you workout at the gym. If you quit working out when it starts to hurt, all you did was exercise the muscle, but you didn't grow it any. If you keep working when it starts to hurt, that is when the muscle grows and develops. Same thing with our emotional maturity. We reject maturity by resisting growth. In our later years we will pay a heavy price with adolescent minds and emotions encased in tired old bodies. Plastic surgery and other modern day techniques may be able to keep our outer self from showing its age, but we have not made much progress in the area of our inner self. Each person has to do the hard work of growing their own emotions - growing their own mind. No one else can do it for us. We have to do it ourselves. Each and every one of us. We will have to Change our thinking to survive, here in the 21st century. It is rapidly becoming a serious matter of our very survival.If we are to evolve into the positive potential of what we can become, we will have to develop guts, guts, and more guts. Emotional guts, that is, what some might call 'intestinal fortitude'. This means the kind of guts that doesn't take a pill for every little pain, much as a baby with its' pacifier. It means a sense of responsibility that doesn't demand a fall guy for my own errors - the guts to acknowledge my own shortcomings and mistakes - to Change my way of thinking. This brand of guts is cooperative with the Universe, and, for this reason can say with Emerson, "I know that I am dear to the heart of Being." I am a part of the all-pervading unity of the Universe and It is part of me.The mature person rises in full stature when the world faces its' darkest hours. We are approaching such a time. The scientists have warned us as they have brought us to the brink of destruction. We have our prosperity, our leisure, and our gadgets, and like mischievous little children who have set the house afire, we run happily upstairs to play.For centuries, "Know Thyself" has quietly, but urgently spoken to us above the portals of learning, but these two words, the open door to maturity, have still not moved beyond our eyeballs.The human race has preferred the darkness of its old order to the light of a new one. Accordingly, the majority of us have yet to develop our own personal psychology. This is a psychology unlike that of the psychiatric world, though it, too, has its place in opening the closed doors of our minds. Psychiatric experts speak of theirs as a baby science, but the psychology of which I speak has been known and practiced by the perceptive mind since man became aware of himself as a complex and creative institution. It is the science of daily, hourly living, and should have been taught from the cradle on, but our mothers, like their mothers, and like the human race in general, has not wanted to know of this way of Life. It is simply maturity, but this word is glibly thrown around now, too, and means nothing. We have to begin to know ourselves."The reluctance of all of us human beings to know ourselves," advises Brock Chisholm, "the aggressions released by any attempt to help us to know ourselves truly, the antagonisms with which we defend our embedded original premises, no matter how demonstrably fallacious they may be are STILL - - and probably will be for a long time to come, the great barriers to human progress in those very directions which are of the greatest importance to the whole race.""What has happened," says Buckminister Fuller, "is that we were allowed to be ignorant up to a point. - - All of humanity is like a chicken just poking out of the egg. - - from this point on, we really have to use our brain. - - And we really have to dare to go to the truth."So what is truth? Thomas Powers tells us that, "Truth is not only that which is known; it is also the power to know; it is the ability to see and understand." "Truth," says Mr. Fuller, "is really only a direction, a direction of closer and closer approximation."But closer to what are we moving? To what evolutionary end is our current direction taking us closer to? We would do well to heed the ancient proverb which advises, "If we do not Change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed."Jesus Christ said that if we could know the truth, that it would make us free. What did he mean? "Know the truth and the truth will make you free." But do we realize what this says? The freedom we all seek from the hell of our lives, we are told, comes by knowing the truth. But who believes that? Who even hears it? "He who hath ears to hear, let him hear."Now the truth we have to know to have any basis in fact is a full acquaintance with oursleves without any dressing up at all. If we are to know the truth that will make us free, we must look into ourselves objectively, separating what we think and feel about ourselves from what we truly are. This is so very difficult that it is almost impossible, but only almost. What we are really after now is the truth. The truth about ourselves and the purpose of our earthly existence.Of all the hungers in our crazy, mixed-up world, it is the hunger of the young that can break our heart when one asks, "Who am I?" "What am I here for?" And silence is our only answer.What is essential when questioning the purpose of our existence is the fact that we have evolved - we have emerged from the animal kingdom, from instinctive adaptation, and that we have transcended Nature, although we can never leave it as we are part of it. We now know that all Life is evolving, but up to now, at least as far as we know, only the human has developed a conscious mind capable of reason. This sets us apart from the rest of Nature. We know that some of our animal companions show signs of thinking intelligence. Dolphins can communicate with us through signing. Gorillas and chimps have recently been observed using objects as tools, but we don't know yet if they, or any other species, can actually reason. It is our ability to remember, to think and to reason that makes us different from all the rest of the animals. We are, indeed, evolving beings in an evolving Universe."Less than half of all Americans," reports Jerry Adler, "believe in evolution, while 80 percent of the population believes that God created the earth.To a society accustomed to searching for truth in the pages of the Bible, Darwin introduced the notion of evolution; that the lineages of living things Change, diverges and go extinct over time, rather than appear suddenly in immutable form, as Genesis would have it. A corollary is that most of the species alive now are descended from one or at most a few original forms. - - By itself this was not a wholly radical idea - -Darwin’s greater, and more radical, achievement was to suggest a plausible mechanism for evolution. To a world taught to see the hand of God in every part of Nature, he suggested a different creative force altogether, an undirected, morally neutral process he call natural selection.Others characterized it as ‘survival of the fittest,’ although the phrase has taken on connotations of social and economic competition that Darwin never intended. But he was very much influenced by Thomas Malthus, and his idea that predators, disease and a finite food supply place a limit on populations that would otherwise multiply indefinitely. Animals are in a continuous struggle to survive and reproduce, and it was Darwin’s insight that the winners, on average, must have some small advantage over those who fall behind. His crucial insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environment – a faster wolf, or deer – have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics onto the next generation. (In modern terms, we would say pass on their genes, but Darwin wrote long before the mechanisms of heredity were understood.) Of course, it’s not as simple as a one-dimensional contest to outrun the competition. If the climate changes, a heavier coat might represent the winning edge. For a certain species, intelligence has been a useful trait. Evolution is driven by the accumulation of many such small changes, culminating in the emergence of an entirely new species. " – -- from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows." Darwin wrote."Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale," Darwin wrote, offering a small sop to human vanity before his devastating conclusion; "that man with all his noble qualities…still bears in his bodily form the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."‘Where is God?’ is the mournful chorus that has accompanied every new scientific paradigm over the last 500 years, ever since Copernicus declared Him unnecessary to the task of getting the sun up into the sky each day. The church eventually reconciled itself to the reality of the solar system, which Darwin, perhaps intentionally, invoked in the stirring conclusion to the ‘Origin’, "There is grandeur in this view of life…that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."- - Darwin never found God; by the same token, the Bible has nothing to impart about the genetic relationships among the finches he did find. But it is human nature to seek both kinds of knowledge. Perhaps after a few more cycles of the planet, we will find a way to pursue them both in peace," concludes Mr. Alder.As our pursuit continues, it is essential for us to acknowledge that, while we know that all of Life is evolving, only the human, as far as we know, has begun to emerge from the animal kingdom, through instinctive adaptation. This has occurred as a result of our evolving genetics."A gene known to be important for brain development," reports MSNBC, "is more active in humans than in apes, a discovery that might have played a key role in human evolution. The gene is used by cells to make an opiatelike protein found in apes and humans called "prodynorphin," or PDYN. In humans, PDYN is believed to be important for perception, memory and susceptibility to drug dependence. People who don’t make enough of the protein are vulnerable to drug addiction, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and a form of epilepsy, studies have found. "So we reasoned that humans might uniquely need to make more of this substance, perhaps because our brains are bigger, or because they function differently," said Gregory Wray, a biologist at the Duke University in North Carolina who was involved in the study. The researchers found that humans possess a distinctive variant in a regulatory segment of the gene that causes PDYN to be produced in higher concentration than in apes. Altering the regulatory segments of a gene is often a better way to generate variability than altering the structure and function of a protein through random mutations, Wray said. Called "promoters," these regulatory segments determine how much and how fast a protein is expressed rather than changing its structure or function. The finding supports a growing consensus among evolutionary anthropologists that hominid divergence from the other great apes was fueled not by the origin of new genes, but by the speeding up or slowing down of the expression of existing genes. In the studies, the researchers analyzed the sequence structure of the PDYN promoter segment in humans and in seven species of nonhuman primates: chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, baboons, pigtailed macaques and rhesus monkeys. The researchers didn’t find significant mutational changes in the parts of the PDYN gene that controlled protein structure or function. Instead, most of the changes were in segments of the gene that controlled the regulation of PDYN. For example, the PDYN protein is identical in chimps and humans, but the human version is 20 percent more active. The researchers also found a surprisingly large amount of genetic variation in the PDYN promoter segment among humans.The analyses showed higher differences between the different populations—which included Chinese, Papua New Guineans, (Asian) Indians, Ethiopians, Cameroonians, Austrians and Italians — than within them. Such a pattern is a signature of evolutionary selection, Wray said. Still mysterious, however, is how the prodynorphin gene changes affect human neural development. We do know that not making enough prodynorphin causes clinical problems, but we don't know what having more of it did for us humans," Wray said. "We're hoping the clinical psychiatrists and psychologists can give us more insight into that aspect," concludes MSNBC.In his article, 'Your Mind Can Map Your Destiny', Ben Carson writes, " At medical school, I decided to make neurosurgery my lifelong passion. I was impressed by the clinical presentations made by the neurosurgeons there, but the deciding factor was my own analysis of my god-given gifts: I had a tremendous amount of eye-hand coordination as well as an ability to think and visualize in three dimensions, a crucial skill. The brain does not contain many landmarks, and a neurosurgeon must be able to imagine readily where all the numerous nuclei, tracts and neurological pathways are situated.After that first glimpse around the dissection table, the landscape of the brain continued to hold a fascination for me. Two years later, I saw it again in a living patient. Once again, I awaited the moment of revelation. This time, as the dura was folded back, the mysterious mass pulsated with life - and I had a sudden, startling insight: This conglomerate of billions of neurons and hundreds of billions of interconnections was the actual physical thing that gave each of us our distinct personality, the intellectual and emotional characteristics that made each person unique.The organ system of the brain is one of incredible complexity and power. It can process millions of pieces of information per second. It remembers everything a person has ever seen or heard. For example, by placing special electrodes into the parts of the brain that control memory, you can stimulate recall in an 85-year-old so specific that he could quote verbatim a newspaper article read a half-century earlier.One characteristic of the brain in particular makes us essentially human and distinguishes our brains from those of animals: the presence of very large frontal lobes. They enable us to engage in rational thought-processing, to extract information from the past and the present, analyze it and use our conclusions to project a course of future action.Animals are victims of circumstance. They can only react to their environment. But humans, thanks to our frontal lobes, can plan, strategize and exercise control over our environments..We don’t have to be victims who simply react.I learned that truth about frontal lobes at age 10, when - not doing well in school and guided initially by my mother’s firm hand - I made a decision to change my life’s direction. Within a year and a half, by devouring book after book, I had migrated from the bottom of my fifth-grade class to the top of my seventh-grade class. This academic transformation was so dramatic that one might have suspected a brain transplant, if such a thing were possible. ‘The actual change occurred in my self-perception and my expectations. I had gone from victim to master planner.By age 14, my mind was plotting my future. Reading biographies of successful people, I realized that I could change my circumstances of poverty by programming my brain with the kind of information that would guarantee academic success. That, I believed, would allow me to choose my own destiny.I encountered negative people who tried to discourage me and put a lid on my dreams. I chose to regard them simply as environmental hazards to be carefully swept aside.My strongest supporter and inspiration throughout this metamorphosis was my mother. She was one of 24 children, had only a third-grade education and was married by age 13. She steadfastly encouraged my brother and me to read, though she never learned herself.Many times, as I progressed from medical student to professor of neurological surgery, I was struck by the anatomical beauty of the brain and the extraordinary things medicine could do to improve the quality of life. Yet, at the same time, I became increasingly fascinated with the unbounded intellectual potential contained within that 1400 -gram (3 pound) structure. The human brain, I came to realize, is simply a mechanical component of an entity of far greater beauty and power: the mind. I was awed by what an inspired and disciplined mind could accomplish.Within every - brain is a mind teeming with ideas and dreams and abilities’ unrealized. The greatest thing we can do - - is to nourish that potential, both intellectual and humanitarian, so that each mind can fulfill its promise to the benefit of mankind," concludes Ben Carson.As the human brain continues to evolve, we discover that we are transcending Nature, although we can never leave it, for we are part of it. We also know that in the lower animals, Nature and being are identical, that is to say that the animal does not bear the burden of self-consciousness, or of knowing that it knows. We also know that having evolved to be less instinctually guided, we humans can, through our own awareness, influence to some extent our own evolution. We should take advantage of this extra ordinary circumstance. We are also beginning to see evidence that other species may be following in our footsteps. Scientific history tells us that primitive human beings were much like some of our present day animal kin.Again, the only differences between the human race and all other Earth Life are our evolved abilities to remember, to think, and our sense of reason. Except for our Life, itself, these are our greatest gifts and make us simply, 'Life with the ability to be aware of itself'. Unlike other Earth Life, we can be aware of ourselves, of our living counterparts, of our past, and of the possibilities of our future. "The Universe," explains Rushdy El-Ghussein, "shows us it's vastness, complexity, interconnectedness, growth and regrowth. In ourselves we see beings who can think and reason, be compassionate and caring or cruel and thoughtless and be either just or oppressive. We can see history, learn from the past, plan for the future, see our deaths, hope and despair."The choice is ours to make, once we become aware of it. We really do have the increasing ability to influence the evolutionary process, but to exercise any real decisive power, we have to be self-conscious.Listen to Rollo May tell us about our selves, "The fact that a human being can be self-conscious vastly increases his need for self-affirmation. Consciousness is the intervening variable between Nature and being. In lower animals, Nature and being are identical, the animal does not bear the burden of self-consciousness - or of knowing that it knows, and while it escapes the guilt of this experience, it is also bereft of its glory.Man becomes a self only to the extent that he can know it, affirm it, and assert it. This is why man is infinitely more educable than lower animals - - ; being less instinctually guided, he can, through his own awareness, influence to some extent his own evolution. Therein lies the collective shame and bewilderment of being a man, and therein also lies the greatness of being one." The collective shame we experience comes not from what we have done, but rather, from what we have NOT done! We have not matured.We Have Refused To Grow Up! No wonder we are so confused and bewildered.In our human existence, to be alive with the ability to be aware is all any of us ever are. No matter how much we achieve or how great our accomplishments, no matter who we are, how famous or unknown, how rich or poor, we are never anything but alive with the ability to be aware. Our awareness visits us in many forms and varies greatly in degree, both in quantity and quality of awareness.We are all alive and, except for the totally mentally disabled, we are all aware, at least to some degree. If, through our own awareness, we are to influence to any extent our own evolution, we will need to be objective.The noted psychoanalysist Erich Fromm tells us, "The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility. If one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, which one has as a child."So we have to 'stop the world' and see ourselves, and people and things as they are, objectively, and then be able to separate this objective picture from the picture which is formed by our own desires and fears.We must Change! If we, as a race, are to ever achieve any sort of greatness, we will have to dare to be true to ourselves, individually. We will have to say with Gerald Heard, "I must start with myself and stay with myself until some intension appears in my actions, some consistency between what I say and what I do. I must not escape into denunciation, coercion, or even superior concern for anyone else. I shall do so if I can; that is the invariable trick of the ego, trying to escape and save itself from its necessary end."If we are to influence to any extent our own evolution, we must become aware of our self - and "Our self," as Fritz Kunkel advises, "is invisible, just as consciousness and Life, itself, are invisible. We know them only from our own inner experiences, or we infer them from outer results. The self can never be made an object. If we try to explore it, it escapes. If we handle it, as we handle dead things, it eludes us. If we formulate its qualities, and the laws of its reactions, it suddenly shows different attitudes and behaves in a way which could by no means have been predicted. It is incalculable and free because of its creativeness. The self exists and works in time, but it cannot be located in space. - - What we know about the enigmatical self we owe to the fact that it frequently contradicts the instinctive powers which constitute unconscious Life."The intentional, willful contradiction of our old instinctive animal nature, with all of its desires and powers, this is the direction of self development we must pursue if we are to grow up emotionally and mature into complete human beings. This could be the next step up on the evolutionary ladder.This seems like a good place for me to summarize my writing up to this point. We know that humans are animals, and that the human race, the people our earliest ancestors were, started out as primitive Life in the animal world and over time we have evolved into the people we presently are. We call ourselves people, but that does not change the fact that we are, indeed, animals (there is a sanctity of human Life, as there is a sanctity of all Life). The known human race started out as ignorant cave dwellers. Their decendants have now evolved into knowledgeable space travelers. The exact path of evolution and how we came to be as we now are, is a matter of great debate even still, here at the beginning of the third millennium. It's an interesting debate, though the subject is actually irrelevant as far as what is required of us today. What is required is that we step back and take a look at the big picture. We see that humans started out few in numbers and of small intelligence. The ancient ones learned a little and remembered it, then passed it onto the next generation, who learned a little more and passed it all onto the next generation, who continued the process right on through those of us who are now alive. This growing pool of knowledge includes the many myths and traditions of generations of peoples. Today there are more than six billion of us and our cumulative knowledge is growing rapidly. This increased knowledge is the root of our growing intelligence. As the population increases, so does the accelerating rate of Change. Unless the Earth is hit by an asteroid or we experience some sort of total cataclysm or pandemic which kills off a bunch of us, things could get quite chaotic in the times ahead, so now would be a good time for us to make a Change in the way we think. We can only do this as individuals, each of us learning how to think in a new way.So now, as the Metamorphosis of Life continues, we begin the process of self Change. Von Ogden Vogt speaks of this Change as not one of 'material elements, but as a real transubstantiation of persons, a real Change of human nature - -'. "This," he says, " is - essential - -."And from 'The Choice Is Always Ours' we are advised, " The slowness of self-Change, against which so many rebel and because of which even greater numbers abandon this essential process, becomes more endurable when we realize two things. The first is that, considering the results to be produced, Change, if it is to be effective, could not be faster. To Change oneself - that seems a small preliminary thing. In fact it is nothing of the sort. It is the most radical of alterations. To Change oneself is not merely to alter one's relations to all fellow men, to alter the whole of self and social nexus. That is much. We are, even the most independent, unsuspectedly integrated with our society. We cannot move without affecting all those around us; they have made and make us largely what we are. Self-change must always be social change; that is why moral courage is rarer than physical courage; - - the determination to alter the social will needs more energy than the determination to sacrifice the self to that will.To Change oneself is to have to do that, but it is also to do far more. It is to alter one's outlook literally - to attend to what has been overlooked, to see through what has riveted attention. It is to see another world. Once that other world is seen, once the new faculty has grown, then a new way of action is natural and inevitable. Seeing, realization of the further range of reality, that is the step that really counts. The task is an immense one, for by remaking the self, we remake, and can only remake the world."So what are we to do? The forces shaping our world are far beyond our reach as individuals, but those things that shape our own well-being are not. So to remake the world we have to remake oursleves. Twenty-first century thinking may light the path to maturity, but walking that path is still up to us. As Geoffrey Cowley wisely puts it, "The biggest challenge we face is to translate knowledge into action." So now the process of absorption begins as we look deeper and deeper into oursleves. Next; Forward to Reflections on The Two Natures at http://mysticwizardmusings3.blogspot.com/ or back to Reflections On A Time For Change at http://mysticwizardmusings1.blogspot.com/