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by Jayaram V
Immaturity is not confined to individuals alone. Sometimes, groups or even
nations act quite immaturely, resulting in great misery and suffering to millions of people. It happened several times in the past and is still happening today in many parts of the world, causing much misery and bloodshed to millions of people. We see it happening in sports and competitions, in many major international forums, the UN security council and general assembly, and in the senates and parliaments of many nations. Truly speaking, on a cosmic scale, ours is still an immature civilization and we may require a few more centuries to be able to look at ourselves and our actions with complete objectivity.
Definition
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word "maturity" as "deliberateness of action, mature consideration, due deliberation, fullness or perfection of natural development, ripeness, due promptness, the state of being complete, perfect, ready," and so on. This is the literary definition.
Physical Growth vs Mental Growth
However, in a general sense, maturity means complete physical and mental growth, or the state of adulthood. We all know or at least can make an intelligent guess of what complete physical growth means. It is easy to understand because physical growth is visible, measurable and does not continue beyond a particular age except in certain other ways. Almost every normal individual attains physical maturity in expected time. Only and rarely a few unfortunate individuals fail to grow normally because of some exceptional conditions or circumstances.
In case of mental maturity the trend is not the same. An individual can grow mentally for long. It is difficult to say when an individual actually stops growing mentally and whether he stops growing mentally at all till the end. Secondly, mental growth varies from individual to individual. Some people develop greater mental maturity and rationality much earlier in their lives compared to others. Thirdly, the same individual may exhibit varying degrees of maturity on different occasions, prompted by many facilitating and inhibiting factors, which are far too complex to be ascertained or explained with certainty.
However guarded an individual is and however mature he is mentally, at times he is bound to yield under pressure and show signs of immaturity. A vast majority of us are prone to this weakness. From time to time we take wrong decisions or display inappropriate behavior. This is very much human and there is nothing abnormal about it. In a way it is also helpful, especially when we let out our emotions, because it provides an outlet to our pent up emotions and helps us keep our inner balance.
Each of us have a child inside us. This child part in each of us is a product of our early experiences as growing infants. It is not unwanted. It in fact needs as much care as you needed it years ago as a child. What is undesirable, however, is to refuse to grow mentally along with age and acknowledge the reality of the present moment.
Quantifying the mental growth is therefore a real problem. It is difficult to say when and at what stage a person attains complete mental growth. By subjecting an individual to certain tests and testing situations, we may arrive at certain conclusions, but we cannot be sure how accurate such conclusions are.
What is maturity?
Maturity need not necessarily come with age, but with awareness and understanding, borne out of individual perception and cognitive experience. In an individual, it develops to the extent he organizes his consciousness on the basis of his empirical experience and verification of facts and to the extent he is free from his irrational thoughts, beliefs, prejudices, notions and emotions.
To be mature does not necessarily mean just a fully grown up individual. It is a combination of many things that includes age, awareness, intelligence, decision making ability and more. To be mature means:
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to be realistic, to be in touch with reality and to be guided by facts,
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to be responsible to self and others and to accept responsibility for self preservation,
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to be willing to examine ones beliefs, fallacies, prejudices and assumptive behavior in an objective way and let them go,
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to be guided by reason rather than emotions, to be able to distinguish the two and also at the same time accommodate them appropriately and intelligently in one's life and priorities,
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to be assertive without being aggressive, to be friendly without the need to get attention, to disagree without the need to compete and to seek without the fear of failure or rejection,
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to be flexible and open-minded rather than rigid and judgmental, to be amenable to new situations and receptive to new knowledge, to be willing to learn new skills and new responses,
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to be inquisitive and exploratory, seeking answers to questions one does not know, gathering information before arriving at conclusions, stretching the mind to explore hidden possibilities and hidden potentialities,
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to act spontaneously to an occasion or situation, free from preconceived notions, the compulsion to be perfect or correct, habitual or mechanical reactions
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to be in touch with the present and enjoy the passing moment
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To know what is possible and achievable and to acknowledge that which is not.
Who is a mature person?
Here is a brief description of what a mature person is. A mature person:
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is concerned with facts,
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goes by his experience rather than beliefs,
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relies upon his reason rather than his emotions,
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relies mostly upon his thinking,
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uses his resources wisely according to the realistic needs and demands of the situation
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weighs a situation carefully before drawing conclusions
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Lives in the present
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is open-minded, willing to learn and explore other possibilities, view points and alternatives
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knows his limitations
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is flexible
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is spontaneous
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has a healthy self image and sense of self
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takes practical decisions based upon his perception of the situation
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knows how to deal with his anxiety, fear and worries.
Some suggestions to practice adult thinking
1. Be Realistic: Keep in touch with the reality around you as much as possible. You may day dream, have plans and goals that may seem to be difficult to attain. You may have the tendency to be driven by the passion of idealism rather than the demands of the day. All this is acceptable so long as you know what you are doing, what you are capable of doing and know the difference between what you perceive as reality and what you think as your dreams and ideals.
You can become a realist by practicing mindfulness, not by becoming a monk but by remaining amidst the world. Mindfulness is an excellent way of keeping your mind occupied with each passing moment. It is a combination of many things at a time: dynamic awareness, attention to detail, concentration, detached wakefulness, staying with the moment and dispassionate analysis and assimilation of the incoming information.
This you can learn from trained practitioners or by reading some books on the subject. If that is not possible at this juncture, just learn to practice detached observation using all your senses and your full attention. By remaining in touch with your surroundings and by controlling your thoughts and emotions, you can keep the adult in you wakeful and responsive most of the time and save yourself from a great deal of trouble that stems out of immature responses and reactions.
2. Challenge your assumptions: If we carefully start observing and
analyzing, we will be surprised to know how much of our thinking and behavior is induced by our beliefs, assumptions, preferences and prejudices. We inherit them mostly from our childhood days and keep them intact like antiques in the cupboards of our minds, cherishing them for their sentimental value and rarely evaluating them or subjecting them to serious scrutiny.
As children these beliefs and thought patterns might have enabled us to deal with our limited exposure to the world around us, or we might have inherited them from our elders and peers, out of respect, out of fear, out of ignorance or out of the innocent conviction that since they were cherishing them they must be true.
But unless we verify them and found them to be acceptable, in the light of the new experience and information we gather over a period of time as adults, and unless they stand the test of objective analysis and practicability of the present day reality, they can become impediments to our adult behavior and thinking. One very practical way to keep ourselves in adult mode is to examine regularly how much of our thinking is based on our past beliefs and assumptions and how it is interfering with our rationale and sensible behavior and thought processes. Unless you remove those cobwebs from your mind, you will continue to experience difficulties in adult life.
3. Be Inquisitive: Those who are rigid in their outlook and behavior are driven mostly by their prejudices, and beliefs. They tend to remain rigid and judgmental in their attitude and when confronted with rationale thinking, they behave overbearingly or aggressively. They behave aggressively because they are not sure of what they do and say and they would not like to subject themselves or thoughts to other's scrutiny. They believe that challenging their assumptions means challenging their very selves or their very existence, or negating something around which they might have built much of their lives and actions. To shatter that center means to shatter them, their very meaning and purpose. Hence they would build a fort like
defense around themselves and protect themselves from attacks from outside. If you question them they take it as a sign of disrespect and would categorize you as a heretic, deviant or even pervert. They would rationalize their behavior resting their arguments on something that is as vague or vast as society or religion. They also suppress a part of themselves that questions their beliefs and assumptions because they are uncomfortable with it. Hence they also remain unstable and incomplete.
The best way to collect objective data from the world around you is through questioning. By asking questions you are not confirming anything. You are only challenging the assumptions and beliefs either of your own or of others. You draw valuable information through that process and are in a position to assess its true worth. You know from your experience what to accept or not to accept, and you would be confident in many ways of what you do or intend to do. Since your information is verified and objectively tested, you are in a position to choose better alternatives in more creative ways.
To be inquisitive and curious is the key to adult behavior. It was something we all have done as children, but something which most of us tend to ignore at a later stage in our lives. Learning can be mere passive acceptance of facts or a dynamic questioning and seeking that lead to an expanding consciousness. The former tend to make us mental slaves while the later enables us to be masters of our lives and owners of valid knowledge.
In ancient India that was the way spiritual masters used to impart mystic knowledge to young students. Knowledge would not be given unless someone came with intense curiosity and asked questions persistently. That was the main qualification and the main consideration to accept someone as a disciple. And even while the instruction was going on, further knowledge would not be imparted unless the knowledge that was already revealed was tested personally and found valid. All knowledge was kept secret because that was the best way to arouse human curiosity.
Do not accept any suggestion or information, however trivial it may seem, unless you are convinced that they stand the test of reason and reality. You can do this by learning to question every thing, every data, every assumption and drawing rationale conclusions based on your experience. The same attitude would also enable you to deal effectively with your irrational thoughts and behavior.
4. Understand your emotions. It is irrational and unrealistic to believe that any one can control his or her emotions completely to the point of becoming apathetic. Emotions are essential part of human life and without emotions life will be too plain to be appealing. Just as it would be unwise to destroy all the rivers in the world so as to deal with the problem of flooding, it would be foolish or even harmful to try to eliminate emotions completely out of our systems so as to remain immune to the suffering caused by them.
Emotions are the most mysterious aspects of your self. They erupt spontaneously and once erupted they take their own time to subside. They are a part of the intricate play of the energies inside the human body, about which presently we have very limited knowledge and physically very little control.
Our emotions are like the animals in a zoo that wake up now and then and make their cries, either because they are hungry or some one has disturbed them. So long as we do not understand their mechanism, so long as we are not sure what causes them to erupt and persist, it is not good to put them down with force or interfere too much with their spontaneity.
The best way to deal with emotions is to examine them in a conscious, systematic and detached way as they arise and enact their drama. Once you know by your own experience what triggers your emotions, how they proceed, which parts of your being they effect, how they cool down and so on, you will develop the skill and awareness to deal with them effectively. Such a mastery comes to you only when you have studied your emotions in a comprehensive manner, learned to distinguish them and understood their play. This is the way suggested by the spiritual masters of the east, especially those who believed in the integration of human personality for its further spiritual evolution, not in its disintegration.
In other words what we are suggesting here is that let the animals live but you as the ring master in control. This is the way of maturity. Accept your emotions as they are, as a part of your heritage, acknowledge realistically their power, beauty and influence and learn to cope with them in a non-judgmental way.
Once you develop the understanding through your own study and observation, you will know which of them to use, which of them to control and which of them to improve. You will learn how to live with them not by controlling them by force or by being controlled by them but by learning to deal with them in more creative ways.
This mastery cannot be yours so easily, unless you are willing to invest enough time and energy in the pure study of your emotions and understanding their movements. It may take years. But once you study them you will have the power to handle your emotions in a in a positive and constructive way to enrich your life and experience.
5. Decide the right way. We may not be conscious of this, but it is true that each and every moment of our existence is created by its preceding moment and if we observe life carefully, we realize that what appears to be one continuous stream is in reality a series of moments merging or flowing into the next. The apparent continuity is an illusion. Actually each moment is separate and independent by itself. It seems to be in league with the next because of our interpretation and our imaginary association or attachment with all the moments that we live. It is true but for our thinking and imagination each moment is separate and independent by itself.
This knowledge is important, because each moment that we live influences the next. Whether we admit the fact or not, the decisions that we make at various levels, physically, mentally, emotionally or rationally, almost every moment of our lives, carry in their wombs the images of things to come, the dreams to be realized, the lives to be lived and the actions to be performed in the moments yet to come.
The present moment is therefore of utmost importance to us. Equally important to us is the kind of decisions that we are taking right now at this very moment, either consciously or unconsciously. Taking right decisions and arriving at right conclusion in the present is the key to the quality of our experience in the future. But are we in a position to choose correctly or to decide correctly?
No amount of knowledge, no degree of maturity, no amount of intelligence can really make us error proof in taking decisions. Whatever be the method, whatever be state of mind, because of our inherent incapacity to possess or conceive the whole truth, we are bound to make mistakes and lead ourselves into unexpected situations.
But decisions can still be made on an intelligent and rationale basis to cope with uncertainty and minimize risks by drawing richly from our experience and available channels of information. The best known method is the scientific method and when you are not sure, seek others' or experts' opinion. If you are still not satisfied test your intuition and see whether it can be of some help.
6. Practice detachment. Learn the power of mindful detachment. Seek the seeker and know the knower. It is the basis of all true intelligence, judgment, awareness and discretion. With mindful detachment you can overcome the problem of selective perception and emotional judgments. You can develop true maturity of mind and behavior. You will learn to deal effectively and objectively with your day to day problems and your emotional baggage as you carry it. You create a center of peace and calm where reason can operate and coexist with the flow of emotions or the vibrations of your prejudices and irrational thoughts. You will also learn to deal with ambiguity and decision that involve ambiguity and uncertainty.
Maturity is accepting what is, willing to change what can be and knowing what cannot be. Maturity is to enter into a covenant with yourself, agreeing to be guided by reason, to be aware of your emotions, to strive for that freedom that is not of the prisoners of their own worlds.
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