The Need for Emotional & Spiritual Maturity
Humanity’s creative and intellectual capacity never ceases to amaze me. We’ve been able to produce remarkable works of art, music, film, literature, and philosophy, as well as impressive advances in science and technology. We’ve sent astronauts into space and now keep sophisticated satellites floating out there allowing us to communicate with one another, from all corners of the planet, as if we were in the same room.
We’ve developed complex systems of observation and acquired an immense amount of knowledge to better understand how this Universe works and tackle the inherent and man-made challenges of our human condition. And yet, what we haven’t been able to reach is a global level of love and compassion to stop fighting for power or exploiting both human and material resources on Mother Earth.
Clearly, promoting love is not a matter of logic or rationality, but the result of emotional and spiritual maturity. Real change has to come from within, on an individual level, to affect the collective unconscious. This is the opposite of what most societies have promoted for centuries, that is, rationalizing your emotions or suppressing any child-like impulses that don’t fit the mold of what is perceived as being a responsible, ‘functional’ adult fitting the needs of the group. Now, you can be a functional adult in a dysfunctional world, but can you be happy? And isn’t our collective suffering the shadow side of this cultural (militarized) model?
From a psychological perspective, emotional maturity develops in relation to other people: you restrain infantile impulses or desires to avoid feeling rejected; you want to be liked, loved, appreciated, and supported, to belong in a group or community. Delaying gratification is important to become a well-integrated person, but not if it hides a wounded need to please others while secretly holding anger and resentment toward them; in this case it’s a trade-off that leads to the usual dysfunction and pain.
Emotional Maturity Leads To Spiritual Maturity
The world is made of ego, for ego, and promoting ego, because it’s perceived through the ego-mind. But ego is a false sense of self that cannot exist without a sense of ‘otherness.’ These two aspects constitute the ordinary consciousness used to interact in the world, because it creates the delusion of duality. However, your sense of otherness has become an inner bully squelching your sense of self by making you feel you should be someone other than who you are, because you’re deficient on some level—not ‘good enough.’
This motivates you to seek validation and love outside of yourself, seeing others as more important than you, just like when you were a child. For this reason, developing emotional maturity requires diminishing your sense of otherness to balance your perception of the world and accomplish your dreams and aspirations without guilt or resistance.
In time, you may discern that nothing external can bring true fulfillment, since the ego relies on polarity and conflict to exist. That is, the only way to real happiness is to dissolve the ego altogether. But it’s a paradox, because you need ego to function in the world, and you need to relinquish it to be truly happy. The key is to understand that it is a process of evolution and involution. You have to experience and explore the world to discover yourself—to learn what bring you joy or pain—which naturally creates the drive to transcend your egoic identifications causing suffering.
You develop emotional maturity when you start looking within to recognize the unconscious mental-emotional patterns pushing you to act in an impulsive, self-centered, or self-destructive manner. It’s not about others, although it affects your relationship with others; it’s really about diminishing otherness to make conscious choices for a better future.
It’s also about your willingness and effort to do what it takes to achieve your goals, pursuing them with discipline and determination, taking one step at a time, rather than sabotaging them by jumping ahead of yourself, procrastinating, or throwing temper tantrums because you expect life to be easy and people to fulfill your desires to avoid taking responsibility. It requires unraveling outdated codependent patterns to reclaim the freedom to be, one-in-yourself, regardless of what others think or do.
Then you mature spiritually as you pinpoint and diminish the ego-mind pushing these patterns of perception to keep you trapped in the past—in the wounded child archetype, where the external world is clearly stuck. It leads to inner peace, since it entails dropping your expectations, accepting life as it unfolds, and taking spiritual responsibility for everything in your reality. When you turn your life into a journey of self-discovery, maturity and freedom go hand in had. So contact me today to experience this level of freedom by implementing a practical method of self-exploration and energy management in alignment with your soul purpose!
© Yol Swan. All rights reserved.