Suffering the Curse of Arrested Development
There are few things more obvious on this planet than arrested development. With a little light-hearted observation we can see many people living in a rut of arrested development.
It is natural for children to need tending. Their endless, unrestrained curiosity leads them around, and in their wake comes mom or dad picking up after them. There appears to be a very large segment of our population stuck in “the terrible twos,” “the entitled teens,” or “potty training” – being led around not by curiosity, but by arrested development and leaving a mess in their wake for surrogate parents.
These adult-bodied children have jobs, drive cars, and pay taxes. They like to believe they are mature adults, but simple observation reveals the arrested development – a lack of capacity for emotional depth, a lack of awareness on what is going on around them, a lack of consideration for others, a sense of entitlement, and a constant mess for others to pick up.
It’s not unusual for them to react with temper tantrums if this is pointed out.
Aldous Huxley Quotes:
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance to continue to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
Experience is not a matter of having swum the Hellespont, danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing and hearing the significant things, paying attention at the right moments, understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man but what a man does with what happens to him.
Religion is for people who have not yet had a spiritual experience.
Spiritually Arrested Development
The Diamond Approach looks at arrested development through the lens of what’s possible for human development beyond emotional and psychological development. Ego is seen as a necessary stage of development for human consciousness.
But, the ego self is a case of arrested development. The potentiality of the individual consciousness becomes stuck through identification with a mentally constructed self, a historical self.
Human beings typically live in a state of arrested development in which the psychological domain rules our consciousness. Reaching the fullness of our potential entails resuming our development, which leads beyond the psychological to the realm of Being or spirit. Our experience in traveling this path is that psychological understanding and spiritual experience are so interwoven and interconnected that they can best be viewed as forming a continuum of realms of human experience. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas , Introduction
The Cure for Arrested Development
To free ourselves from the arrested development of the soul, requires freeing ourselves from identification with the ego self and its ignorance. The obvious first step is educating ourselves about the real state of affairs and reengaging our developmental process through conscious efforts and commitment.
What we usually consider adulthood is not real adulthood; it is a case of arrested development. It is not easy to mature on our own. Our difficulty with maturation stems basically from two kinds of ignorance: what we have forgotten and what we don’t yet know. Inner work is a process of remembering what we have forgotten and learning what we still don’t know. We can’t do one without the other. If we only remember what we have forgotten, it won’t be enough. If we simply learn what we don’t know, it’s not enough. There has to be an interaction between the two. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, ch. 3
Human Maturity & Realization
Two key elements for activating development beyond ego identification seem to be an awareness of something fundamental missing in our lives and a curiosity-drive to discover what that might be.
Three basics of the Diamond Approach methodology support this activation:
Maturity entails finding the necessary knowledge to develop the expertise to do what is needed. The mature person does this quietly, as part of his life. – A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 4
Realization, human maturity, and embodiment (integration) are three intertwined aspects of an open-ended developmental process possible for us, which reflects the infinite potential and possibilities of true nature.
To know our core freedom, our primordial freedom, and for it to become a central value, requires a great deal of maturation in our soul. In addition to the discovery of true nature, we need the maturity that allows us to appreciate that kind of freedom. And part of this maturity is the development and refinement of the discriminating capacity of our immediate experience. – A. H. Almaas, Runaway Realization: Living a Life of Ceaseless Discovery, ch. 18