Exploring Emotional Maturity

Part II

 

with Richard Kieninger

 

Q:     In dealing with muscular/mental blocks from your childhood, you can start uncovering them when you consciously look for them; by whichever way that you go about it—alone or with a therapist. When you get into resolving blocks or hang-ups or fixations that are associated with fear, do you have any other choice but to just be there and relive the scared and terrified feelings that you had as a kid?

 

RK:  One probably does not have a choice. But since you would not be retrospecting through a currently dangerous or fearful real situation any longer, you don’t need support to finally experience the emotions and feelings to the point of discharge and resolution because the submerged fear is no longer based on something which is an immediate threat. So your best bet is to live it and experience it and discharge it, whether alone in your locked room or with a therapist who is encouraging you. It does seem to be easier with some neutral and trusted facilita­tor to support you, provided you have overcome the embarrassment of letting go with another person around.

 

Q:     Could a person be emotionally mature and still have a number of unresolved muscular armorings protecting childhood fears?

 

RK:  I think that one could be mostly emotionally mature but still be partially blocked because of these armorings; therefore, the person really would not have access to his or her full potential of maturity. That is because such a person is likely to make inappropriate responses in the context of things to which he has armored himself. When you are making inappropriate responses, then you are not fully in control of your environment and certainly not of yourself. I like to think that a person who is fully mature is really in control, particularly of himself. If you are not fully in control, then you are going to feel inadequate; and those inadequacies begin to bother your sense of self-esteem.

 

Q:     Would you describe the level of emotional maturity required to become a Brother?

 

RK:  Well, for a person to even get to mystic awareness, he has to be pretty free of emotional blocks. He has to be a very mature type of individual. As I have said before, a lot of people say, “It’s great when you are a mystic because then you exhibit all of those exceedingly mature traits.” And I have to counter with the fact that you can’t become a mystic until first you achieve those mature traits. You have to have mystic awareness to achieve cosmic consciousness, which is required for Initiation. You must arrive at a considerable state of emotional maturity in order to have made that neurological break­through into use of the more primitive or archaic parts of your brain. Any kind of major neurotic blocking will keep you from having access to the primitive parts of the brain that you use primarily as a young child, and that is definitely going to block you from achieving mystic awareness.

 

One of the purposes of our Philosophy Seminar classes is to help people become aware of the areas where they have to grow up in order to achieve psychological and emotional maturity. We try to get people to where they are emotionally even-keeled so that they can eventually partake of these other wonders. The main thing we ask of people who come to the organization is a willingness to change and to improve themselves. Even though they didn’t recognize that they had any shortcomings, new awareness soon allows them to address themselves persistently toward becoming more mature people.

 

Q:     I guess I just wanted a more specific description of how a Brother would act or solve problems in regard to emotional maturity. I understand that a person has to be very mature to be a Brother, but I would just like more specific examples.

RK: Men and women who are emotionally mature and unhampered by mental conflicts demonstrate two essential features in living their lives: they are able to love and have a satisfactory capacity for work. The normally mature person has the following characteristics:

 

He is able to earn his own livelihood, work without too much complaining, and he keeps too busy to be unhappy. He is not overly attached to his parents or to the past. He does not act impulsively, but rather he has learned to control his emotions, to exercise good judgment and to make rational decisions. He utilizes the experiences of past mistakes to acquire wisdom in a positive way. He accepts the hardships which befall him in a philosophical way and does not allow himself to become cynical or to hold neurotic prejudices. He is able to get along with almost everyone, is flexible in his associations with others and is humanly understanding. He tries to keep his nose out of other people’s affairs and not interfere in their lives. He is tolerant, tactful and not argumentative. He can accept criticism, is not overly sensitive and has a sense of humor. He is glad to be alive and he radiates his joy and self-confidence. He has achieved a desirable life‑style which makes his life pleasant. He has learned how to relax and enjoy recreation and the pleasures of life. He is capable of giving love and sharing love with someone. He has faith in mankind and has a healthy attitude toward people and the world around him. The well-adjusted man and woman are likable persons, respected and admired by men, women and children. They never dominate others although they are dynamic and self-assured. They are free of neurotic indecision and follow through positively in their actions. They are poised and broad-minded. There is no selfish motive in their dealings with others. They give love rather than expecting it. They are kind, considerate, and romantic. They are even-tempered and discuss rather than argue controversial issues. They achieve mutually satisfying sexual adjustments with their mate and can appreciate the viewpoint of the other gender. They are not goody-goody and are just daring enough to be fascinating. They can enjoy an off-color joke, but their tendencies toward adventure are never foolhardy and are always under control. They never compete with their spouse, but seek companionship. Excessive complain­ing, fussing, bickering, teasing, and nagging are recognized by them as fatal to a marriage.

 

No one is spared the sorrows of life, but it is how one reacts which determines if one is normal or neurotic. The healthy-minded person does not allow himself to become incapacitated by depression. He keeps from becoming either overly elated or greatly depressed by employing constructive rationalization to avoid extremes. If he has a spell of the blues, he knows the mood will disappear as time goes by instead of surrendering to depression. The emotionally healthy person does not allow his worries and fears to make him over-anxious. He tries to distinguish between unfounded and real worries, and then he deals intelligently to solve those which are within his control.

 

The well-adjusted persons exercise moderation in everything they do—eating, drinking, working, playing. They keep in close contact with the things which stimulate and inspire them, such as beautiful music, art, literature, love and religion. They cultivate sound living habits and constantly strive to develop techniques of self-improvement to attain healthier think­ing and peace of mind. They refuse to be defeated by setbacks, and they work for the betterment of their future.

 

Emotional maturity involves the ability to stick to a job, to struggle through until it is finished. Maturity gives rise to one’s capacity to give more than is asked or required in a given situation; it is this quality which enables others to count on one—it is reliability. Persistence and forbearance are aspects of maturity with which one endures frustration, discomfort, hardship and unpleasantness. Determination to succeed gives one a will to live and to cooperate with others, to work in an organization under authority. The mature person exempli­fies the twelve Great Virtues alloyed with the wisdom to adapt and compromise flexibly if necessary in the face of inimical outside pressures. Dissatisfaction with the status quo calls forth assertive, constructive effort from the mature person to satisfy his social concern and devotion. The mature person readily sustains his own morale.

Without emotional maturity, true spiritual advancement is unattainable. The efforts needed for one to earn recognition by the Brotherhoods as having achieved Initiation needs a sound emotional platform from which to venture forth into spiritual realms. This does not mean that he or she doesn’t have some minor fixations or muscular blocks. It’s hard to live long enough to mend all the little quirks of personality left over from fears and traumas of childhood.

 

Q:     The way that I look at it is that no matter what kind of situation you find yourself in, you can find something good coming out of it, regardless what emotions are evoked by that situation, and you do whatever it takes to reach your goals.

 

RK:  Well I guess that expresses the kind of adaptability possessed by a person who is emotionally mature.

 

Q:     For instance, if a person gets angry, in one sense you might say that to hold back that anger is unhealthy, but if that person decides his anger is just going to make his antagonist angry in response, then possibly he could delay open expression of his emotion and talk to the other party at another time when the immediate feelings have calmed down.

 

RK:  That is civilized, and it also indicates some emotional maturity in deciding on a logical course. Some people who aren’t emotionally mature lash out at anybody who pushes their buttons, and just go on automatic without the ability to consider alter­natives. Those kind of people spend a lot of time in the courts.

 

Q:     Is emotional maturity a quality which is basically finite? Like something that once you achieve it, then nothing more that you learn toward Egoic knowledge is going to make you more emotionally mature?

 

RK:  When you get to be a Master, you have pretty much arrived at the utmost of the human condition, and you don’t have any further to go in relationships as long as you are part of the human lifewave. Of course, even as a Master there will always be more things to learn in general fields of knowledge. The blocks to emotional maturity occur in the brain itself. They could be regarded as bad connections, and most of those bad connections resulted if negative emotions accompanied information as it was being stored in the brain’s memory banks. Experiences loaded with painful emotion tend generally to be blocked from recall and can distort further use of the synaptic circuitry all too effectively. Anxiety and pain prevents the learning process, whereas learning while having fun is a breeze.

 

Q:     Now it would seem that someone who works to intensify the emotion of joy would be able to think more clearly in most situations if you consider that the negative emotions tend to distort how you view a situation.

 

RK:  It helps to have free passage of positive, pleasant emotions through the neurological circuitry of the brain so that you can benefit from them in just the way you suggest. You can see that it pays to steer clear of people and situations that make you angry or keep you aggravated.

 

Q:     What I personally see is that a lot of people seem to be preoccupied with just listening to and being dominated by their emotions to the extent that they don’t seem able to get on with their lives.

 

RK:  That’s like a tape recording on a continuous loop. The person keeps focusing on the same problem, and he repeats, “I’ve got this problem, I’ve got this problem...I’ve got this problem.” He can’t get off the tape loop in order to actually address the problem—mostly because he doesn’t know how and in many cases he can’t penetrate the base of his problem because it is obscured by armoring and fixations.

 

Q:     Sometimes I have thought that I understood why I was reacting to a certain situation and that I could correctly trace its roots back to an early experience; yet I wasn’t able to remove it from myself. I still reacted that way and I still felt the unwanted emotion whether I understood it or not. Is there any way you can change how you feel and react when that comes on?

 

RK:  I’d guess you aren’t really getting down to the real root cause. You need to pursue why your digging is being side­tracked. The question to pursue may be, “What am I covering up from myself?”

 

Q:     So maybe I am stopping short with my answers? I am tracing it back to something, but only as far as I am comfortable. Might that be the difficulty?

 

RK:  As a generalization, that may well be the situation. You will protect yourself in all different kinds of ways from having to live through your real problem. The psychological principle states that for some reason your brain is trying to protect your self-esteem or your emotional comfort by setting up a block to recollection.

 

Q:     The brain seems to do a terrible job of actually protecting one’s feeling good about himself.

 

RK:  I agree. Such blocks actually can make you blind to certain aspects of yourself. If a person were to come to have no self-esteem, then that would be the end of him. When the last shred of his own self-esteem disappears, the lights go out. No one could stand that, so our past actions that we regard as shameful or foolish or deprecating we must hide from in order to preserve a self-image of rightness or goodness or worthiness. If I be­lieve that I am not good in any aspect, if there is nothing about me which I feel is redeeming, then logically I am nothing.

 

Q:     That is the brain’s motivation for erecting psychological blocks?

 

RK:  Right. To protect yourself from anything which seems to make you do less or be less than what you want to be, your brain can come up with some fantastically subtle techniques to keep you from conscious awareness of who you really, basically are.

 

Q:     What are some of the tricks the brain uses?

 

RK:  Armoring is a good one to start with. Let’s say you are afraid of being hollered at by your parents and thus being caused to feel guilty and emotionally upset to a high degree. You’ll automatically and unconsciously assume certain muscular rigidi­ties to diminish your feelings. Since emotions engender body feelings in muscles, locking the muscles blocks their normal response. But after the emotion subsides, the muscles’ readiness to respond remains frozen in that readiness for as long as you live. This takes energy to sustain, and some people are so full of such locked-up energy that they have almost no spare energy to accomplish anything. Eventually, although you are having emotions, you don’t experience them translated into muscu­lar feelings in your body. You block those out, and you restrict the ability of the body to respond to these natural emotional stimuli. After years of repeatedly restricting the natural response to a scolding, you find out that you can’t respond to any emotional stimulus because the neurological-muscular channels through which such feelings have to travel are now effectively blocked for both good feelings and bad feelings.

 

The mechanism of this blocking lies in a part of the thalamus in the brain and also in the muscles at the site of whatever muscle systems are involved in the feelings associated with a specific emotion. To overcome this induced deadening, you have to go back and allow yourself to feel genuinely and deeply all of those body responses that you were avoiding and locking in the muscles; and upon discharge, the body becomes soft and supple instead of the muscles being rigid and feeling like armor under the skin.

 

Threats to your self-esteem can also be blocked out via the brain alone. Such brain tricks are called fixations. If you have had a terrifying experience where you couldn’t handle the resulting potent emotions that seemed like they were going to overwhelm you, then you tend to bury the whole experience so you don’t have to relive it in any way. Some of those fierce experiences leak through in the form of nightmares, usually in some disguised symbolism. This is part of the brain’s at­tempt to inure you through a similar experience as a dream. If the painful or frightening event happened way back at the time when you were a small child, however, it usually becomes thoroughly buried from conscious recall, but the buried memory still has an unconscious influence on your attitudes, behavior and responses. The only chance for recall is to go step by

step backwards to that original cause via the peeling of the onion technique or with the help of a psychotherapist. Whatever technique is used, the key to discharging the neurotic block is to relive the emotional content of each buried memory as it is uncovered. Otherwise, that buried incident of the past continues to poison your present and future.

 

Q:     So you can’t just recognize fixations and armorings intellec­tually for them to go away? You have to discharge the emotions?

 

RK:  Yes. Just having an expert correctly identify that you have a neurotic condition doesn’t uncover its source. Take a person with a phobia, for instance. He may be unreasonably terrified of something like a cat or high places or crowds, and he hasn’t the foggiest notion of where that comes from. It is just completely blocked from his memory. The only way back is through some form of psychotherapy. Uncovering the true source of those feelings can be a hit-or-miss proposition’ that goes on for a long period of time before you are likely to get to the true cause, and in many cases you never do. But you are just as likely to find it on your own. We can use the same psychiatric techniques to do it for ourselves. We all have neurotic blocks and armorings, and we can address the major ones in a reasonably allotted time, but I don’t think that any of us can live long enough to completely rid ourselves of all of them. That is one of the problems of growing up in a society where so many negative things are laid on us, and we have childish responses to them which are usually way out of propor­tion to the strength of the stimulus.

 

Q.     And so that’s just another symptom of emotional immaturity. The phobic person is reacting to a situation which calls for an adult response, but he’s fixated at a child’s response level.

 

RK:  Yes. A phobia is an inappropriate response to a current situation. If one really worked at it, he could get rid of most of his emotional blockages and be a pretty capable and efficiently functioning person. By efficiently I don’t mean like a machine. We can experience all the good human feelings, be able to love, and clear the brain pathways of neurotic blocks to emotional maturity so that higher mental abilities can mani­fest in us. Then we are fulfilling the rich life human beings are heir to. We can better experience and cope with our envi­ronment in ways that are beneficial to all concerned.

 

Q:     Why is it that so few of us do that?

 

RK:  Well, it takes a lot of time and effort and usually a good deal of money for professional help. Most people can’t see the incentive and rewards for clearing hidden blocks. Most people don’t even believe there is something better that they could be. We learn to live with our shortcomings and even pro­claim them proudly as strengths. The churches provide social acceptance at whatever level of maturity one happens to be, and that is a great comfort. No personal effort is expected of us—just believe and you are one of the elite. We here take a different approach—that life should be something that is exciting and that you have a grip on. We encourage members to live on the point of reality and live life as if it is their great personal scientific experiment where they are discovering ever more wonders as they open new doors. We also provide a lot of opportunities for insights into personal growth incentives which are rarely available elsewhere. We like to discuss the rewards available by going through the effort of thinking through some of these new ideas. They are not really new ideas; they are ideas that are as old as mankind, but they are new to us because they are different ways of approaching problems which seem to be so prevalent that you can’t even recognize them as problems, because the problems seem to be the norm. We are not here to knock society, but some people outside our group may think we are because we are saying, “This is no good, and that could be better.” Actually, we’re pointing out the things that are wrong so that we can address them; and if people are never shown how to recognize their problems they certainly aren’t going to put any effort into solving them. Growing up is tough. And growing beyond the norm is even tougher. After the first few years of struggling with inner growth, you begin to feel the task is insurmountable and is going to take forever, and in truth you have to accept that it is going to continue your whole lifetime, but that is a negative feeling that yields to persistence. In time, breakthroughs begin to occur, and you do begin to build up a firmer sense of self-esteem. You say, “I am beginning to understand what Lemurian civilization has to be. I see why Christ needs us to take on the kinds of tasks that we have to do. We can’t rely on our neighbor doing them for us. We each have to build ourself into a brick that is strong within itself in order to be part of a sound edifice comprising a great civilization.” So there is an external in­centive to add to the personal incentives, and the rewards are tremendous because you begin to experience things that nobody else can even see. You approach a level of maturity that is one of the most gratifying things that can be experienced. As neurotic blockages that limit intelligence are removed, you become more able to perceive worlds that nobody else can touch upon and can penetrate hitherto unsuspected realities. The world of geniuses is much richer and awe inspiring than the average person’s. Einstein is regarded as one of the most mature people. He had a deeply genuine concern for humanity, was an excellent father, was interested in music and the arts and all that culture has to offer, and lived his life to the fullest. He was a complete human being—a man as a man should be. He wasn’t some kind of a warped mad scientist or anything like that. He was as far as possible from that. He was proven also to be a mystic. But we know he didn’t have Cosmic Consciousness because he didn’t believe in clairvoyance.

 

 

 

Exploring Emotional Maturity (III)