Sunday, November 13, 2005
Puberty. "You become morally self-aware and have to make moral choices on your own, thinking for yourself. You stop simply accepting the rules of your parents or your church; you don't always even accept the laws of your country. Instead, you look to the principles behind these rules and decide whether those principles are valid. Once you take this step, the world will never be the same.
You acquire the intellectual capacity for formal reasoning -- the ability to think about thinking -- which allows you to be aware of your own awareness. This experience is literally a mind-blower, since it opens up your consciousness beyond the space of your skill. You open up to the sacred, whatever is sacred to you. This experience, too, can transform your whole world.
You experience your body changing and see your parents growing older. From this evidence and your new self-awareness, you deduce the inevitability of old age and death. The sudden consciousness of your own mortality can strike with such force that you feel vertigo.
You may begin to search frantically for some kind of meaning in a life that must end in death and loss. If no worldly answer seems to transcend death, you have to consider cosmic answers. If you were raised in a religion, you may turn to it now in a powerful new way. Humans can't live without meaning. Most teens discover that the old meanings of childhood don't work anymore. Some teens must find new meaning in life, or it is simply not worth living anymore. You need meaning to face death."
- Buddha in your backpack
Food for thought, when I read it I realized that it was what I was going through on the nights when I couldn't sleep and lay in bed thinking.
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