Maturity of Mind and Adult Behavior

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:

1.    
to be realistic, to be in touch with reality and to be
guided by facts,

2.    
to be responsible to self and others and to accept
responsibility for self preservation,

3.    
to be willing to examine ones beliefs, fallacies,
prejudices and assumptive behavior in an objective way and let them go,

4.    
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,

5.    
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,

6.    
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,

7.    
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,

8.    
to act spontaneously to an occasion or situation, free from
preconceived notions, the compulsion to be perfect or correct, habitual or
mechanical reactions

9.    
to be in touch with the present and enjoy the passing
moment

10.                       
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:

1.    
is concerned with facts,

2.    
goes by his experience rather than beliefs,

3.    
relies upon his reason rather than his emotions,

4.    
relies mostly upon his thinking,

5.    
uses his resources wisely according to the realistic needs
and demands of the situation

6.    
weighs  a situation carefully before drawing
conclusions

7.    
Lives in the present

8.    
is open-minded, willing to learn and explore other
possibilities, view points and alternatives 

9.    
knows his limitations

10.                       
is flexible

11.                       
is spontaneous

12.                       
has a healthy self image and sense of self

13.                       
takes practical decisions based upon his perception of the
situation

14.                       
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
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.