Episode 7 - THE MATURATION ANALYSIS: PREREQUISITES OF COLLECTIVE MATURATION

In this episode we examine the power of the Maturation Analysis as a way to break out of the narrative of limiting beliefs about who we are and our false assumption that we are doomed to repeat our past, both of which are holding us back from building a better world.

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Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode, we examine the power of the Maturation Analysis as a tool to break out of the narrative of limiting beliefs about who we are as a human race and our false assumption that we are doomed to repeat our past, both of which are holding us back from building a better world. One of the biggest obstacles that is getting in the way of us reinventing a new and better world, a world that is more peaceful and secure and in which we can each fulfill our potential, and we can collectively fulfill our collective potential is a particular story that we have gotten into the habit of telling ourselves. There are many stories we tell ourselves, but there's a particular category of stories that I call a category of false assumptions. I have come to know more about this through my training as a life mastery and energy coach and this is how this idea of false assumptions goes. The story we tell ourselves is that, just because something has happened in the past, it is bound to happen again. It's a well known phenomenon. I think most of you will recognize this if I give you some examples of how we do this in our personal life. We do it in our personal lives, and we do this in our collective lives because a bunch of personal habits, when collected, becomes the culture of our societies, whether local, national, or global. So, in the personal sphere, how many of you can relate to this? You failed to get a promotion. You applied four years ago for a promotion at work. You tried your best. You put your heart in it. You had your hopes set high and you failed to get it. Now there's another opportunity to apply for promotion. But what holds you back is this memory of and the emotions of disappointment and a sense of failure and a sense of I'm not good enough. And you say, wait a minute, I'm not even going to try for this. I know what's going to happen. Look, I tried before. I failed. I'm bound to fail again. And so you give up. We see this in our relationships, right? We invite someone out on a date. They reject us after a while. And then we become really skittish about asking the next person out on a date. Or we go have a marriage that we really wanted and we thought was successful, which ends in divorce. And then we're afraid to go out and try to establish another long term relationship again. The student who gets a bad grade after having studied quite a lot and the next time an exam rolls around, they say, well, what's the point of studying? You know, I tried so hard last time I failed. It's not going to work. And they give up. So this habit of falling into this trap, "Well, it's happened before, it's bound to happen again," is really a severe obstacle, especially since it's loaded emotionally for us. But we do this collectively as well. Let's look at an example. You know, during COVID, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, made an appeal to all the nations of the world and to the peoples of the world and said, look, at least while we try to resolve this pandemic, let us have a global ceasefire. Let's put an end to war, even if it's temporary. But we weren't able to muster the will to do that. We see this with racism. We see it on both sides. People who have been subjected to endemic and institutional racism often lose hope and say, you know, it's always been like this. It's never going to change. It's happened before. It's going to happen again. Or we are aggressive by nature. You know, we've always been aggressive. We've fought for centuries and we're going to continue fighting. Nothing's ever going to change. We do the same with nationalism. Oh, we're never going to be willing to give up any modicum of state sovereignty in order to make collective global decisions on critical issues like climate change or COVID 19 or in a global economic recession. We do the same with genocide. Oh, well, we've always had genocide. You know, we had Rwanda. We said never again. Then we had Bosnia and we had Kosovo and we had Darfur and on and on and on. We have Syria and you know, it's never going to change. Now when you actually step back and think about this mindset of "Oh, it's happened before; it's bound to happen again and therefore I'm not going to try." It's a little silly actually, because it would be like an 18 year old saying, "Well, gee, for months as a child, I couldn't walk. And, that's the way it's going to be. I'm not going to even bother trying walking. Or for the two year old to say, "I'm not going to try walking. Cause all my life, all one and a half years or two, I have not been able to walk." When we actually take an objective look at this tape that plays in our heads, it really doesn't make much sense. I think of this belief, this false assumption, as a weed. It's like weeds in a garden. Here we are trying to grow and create a world we really want and deserve, a compelling future that we can see, and these weeds end up strangling the new growth before it's even had a chance to take off. Because this kind of thinking triggers a whole set of very negative and dense emotions that are laden with very strong self judgment of who we are as human beings. We end up feeling really badly about ourselves. And we sink into depression and anxiety and a sense of hopelessness and futility that no matter what we do, nothing will help. And those emotions in turn lead to lethargy and apathy, inaction. Indecision. When we do take action, it tends to be too little too late. And we're seeing this with COVID all around the world. It's this constant too little too late. So what do we need to do? We need to shift this emotional energy so that we can come out of our apathy and take action. To shift the energy, the emotional energy, we need to shift the story. We need to change the story. We need to tell ourselves a different story. Chuck out the old story that is really disempowering, doesn't make sense, and doesn't work for us, and try a new one. So here are the steps I would recommend we pursue as we go about replacing this story. The first step is to just challenge the truth of this belief that just because something's happened before, just because we've fought wars before, been aggressive or done certain things a certain way, we're bound to do them again. That our past equals our future, that we're doomed to repeat our past, that our past essentially defines us. We need to challenge this belief and say, how true is it that the past defines our future. To this end, there's a wonderful quote from the famous coach, and he calls himself a strategist Anthony Robbins, in which he says, I'm going to pull it up here, "So many people are trying to drive into the future using a rear view mirror to guide themselves. If you do that, you'll crash." Now that makes eminent sense, right? We wouldn't dream of driving down the road with our eyes fixated just on the rearview mirror, not paying attention to where we were going, because we know we're going to have an accident. And yet we do this in our individual and collective lives as societies, all the time. That's the first step. We need to wake up and recognize, what we've been doing doesn't actually make sense, and it's actually quite dangerous. So let's change how we do things. Then the second step is to change the way we interpret and understand our collective history. The old story, as we said before, is that humanity as a whole has been aggressive, that we've always been prone to violence and conflict, that it's in our nature, in fact, as human beings, and that nothing's going to change no matter how hard we try. The result is we have no incentive to try anything different and we've basically given up before we've even started playing, right? It's like sitting out the game before you've even taken a foot out onto the court. Now, what I want to offer instead is a different way of viewing human history, what has happened to date and what we're still going through right now, and I call it the Maturation Analysis. The new story is based on this Maturation Analysis in which we view the history of humanity as a whole as an evolution from the infancy of humanity all the way through to its maturity. Its progression from immaturity to maturity. It's an evolution that is marked by various developmental stages. And each of these stages is essentially characterized by expanding circles of integration. If you look at the history of humanity, we started off with the family or the clan being the center of our loyalties. After that, the focus of our loyalty became the tribe, then the city state, and then the nation, and we kind of got stuck there. That's where we still are. Our primary loyalty tends to be towards our nation. My nation is first. However, what if the next inevitable stage on this path towards maturity is unity? Unity of the human race, and a sense that our primary loyalty is going to be to humanity, that primary loyalty is not incompatible with lesser loyalties. You know, you can be loyal to your nation and also be loyal to your county and city and to your football team or soccer team or tennis team. These are not incompatible loyalties. So what is the actual truth? To replace the old story that we've told ourselves, that we're incorrigibly aggressive, is that unity of the human race is actually inevitable. It's the next inevitable stage in our growth as a collective whole. Wow, that would be amazing. Quite a big difference. And it brings us back to an old quotation we looked at in one of the earlier episodes by Napoleon Hill, in which he said, "Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve." We need to have a vision of what we can be, to hold a higher vision of our better selves. And then we need to have conviction that it's possible in order to then take action to achieve it. So, what if we finally started to recognize that what we are going through right now is actually the final throes of a very turbulent adolescence that actually presages the maturity of the human race? Having that image immediately within me starts to create a shift in energy. I start to see myself moving from a sense of futility and hopelessness and a sense that nothing will ever change to, "Oh my gosh, this is just a stage. There's a reason for it. And if I really try, I can make it to the other side. And I'm willing to do my bit to help the human race move along. By engendering this kind of hope, we're then able and willing to take whatever action is necessary. It's very similar to parents of a teenager, right? When our teenagers act out, we as parents don't just throw them out of the house. If we thought they were going to be that way forever and never change, we probably would. But we have perspective. We have a vision of the long term. And we realize that this is a phase. Sometimes a phase goes on for a few years. It is a prolonged phase. Sometimes it's right into their 20s and even early 30s. But we still still love them and don't throw them out of the house. Indeed, what we do is quite the opposite. We hold a higher vision of who they can be for ourselves and for them. We encourage them. We are patient. And we have compassion. So these qualities of encouragement, of patience, of compassion are really key. And yet, what do we do with ourselves as a human race? We beat up on ourselves and say, We're incorrigibly selfish. We're evil by nature." What if we were to utilize those same tools and treat ourselves with the same compassion, with the same patience, with the same unconditional love that parents do teenagers? Because we understand that this behavior merely reflects a lack of maturity and capacity and understanding, but that all of these are growing. And indeed, more importantly, we understand that this phase we're going through and what we're exhibiting, this selfishness and this proclivity towards conflict is actually a distortion of the human spirit, as opposed to a reflection of who we truly are as human beings and as a human race. Our job is to stop and take stock of where we are, take responsibility for how we got here, understand why it is that it is just a stage in our evolution, to envision what we could be, and then to make choices to bridge the gap. Very recently, this wonderful young poet laureate who read her poem written specifically for the inauguration here of our our latest president in the United States. She wrote this beautiful poem and there was a particular line that really struck me. Actually, there were two. She says, "We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be." This is a wonderful articulation of this principle that we can't dwell in our past and we can't become literally slaves to our past. We cannot let our future be defined by our past and we're certainly not doomed to repeat it. However, it does require coming face to face with who we are now, what we've been. Looking ourselves straight in the eye. Accepting responsibility. And then taking the next step, which she also articulated beautifully. She says, "It's the past we step into and how we repair it." So the past is not something we dwell on and wallow in and get depressed about, but we step into it, recognize that we have free will choice, recognize that we can make different choices to today, and then we can repair the past. So, what do we do now? Our first step is we recognize. What do we recognize? We recognize that these old habits of nationalism, of xenophobia, of entrenched racism, of tribalism, of political partisanship, these are just evidences of the lack of maturity of the human race, and that we will outgrow them. We will recognize that our primary loyalty is to humanity. The second thing we recognize is that we're ready to develop new capacities, new moral standards and institutions that will serve us, that are fit to serve us, as we step into this next stage of our collective growth into maturity. We can and must choose to harness our power of choice to use consultation, collaboration, and cooperation in order to find constructive ways of creating the world that we want and deserve. And finally, we understand that these steps will lead us to the maturity that will be marked by the unification of the planet. Yes, it's a long row to hoe, and it is going to be tortuous and thorny, and there are going to be ups and downs, but we're going to get there. Where we will have a global community of nations served by global institutions, that are fit to address the needs of a global community, that is interconnected and a single organism, and also fit to meet the crises and global challenges of our time, like climate change, like pandemics like a tremendous human rights atrocities, like entrenched racism. I do want to sound a note of warning though. We must act, we must do these three steps with urgency, because time is of the essence. We can't afford to remain stuck in this developmental stage where we are for too long, because we know what happens when human beings get stuck in a developmental stage, right? They kind of become retarded in their emotional growth. We all are familiar with the guy, and I'll say the guy, but it could be the gal, the lady who is 40 or 50 years old, but still chooses to behave like a teenager. They tell off color jokes, and they don't show up for things. They're not responsible. They're not the kind of person we would choose as our bosses, or as our employees, as our mentors, as our spouses, as the parents of our children, right? So it's the same with us collectively. Right now, we're really acting out. We're kind of stuck in this stage of our development. But it's time to break out a bit. Why is it so important? Because to the extent we don't, we're going to suffer even more. This last year has already demonstrated that there is a lot of pain and suffering, but we do have choices to make. We can mitigate those sufferings and forestall far greater and deeper sufferings by acting quickly to shift our energy, shift our mindset, shift our habits, and let go of this old habit of false assumptions. I want to end today by by sharing with you a beautiful poem by somebody who is the founder and CEO of IPEC Coaching, Bruce Snyder. It's a beautiful poem. Actually, it's lyrics to a song he wrote and it's called "I Am the River" and hopefully it'll be uplifting. I found it very uplifting. Here goes. If life were a river, would you watch it flow by? Would you dive in with passion or not even try? Would you brave a new course and explore distant streams or sit on the bank without having your dreams, living your dreams? Don't you know, don't you know who I am? Can't you see the truth? Don't you know, don't you know who I am? I am life, and I am the river. If life were a desert, would you bathe in the sun? Would your goal be survival or to thrive and have fun? Would you see a cruel world filled with pain, lack and need, or search for a place to plant? A new seed. Look at the river. Look at your life. Look at the world. Look at the world. Look at me. Don't you know? If life were a mountain, would you gaze from the ground? Would you scale to new heights and refuse to stay down? Would you climb but then stop fearing what you might find or surge to the peak, reaching for peace of mind? Don't you know? Don't you know who I am? Can't you see the truth? Don't you know, don't you know who I am? I am life, and I am the river. Okay, I'm going to end by again letting you know that the new book, The Alchemy of Peace, is out. Take care, be well, be safe. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.