Immaturity

 

 

A grown-up person moves in a deep harmony. His body, his psychology, his spirituality are always attuned; they all move together. This does not happen to the people who only grow in age. Their bodies become older but their minds remain retarded.

 

At the time of the First World War, psychologists became aware for the first time of this fact, because for the first time on a large scale they tried to observe, experiment, to know how many people are really psychologically grown-up.

 

And they were amazed, shocked: the average psychological age of human beings is only twelve years. The body may be eighty years old and the mind is lagging far behind. In fact, there seems to be no connection... the gap of seventy years or eighty years. And the eighty-year-old person pretends to know because he thinks he is eighty years old, and he stopped growing when he was only twelve years of age. Really he should be counted only as twelve years of age, not eighty. And as far as the spirit is concerned he may be still in the womb of the mother; he may. never have come out of the womb.

 

These three together, in deep harmony, create beauty, grace, light, love. When they are all in accord, life is an orchestra -- but they are in discord. The spirit is almost non-existent. Hence George Gurdjieff used to say, "I have come across very few people who have any soul."

 

Ordinarily everybody believes that he HAS a soul because the religions have been telling for centuries that everybody has a soul. Everybody only has a potential for being a soul, but that potential is not actualized, not realized. It is Still a seed; it has not come to be a tree. It has not reached the point where spring comes and flowers open up and one feels fulfilled, contented.

 

A grown-up person is a flowering. His life is not divided; his life is an organic unity. He moves in a kind of absolute unity; nothing is lagging behind, nothing has gone far ahead.

 

And this disunity that we see in the world is multidimensional. The soul is in the womb; the mind, the psychology is somewhere hung up at the age of twelve, and the body is eighty or ninety years old. This is only one kind of discord; there are many kinds of discord.

 

The head goes on becoming bigger and bigger, and the heart goes on shrinking. They lose all synchronicity. And when the head becomes too much, man is a monster.

 

-Osho, "Guida Spirituale, #10, Q1“