The Problem of the Puer Aeternus
!1 It is by no means surprising that our culture is suffering from a problem of arrested development. Not only the adolescents but the adults, who “oppressed by the images of beauty” chase an image of their younger selves to the grave. The essays compiled by Mahdi (1987) locate many of the social issues our culture is facing today in individuals hungering for ritual processes and initiations, lacking the proper container. Amongst others, cutting (scarification), anorexia (fasting), and compulsive violence are just a few examples of the terror which ensues when human beings neglect their psychospiritual hygiene. For the discussion today I would like to focus attention on the destructive lack-of-action in young men who live their lives either pathologically bored or vicariously through their screens, indulging limitlessly in video games, pornography, and identified with what I call the “persona’s persona”, the online self. Many of the popular theories on arrested development argue an external etiology (Henderson, 2005). The idea being, the ego as, it goes through its life, inevitably collides with certain factors that can debilitate it. This ranges from momentary frustration to persistent moods and states of possession lasting weeks, months, and in many cases, years. Our culture of scientism reinforces determining a root cause, but as Wilber (2000) has shown, this rule is applied solely to the third-person, external world, while overlooking subjective factors like mental states and stages of development. Even mental states, he illumines, never survive for long before getting externalized, regurgitated to graphs and charts, explained as byproducts of mechanical processes in the brain or body.
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