THE AGING INFANT
Aging is automatic. Maturing is a choice.
The 90-Year-Old Baby
Most human beings live their entire lives while their consciousness remains an infant. Even at age seventy. Eighty. Ninety.
They are still looking for a “pacifier.” Or a breast to nurse from. Someone to calm them down. Someone to validate them. Someone to fill an internal void. Someone to take responsibility for their existence in their place.
Maturation vs. Decay
This is not maturation. It is decay. A life that becomes more and more fixed around habits, needs, and dependencies. Without any true growth of consciousness.
People do not like to hear this. Because it breaks the story of comfort they tell themselves. They prefer soft words that give legitimacy to staying exactly as they are.
The Loop of Dependency
But the one who seeks truth and not a caress must agree to see. The common human behavior—emotional dependency, the search for satisfaction, the clinging to people, systems, and identities—does not lead to any purpose. It only preserves a low existence. A loop that repeats itself.
The Weaning
Awakening begins the moment a person is ready to wean. To stop looking for who will hold him. And to start asking seriously: Where am I living? Why am I living? And what is required of me to move from an “inferior” existence to an essential existence?
Without this. Even a long life. Is just time that passed. Not a life that was lived.
Translated from the Hebrew wisdom of Ruth Kedem.