A's old posts on the stages of personality development, put through DeepL, because he might like his dash of woo but I found this by and large hit home:
There are five basic levels of personality evolution:
All these people live in completely different worlds.
The transition from one world to another is both a psychological catastrophe and the beginning of a completely new life, a new birth.
The change of level cannot be set as a task, but the level is determined by two things:
the degree to which a person perceives his inner self,
the degree of fulfillment of its recommendations,
and hearing and fulfillment are very different things.
Infantile personalities (there are 86 percent of them in the society) do not feel any Self, though they hear it perfectly well, because it speaks to them no less than to the most super-advanced ones.
They hear, but they do not listen.
Our true self speaks to us through the subconscious, and the subconscious speaks to us in the language of images, sensations, states, symbolic coincidences, questions that arise on the periphery of consciousness - in general, in the semiconscious layer, to which the infantile personality does not consider it serious to pay attention.
It cannot believe that this set of inner impressions is the appeal of its true nature, it does not understand, does not know and does not want to understand.
Not feeling any support in himself, infantile personality is entirely captured by the external.
But even here it has no stability.
The infantile personality lives by the method of spontaneous identification - with whatever catches its attention here and now.
The infantile personality is easily identified by the following characteristic - she has no memory of her own words, actions and preferences.
She can start hard for health, and easily end for rest in the course of uttering a single (!) sentence.
Being empty, deprived of access to its inner content, the infantile personality instantly falls prey to various predatory concepts that overflow the collective unconscious (e.g., the concept of “Russian World”).
And here two important nuances arise, weaving together into a paradox.
Being the lowest level of personality, in fact - empty space, weak, unable to exist independently, infantile personality can have an extremely strong influence on you, because this empty space in it is immediately filled by several predators - concepts, usually very tough, which not only fight among themselves on the client's material, they also throw themselves on his interlocutors.
I think we all have such experiences: talking to adherents of the flat Earth theory, vaccinationists/antivaccinationists, vata/vyshivata.
When you are confronted with someone who, as they say, has a stake through their head, this is it.
At this point you are not dealing with the personality itself, but with a hard and powerful force that psychologically (and sometimes not only) can run you over like a bulldozer.
You need to have something behind you (this something arises at the level of adolescent personality), and a personal power that can look into the eyes (and scare) of the most serious demons (and this is already the level of maturity), to be able to resist at this moment and to free a person (at least for the time of conversation with you) from the concepts that devour him.
This is the power of public opinion.
People who are sick with it are of little value in themselves, an infantile person who has been abandoned by its concepts is a pitiful sight - something like a plucked wet rooster.
But brought to the masses and charged with concepts, it's a force to be reckoned with.
This is the secret why the internet (and queues) is dominated by assholes, while decent people are often afraid to even stick their necks out (until they are mature).
The infantile personality dangles through life like an oar in an ice-hole, and when knocked down into the masses it is the main threat to the evolution of society as such, being the main target (and means) of various technologies of influencing the masses.
In itself, taken separately, it is a terrible lost, living in the moment, a chip carried by the ocean - without reference points, without goals, without values.
But the proper time will come and she will become a teenager.
An infantile person becomes a juvenile personality by latching on to one (or more) dominant concepts with a deep inner interest.
These concepts are alien to him. They do not correspond to the needs of his true self, or rather - they do, but at the level of superficial symbolic periphery, when “wealth” is understood as formal possession of a white Mercedes, and not as his ability to be rich in any circumstances, a part of nature; and destiny - as a more or less successful choice of profession, “…which would give bread for bread”.
Nevertheless, here for the first time comes into force the rule according to which the subsequent evolutionary level is a reaction to the extremes of the previous one: if the infantile personality's main problem was the inability to be at least somewhat stable, the juvenile personality begins to work on this very theme.
Juvenile personalities are, what is called, the salt, if not of the earth, then of the society - they carry its main programs and share the main views, and this is the last level, which lives in harmony and agreement with the society, further (from the adolescent level) begins to detach the personality from the social content in favor of personal, internal.
Juvenile personalities in society [are] 13-14%, they together with infantile almost exhaust all 100%, adolescent - somewhere one or two percent, mature - two or even three orders of magnitude less, and integrated [there] may not be a single one for the whole country.
The main theme of the juvenile personality is service.
Its task is to carefully attach itself to the theme: a story, worldview, concept, profession, person, collective, and honestly serve them until the story is exhausted.
From the point of view of the personalities of the subsequent level, the main content of life of the juvenile level personality is nothing but serfdom (in slavery - infantile), but - and this is very important to understand - for the juvenile personality this is the truth of life, its main, sincere content, and these your talks about “liberation”, peculiar to adolescence, it simply will not understand, as the mother of a one-year-old baby will not understand the proposal to “get rid” of him seriously.
The fact is that until the mature level, most people make the same mistake - measuring others by themselves, projecting their level on the interlocutor - hence the relentless desire of the human race to “cure” each other, which with the development of social networks broke free completely uncontrollably.
The transition from juvenile to adolescence is a catastrophe. Suddenly, a person discovers that everything he believed in and was (quite sincerely!) inspired by is completely alien and superfluous to him, and his true life and its content is in a completely different place.
But for now the juvenile, like Sisyphus, persistently rolls the stone handed down by society uphill, a stone that is completely indifferent to her personal experiences and the content of her life, and with which she so desperately identifies.
The infantile personality identifies with the present moment. The juvenile with a cause to which she may be loyal for years or a lifetime.
The important thing is that neither of them identifies with themselves and simply will not understand what the issue is, no matter how much you explain it to them.
The consciousness of the juvenile is firmly fixed in several strong positions: home, work, family, hobbies, friends, and even the very switching between positions is not easy for her.
The shades and nuances, the ability to look at the world and people with soft eyes, inner impressions and inner work, which are the true content of the personality of the following levels, the juvenile does not understand. She doesn't even know them and the inner world as such, not that she doesn't have it (the infantile doesn't have it), as much as it is meager, stiff and limited - to typical experiences and thoughts on various occasions, generated by their leading concepts, and if the concept doesn't give permission, the juvenile won't notice any other nuances of the world.
She won't even know they exist, just as a frog doesn't see objects that don't move.
Despite the extreme rigidity and templates of the worldview, which literally do not allow it to go beyond the limits (always narrow compared to real life) prescribed by the leading concept, the juvenile personality itself usually considers itself firmly on the ground, sensible person and does not experience, except for moments of mental crises, special doubts and experiences.
But these crises, associated with the rejection or replacement of the leading concept, are borne extremely hard, representing a small psychological death.
In these moments juvenile seems that the world has collapsed and everything you believed in and served, flying into the tatters, and this is especially unpleasant if it before it gave and socialization, and prosperity, and meaning.
This is how a major military commander feels when he retires and suddenly finds himself needed by no one, though still full of strength and desire to work, to manage huge masses of troops subordinated to him earlier.
Doctors know that such stories often end sadly - a person who does not have himself, and will not find himself (unless, of course, he was lucky enough to suddenly move to the adolescent level).
The juvenile personality is a faithful servant of society - with its limited perception and rigid templates of “good/bad” - and you'd be surprised, but a lot of powerful people are juvenile personalities, including presidents of certain companies and countries, directors, teachers and other bosses.
The juvenile personality hates crises and doubts and tries to avoid them by all means, although it is there, in the times of its mental breakdowns, when it is abandoned by rigid concepts and left to itself, that the potential of meeting itself lurks.
Then the faithful puppet of social clichés suddenly turns out to be a crab, taken out of the shell of social defenses and presented with its tender meat to all the winds of true life, in all its complex diversity, and - along with total despair - gets a chance.
A chance to find himself.
The next level is adolescence, and we will talk about it a little later).
The transition to adolescent personality is a catastrophe, and the life of the adolescent personality is an escape from a concentration camp.
The catastrophe comes because the juvenile personality believes, firmly, fundamentally, proves them with its whole life - in ideas and values that have nothing to do with it, except symbolic - and that symbolism has yet to be read (usually at a mature level).
But a tale is long in the making - one day the evolutionary river brings a human being to the threshold.
Behind the threshold a waterfall meets the person and the juvenile personality flies into Tartarus.
Tartarus is that all his ideas and values collapse - sometimes with a bang, sometimes as if something poisoned them, and they turn from desirable to bland, something like replacing popcorn with plastic in the middle of a favorite movie.
I drink coffee in the mornings and - without any pleasure, said the classic.
Have you had a state when you are at work or in the middle of a friendly company, suddenly felt like a complete stranger and did not understand - what are you doing here…?
Congratulations, this is your inner self deciding to have a little fun on your own material, showing you some perspective.
The situation of an adolescent personality is characterized by the fact that his inner self has woken up for good and is not going to fall asleep.
The main thing is that it shows the person that now it is not individual situations from his former life that are alien to him, but the whole (oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh) life is alien to him, not real.
It is a blow that few people would wish for and, of course, the person resists it desperately (and with a distinct flavor of hopelessness).
He resists in vain. An invisible scalpel will ruthlessly cut off all former connections with the phantom reality, which the person took for so long for the real one, lived it, was sick, suffered, wished and fought - in it and for it.
Here it is important to realize that his life was not false (life is not false), and he should not be ashamed of it.
What was false were his perceptions, and that too was inevitable.
Later, they are still switched more than once.
In the life of a person who has passed to the adolescent level of personality, a completely different stage begins, and here are some of its characteristics.
If earlier the main reference point in the life of a person was the programs provided by the Big Society, now they are all underlyingly devalued (mentally a person can cling to them for a long time, and the longer - the more trouble he will create for himself).
The opinion of one's own inner self becomes the main thing for a person (and again, he may not realize it for a long time) - and society immediately reacts to this, trying to destroy the adolescent personality already fundamentally - just as a personality.
This must be properly understood. Society is not a direct villain, and the destruction of self-important adolescent personalities is not an end in itself.
The society is just very primitive (and this is our common fault) - and perceives only very simple ideas on very powerful energy, something like:
- All men should serve in the army, all women should give birth to soldiers, and all together should pay taxes and obey the state.
Any idea higher and more complex than these, the Big Society does not understand and does not understand why they should be understood.
But the Big Society understands the opposition to its programs very well and is ruthless to dissidents - you bet, you served, you bastard, on my galleys, and then decided to run away! And who will row the galleys? Dostoevsky?
That's why many people, having reached the adolescent level, start deliberately slowing down their evolutionary development - they are afraid of the skating rink that will run them over.
Only desperate types, for whom their own self is more important than the opinion (and actions) of the Big Society (read - relations with people), go forward and further, and this usually happens at the cost of a lot of blood and tears, and without a good portion of absolute ruthlessness brought up in themselves, it does not work out well.
The main problem of adolescent personality is that this inner self is still too weak.
At the next, mature level, it will shine like a supernova star, flooding the space with a person's personal light, and its power will be so great that a person alone will be free to stop with his own forehead huge social trends - like the most rigid concepts or entire historical trends.
For the time being, the adolescent has no personal power in the positive version, i.e. when a person can purposefully direct his power to his own programs (a mature personality does not deal with other people's programs), and the light of the Self is the light of a very distant, incredibly attractive, special, but still weak star.
This light is enough to reach for the star with all your soul, but it is not enough to reorganize the world and other people's souls in accordance with your plan. Even to (quickly) reorganize one's own soul in accordance with one's own destiny is not enough yet.
But a person already has his own personal power in the negative version - maybe he cannot do anything in particular yet, but no one can crush, deny or humiliate him either, the manipulator always grasps for self-esteem, and here a person has a subconscious but very strong feeling of his own uniqueness and personal, unique destiny (it does not penetrate into consciousness at once - and this is another problem of adolescent personality).
What is important for an adolescent personality?
Its main task is to master the vibrations of one's own Self, however small, distant and insignificant they may seem.
And it all begins with mastering one's own, special, unique view of reality, the world, people, and oneself.
The adolescent personality must embark on a huge program to reshape internal and external reality in his or her own unique way, from eating habits to reacting and strategizing, and any major author (scientist, artist, politician) knows that 90% of success in this is seeing the world through his or her own unique eyes.
Developing this unique vision is the main task of the adolescent personality.
This vision will be the basis for his future accomplishments at the mature level, when he starts to change the world for real, and without developing such a vision you will not get to the mature level.
How does this vision work?
Maybe you've noticed that every major author creates his or her own world - in some ways absolutely real and understandable, and in other ways completely special.
The first lines of a book, the first sounds of a song, the first frames of a movie and you are in a special world, filtered through the prism of this very person, his inner self, his perception.
Technically, this is done through the placement of accents - special accents on the same words, concepts and actions that everyone does, but with their own unique force and direction.
The Buddha said that it is vain to think as if a poor person has no opportunity to sacrifice.
There is always the sacrifice of a kind smile to another person.
But the adolescent personality is already capable of turning its smile personally to the unique soul of another, and this is much more than one might think or suppose.
A small distant star of the inner self tells the adolescent personality the order and ways of setting accents (internal, first of all) in perception and influence on the world and people (and oneself), only it is necessary to have a corresponding desire - to see, hear, feel and - to do.
How does society struggle with uniqueness in a person?
It tries hard to incline a person to a standard response - according to the molds accepted in society.
The spiritual betrayal of self by man (another theme of adolescent personality) comes not least (if not first) through bending to the patterns of response abundantly presented for all occasions by Big Society.
You can live your life in vain, pouring your talents into a cesspool, turn away from the needy, breed plague - society will not say a crooked word to you, but try not to be upset at the news about the illness of a close relative!…
The struggle with the templates of perception and action, the education of the ability to respond non-banal, personal, in their own way - one of the main tasks of adolescent personality.
Depending on the rhythm of his personal destiny, the adolescent personality can live two main variants of his destiny:
Complete break and declassification with the previous life - when a person begins to destroy all his programs - relationships, studies, work, family - for example, leaves the institute, which he entered hard and studied hard two weeks before defending his diploma.
Preservation of external programs while completely replacing internal ones - the fate of a dissident, an internal social immigrant, when a person goes along with the motley crowd, not sharing, as they say, neither thoughts nor passions with it. A familiar story - a person begins to master another, closer to him occupation, but alas, at first it does not bring him any income, and does not meet (to put it mildly) the approval of his relatives and friends, and it is necessary to go to a shabby, former, obtained at the juvenile level of personality work, which is deadly boring - but it feeds.
A combination of these two plots is possible (and often happens).
The unsatisfactory situation can last for years and in the end, the speed of a person's advancement on the evolutionary ladder is determined by his selflessness, inner honesty - and ruthlessness - towards himself.
The adolescent level is a strange combination of a deep, underlying inferiority complex (the inner self is felt but cannot yet be directly realized), a struggle for oneself with society and a struggle for oneself - with oneself - to get rid of the patterns acquired at the previous level, with one's snotty self-pity, a tendency to blame others, and - most importantly - the ability to focus on one's uniqueness as opposed to the benefits (sometimes very large) of living in harmony (and subordination to the Big Society).
Which is what we wish for adolescent personalities).
Adolescent personalities in society are few, no more than 1-2%.
Next time - about mature ones.
And the mature one is Gandalf.
There are very few mature individuals.
In a country like [A's country] there may be only a few hundred or even less - dozens.
The mature level is very high and in any society is a biblical rarity.
I would like to add (after reading the comments) that it is wrong to understand the change of levels of evolutionary growth as a change of physical age.
A child can be born at a mature level at once (although, of course, it will pass through the preliminary phases in childhood, electively), and “…a 90-year-old man who is wise in life” is juvenile.
Accumulated life experience alone does not move a person to a new evolutionary level, at least not linearly.
The main thing in evolutionary growth is the degree with which a person listens to the dictates of his own inner Self.
The mature level is a Self that blazes like a flame emitting prominences.
If on the adolescent level it was a small star shining in the distance, here it is a star that catches you at point-blank range.
A person's own self is so strongly expressed that it is hard to be around him.
Personal energy of a person easily replaces a whole ministry with its thousands of people, apparatuses, real estate, guards, red carpets, gilded pens and a juvenile minister at the head.
If you get into the self-expression zone of a mature personality, it will most likely crush you and not notice you.
This is a person who can easily stop (with his forehead) a train at full speed - a train loaded with tanks.
A mature person alone can calmly confront (and break) the tendencies that a whole society is suffering from, for example, with the concepts, ideological currents, beliefs, myths and convictions that are sweeping the society and guiding huge masses of people.
Breaking and imposing one's own.
The inner self of a person in a mature personality is so pronounced that the strongest fetters of society cease to act on it.
And while the adolescent personality sought personal power through the cultivation of a unique personal vision, the mature personality is a personal force, bending the energy lines of the space in which it lives - according to its vision.
An adolescent personality can only dream (unattainable) of organizing its life according to its preferences, while a mature personality does not just live in a reality that it has organized itself, where nothing is accidental - wherever it goes, it will reorganize reality according to its needs.
You can get into the orbit of a mature person, into her environment only if you are part of her plan. Otherwise, you can't even approach her so easily, and if you happen to be there by accident, she will throw you out with a force that exceeds your imagination, and then you will have to pick up bones for a long time.
No, a mature person does not throw fists at you or pull out a gun when you approach. It's just that its energy level is such that as you interact with it, processes begin in you that you will want to run away from.
If the juvenile personality was glued into the programs of the Big Society like a fly into amber, the adolescent one rebelled against them, the mature one returns to the long-term programs of reality restructuring, but with one nuance - she never follows other people's programs at all.
Even if she visibly participates in them, rest assured that she is there to realize only her own plan and only her own goals.
Because of the above, a mature personality has to maintain a large, and at first glance artificial distance with other people, communicating with them only at (and during) specially organized venues, which is every time a big event for everyone involved.
Generally speaking, only people of the same level or neighboring ones can communicate normally, people through the level practically do not understand each other and are always mistaken in the assessment of goals and actions (we are talking about bottom-up assessment, so a juvenile is unlikely to understand a mature one, even if she jumps out of her pants, attributing to her goals and motives, which in a mature one can cause nothing but sincere laughter).
Thus, a mature personality can shepherd a certain number of adolescents, but juveniles will experience in communication with her something like what Shvonder experienced when he tried to attack Professor Preobrazhensky about the children of Germany - and this is at best.
A mature person looks at the adolescent ones as cute, though somewhat naive and a bit goofy children, at the juvenile ones as absolute puppets, hypnotized by their social reality and having neither thinking nor free will, something like dolls in mothballs, at the same time well oiled with ebauxite resin.
She does not look at the infantile ones at all, and they practically have no chance to be in the same space with her, and even if they are (for example, on board an airplane) they will not meet.
If desired, a mature personality can break the juvenile one like a match, just by giving it a little more of its direct attention, but usually the mature one is not up to it - the freedom, which was enjoyed by the adolescent personality (on the principle “I lived then as a spiritual person, without protection”) ends.
The mature personality, plows like a draught horse, realizing its programs day, night, in dreams and in reality.
Her inner self beams with such light that it leaves her no chance to relax.
The solar wind tearing it from within forces the mature personality to change reality in accordance with its own inner vibrations - the moans, cries, complaints and objections of others, especially of lower evolutionary levels, are not taken into account, the mature personality knows better than others what they really need and is usually not interested in other people's opinions.
Depending on personal preferences, a mature personality can choose one of the two main ways of influencing the external reality - by internal or external efforts.
The internal way is to dispense appropriate wi-fi by simply rearranging one's internal and external objects of attention and ways of looking at them. Technically in such a case, a mature personality can sit (or lie) folded, but the reality around her and especially - the reality of other people, begins to change rapidly and unpredictably (for them) rapidly in the desired direction.
The external one is to initiate external transformations corresponding in scale to the task of projecting the inner reality outward, twisting people into their programs, involving and convincing them with one's presence and the light of the inner self.
Usually these two methods are combined, although they can change each other depending on the situation.
The slogan of the mature personality:
There should be only one leader in the party - and that leader is the Self.
This is, of course, in matters that concern her own affairs, where self-realization takes place.
A mature person does not meddle in other people's affairs. In general, a keen sense of “one's own - another's” is one of the main intuitions of a mature person and she willingly uses it, unlike a juvenile, who has neither her own (i.e. sanctioned by the inner self) nor can't get out of other people's programs - and yet willingly climbs to judge everyone and everything).
For humane reasons or in the interest of the cause, the mature personality can cover its power without directing it directly from those around it, and even play the personality of a lower level, only problem is that at the end it will still be according to its - rules, goals and objectives.
A mature personality doesn't have failed programs, they are all realized in one way or another.
A mature personality can be loved, it can be hated (people usually alternate between these two attitudes), but it is impossible to ignore.
A mature personality often (but not necessarily) has a school, pupils or at least a long trail of followers who do not so much want to realize her programs (although this happens too) as just to bask in the beating light of her inner self (a person learns through imitation).
If two mature individuals meet, they bow. Even if they are visibly engaged in the same work from the point of view of society, their work is so intrinsically unique that they have nothing to share.
Mature personalities understand each other without words and respect the work of their colleagues a priori, needing neither help nor inspiration, and only occasionally able (for example, for public benefit) to work in the same direction.
The adolescent personality becomes mature when it finally decides to live in accordance with its own internal norm - whatever it costs and whatever it takes, pushing through anything and everything for the sake of its realization and not considering compromises.
At the next, integrated level, the personality will again undergo a remarkable change.
Unlike the mature one, which is, to put it bluntly, hard to deal with and capable of pestering everyone - good or bad - the integrated one… disappears.
It becomes absolutely easy in the first approximation at all smells like …infantile.
But about that - a little later.)
[video of polar bear navigating across ice floes heaving up and down across a stormy sea]
This is how an integrated personality moves through the world - the situation is constantly changing and you have only two or three seconds to assess it correctly and choose the style and solution that is most appropriate for the fulfillment of your purpose.
And the sun is inside her.
All other personality levels move this way too, but they don't realize it.
Adolescent seems to be driven only by a cloudy little sun, somewhere far over the horizon, as an incredibly desirable but distant ideal, and tends to genuinely believe that she can sit on the same ice floe for five to ten years and/or arbitrarily change ice floes without noticing that the situation is actually changing continuously.
The juvenile serves the ice floe she has clung to in a burst of devoted Service, claiming this ice floe to be both the Truth and the Center of the Universe, and all those who believe in other ice floes are fools or enemies.
She does not notice that she is carried uncontrollably and not to the right place at all - she does not care about it, she has to serve My Great and Only One True Ice Floe.
The infantile personality jumps from ice floe to ice floe without any logic, system or intention, representing pure primordial chaos, like two-year-old children in a ball pool and not noticing that it is treading on the spot.
She imagines that she is the Sun.
A mature personality is a bear sitting on a large iceberg and guiding it to the goal, regardless of any storms and obstacles. Even on purpose - through storms and obstacles.
A realized personality is the Ocean itself.
