Chapter 8:8 ADOLESCENCE

The genus: Homo — 2.4 million years ago to the present

The individual now: 12 to 50 plus years old

Moving now into analysis of adolescence, it was emphasised in chapters 2:2 and 8:2 that adolescence encompasses the stage when we fully conscious humans search for our identity, for understanding of who we are—specifically for why we have not been ideally behaved. And since completing that upsetting search was to take some 2 million years, humanity’s adolescence came to be characterised by ever-increasing levels of upset, which required the invention of more and more desperate means to try to contain that upset as well as find relief from it. Ultimately, during the final, agonising stages of this horror story, when upset reached such excruciating levels that we could no longer bear to confront and think about it, we came to a point where we had no choice but to resign ourselves to living in complete denial of the whole unbearably depressing issue of our corrupted condition. The result of this extremely dishonest block-out or denial was almost total separation from our all-sensitive and all-loving—but, at the same time, all-criticising—true self or soul. So when this process of Resignation became an almost universal phenomenon amongst humans during the last 11,000 years (as will be explained, this was due to the development of agriculture, which allowed people to settle and multiply and form towns and cities where closer interaction amongst humans had the effect of rapidly escalating upset) it was indicative of the fact that the human race was fast approaching the psychologically dead state of terminal alienation—a state that has now virtually been reached, and which all the apocalyptic-and–zombie-themed movies we are currently seeing in our cinemas are testament to. So, unfortunately, the true story of our species’ journey through the various stages of adolescence that is now, for the first time, going to be told in this book is one that travels from soundness to insanity—keeping in mind that with the reconciling and rehabilitating understanding of the human condition now found, the human race can be transformed back to life, back to a state of universal sanity, happiness and togetherness, as will be explained in chapter 9.