The Agony For Adolescents - At Last The Silence is Finally Broken

I think Jeremy Griffith’s explanation of the psychological process of resignation is so precious—to finally have someone honestly explain what is really going on in our teenage years is incredible. The whole explanation of the human condition presented on this website is so heart wrenchingly beautiful—what it can do for this world and what it makes possible for the future is absolutely amazing. With the explanation of the human condition now available, children can be told the truth and never have to give up on their truthful, soulful, all-sensitive world and all the truth and beauty they hold there and for us as adults—we humans are finally completely defended and dignified in the most profound way. This information can finally put a stop to all the suffering and bring about a world where humans can be truly free from the torment of our condition—it has given me the most meaningful life I could ever have imagined. ‘Humanity’s journey has been astonishing. The greatest story ever told is our own.’ (Beyond the Human Condition).

I first became aware of the following quote from Robert Coles’ book The Moral Intelligence of Children, when I read it in Part 3:8 of Freedom: Expanded Book 1 where it discusses the psychological process of resignation, a process that occurs in practically everyone when we are about 15 years of age. This quote has always had the most moving affect on me:

“‘…I remember…a young man of fifteen who engaged in light banter, only to shut down, shake his head, refuse to talk at all when his own life and troubles became the subject at hand. He had stopped going to school, begun using large amounts of pot; he sat in his room for hours listening to rock music, the door closed. To myself I called him a host of psychiatric names: withdrawn, depressed, possibly psychotic; finally I asked him about his head-shaking behavior: I wondered whom he was thereby addressing. He replied: “No one.” I hesitated, gulped a bit as I took a chance: “Not yourself?” He looked right at me now in a sustained stare, for the first time. “Why do you say that?”  [he asked]…I decided not to answer the question in the manner that I was trained [as a denial-complying psychiatrist] to reply…an account of what I had surmised about him, what I thought was happening inside him…Instead, with some unease…I heard myself saying this: “I’ve been there; I remember being there—remember when I felt I couldn’t say a word to anyone”…I can still remember those words, still remember feeling that I ought not to have spoken them: it was a breach in “technique”. The young man kept staring at me, didn’t speak, at least with his mouth. When he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, I realized they had begun to fill’”.

As Jeremy goes on to explain:

“The boy was in tears because Coles had reached him with some recognition and acknowledgement of what he was wrestling with. Coles had shown some honesty about what the boy could see and was struggling with, namely the horror of the utter hypocrisy of human behaviour—which all those who had already resigned to living in denial of the human condition had determinedly committed their minds to avoiding. It has been very hard to grow up in a world that is so full of bullshit/ denial/ dishonesty, most especially its silence about the truth.”  (Freedom: Expanded Book 1 Part 3:8 The anguish of Resignation ).

I also love the following quote from the Resignation chapter in Jeremy’s book A Species In Denial:

“The response from the larger world in general to the honest questioning of children and to the agony of young adolescents struggling with the horrific imperfection of human life was to say something along the lines of, ‘You’ll get over it, it’s just our animal instincts to be brutally aggressive, mean and selfish, and anyway human nature is unchangeable so it’s not worth worrying about.’  But adolescents, who hadn’t yet adopted all the lies, knew full well that the way humans behave now is not the way humans should or once did behave. Their truthful mind and truthful instinctive moral soul was still alive inside of them and the way humans behave now simply terrorised them. For humans who are already resigned and living in denial it is self-evident why everyone is lying and being so silent about the incredible wrongness of human behaviour, but to unresigned innocents it has been an extraordinary and inexplicable mystery. From the young adolescent’s point of view, adults have been ‘full of shit’; full of denial; they have been using all these false excuses and not even admitting that there is a very real and serious problem with human behaviour. .... There was ‘an elephant in our living room’, an all-important issue in human life that nobody was talking about, and young adolescents just had to discover for themselves why it was so necessary to ignore ‘the elephant’, why adults found the human condition such an unconfrontable, off-limits subject, and why each new generation of humans had to resign to a life of blocking out the subject of the human condition. Given the truly awful world and state they were having to resign themselves to, and that they had to go through the agony of resigning without being able to talk to anybody about it, life leading up to resignation was a hellish existence for young adolescents.”

Finally, the following extract from the Main Introductory Video is awesome—get ready for some deadly honest, unevasive truth—it’s stunning!