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Education and Maturity

A talk before the faculty and students of Barnard College, at their fifth biennial vocational conference, November 30, 1960

Maturity has many meanings, especially when applied to people. But in my own association, there is a strong link between the word maturity and the word becoming. Education, in particular a liberal education, can be a powerful maturing force. Depth of meaning about process emerges only out of experience. This, briefly, is the framework within which I shall try to deal with the subject of education and maturity.

A friend of mine in Madison, Wisconsin, tells a story about Frank Lloyd Wright many years ago when his studio, Taliesen, was at nearby Spring Green. Mr. Wright had been invited by a women’s club in Madison to come and talk on the subject “What is Art?” He accepted and appeared at the appointed hour and was introduced to speak on this subject.

In his prime, he was a large impressive man, with good stage presence and a fine voice. He acknowledged the introduction and produced from his pocket a little book. He then proceeded to read one of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, the one about the little mermaid. He read it beautifully, and it took about 15 minutes. When he finished he closed the book, looked intently at his audience and said, “That, my friends, is art,” and sat down.

As I thought about this talk today, I wished that I knew how to do this with the subject of maturity. Maturity is like art and virtue; it is best demonstrated, and I feel presumptuous to be talking about it at all.

I do not have a how-to-do-it formula for achieving maturity to hand you. My sole aim is to encourage you to be thoughtful about your problem of finding the meaning of maturity in your own lives and the times you live in. Because we are all different, the problem will be different for each of us. The common ground I shall try to find is a way of thinking about the meaning of maturity.

The most important lesson I have learned about maturity is that the emergence, the full development, of what is uniquely me should be an important concern throughout my entire life. There are many other important concerns, but this particular one must never be submerged, never be out of sight.

This I learned the hard way. There was a long “wilderness” period in which I sought resources outside of myself. I looked for an “answer” to the normal frustrations of life (frustration used in the sense of the blocking of motives to which one cannot make a constructive response). Good years went by. No answers came. It took a long time for me to discover that the only real answer to frustration is to concern myself with the drawing forth of what is uniquely me. Only as what is uniquely me emerges do I experience moments of true creativity; moments which, when deeply felt, temper the pain of long periods of frustration that are the common lot of most of us and give me the impulse and the courage to act constructively in the outside world.

Every life, including the most normal of the normal, is a blend of experiences that build ego strength and those that tear it down. As one’s responsibilities widen, these forces become more powerful. As good a definition as I know is that maturity is the capacity to withstand the ego-destroying experiences and not lose one’s perspective in the ego-building experiences: “If you can meet with triumph or disaster—,” to borrow a phrase from Mr. Kipling.

One of my special interests is the field of management development. I have made a point of looking into a few organizations in which, in a certain period, there was an unusual flowering of managerial talent. Usually there was one person, an able manager who had the gift of guiding his understudy so as to help bring latent talent to fruition, to the mature ability to carry heavy responsibility successfully. The most outstanding developer I know about had at the center of his philosophy the idea that the really important lessons in the managerial art are learned only as the result of error, suffering the consequences of error and learning from the total experience. This is an important test of maturity: to seek to avoid error, to accept the consequences of error when it comes (as it surely will), and learn from it and to wipe the slate clean and start afresh, free from feelings of guilt.

But this takes a special view of the self. The sustaining feeling of personal significance is important. It comes from the inside. I am not a piece of dust on the way to becoming another piece of dust. I am an instrument of creation, unlike any that has ever been or ever will be. So is each of you. No matter how badly you may be shaken, no matter how serious the failure or how ignominious the fall from grace, by accepting and learning you can be restored with greater strength. Don’t lose this basic view of who you are.

A friend of mine once said of his 4-year-old son, “His world is a six-foot sphere. He’s in the center of it and moves it around with him wherever he goes.”

The conventional view is that this is youthful egocentricity and that one grows out of it as he matures, as he becomes social and accepts responsibility. I would rather say that there is a transmutation as one matures. One is still at the center of his world. (How could one be unique and be otherwise?) But with maturity one’s world becomes the limitless sphere of people, ideas, and events which each of us influences by each thought, word, and deed; and each of us, in turn, is open to receive influence. The individual capacity of each of us to influence and be influenced and to absorb the shocks—this capacity is in proportion to the emergence of the sentient person, the drawing forth of what is uniquely us. This is an important idea to keep as your own private lamp when somebody undertakes to grind you down—as they surely will sometime, if you have not been aware of it already.

This is the central idea of maturity: to keep your private lamp lighted as you venture forth on your own to meet with triumph or disaster or just plain routine. And this is what a liberal education is about; because this is what life is about. If, in your college years, you learn nothing other than who you are, that you have a private lamp, your stay here will have been amply justified.

The notion of uniqueness will bear some exploration. I will leave to the theologians the speculation as to whether part of what is uniquely a person is inherently evil. I prefer to say: whatever it is, draw it forth and face it; then make something creative and good out of it. Oscar Wilde has left for us the observation, “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future.”

We are all conditioned by the culture in which we have lived, more than we can ever know. So many of the conflicts of the world today may have had their origins in the sudden impact of modern travel and communication, which bring these cultural differences face to face in sharp encounter. This makes it imperative that each of us understands the biases of his own culture which he brings to the confrontation.

Yet, acknowledging all of this, I believe that something of unconditioned uniqueness is prepared to show through in every person. It is the process of drawing it forth with which each of us needs to be concerned. It is a process which, at best, will be only dimly perceived; yet we must conjure with it. The remainder of this talk will deal with some ideas about the process which seem particularly important to me at this time.

I see four major issues that need to be faced and dealt with if this drawing forth is to proceed as an important life involvement. The relevance to your concern in this vocational conference is this: in choosing a vocation, you should have as your primary aim (there are other necessary aims, but this one should be primary) that of finding in the work in which you are engaged that which is uniquely you. If you miss on this, you will likely wind up as one of T. S. Eliot’s hollow men—

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

No other achievement, no other end sought, will be worth the effort if through the work that occupies your best days and years you do not find a way to fan your own creative spark to a white heat—at least once in a while. So I want to talk about four of many issues, four that have emerged rather sharply out of my own experience, in the hope that something will resonate in your own experience, while you still have many choices before you.

First, the consequences of stress and responsibility! All work—whether in business, profession, government, home—both develops and limits. It stretches one out in some ways and narrows one in others; it both fans the flame and seeks to quench it. This has no doubt happened to some extent in the educational and other choices you have already made. It will happen more in work.

I see no exceptions: no completely whole persons, nor any chance of it. You must not look forward to any idealized achievement, no perfect or enduring adjustment to your life work. Whenever I think I have really achieved something, up come those powerful lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road”:

Now, understand me well—It is provided in the essence of things, that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.

The greater struggle that will be necessary as you learn to bear more stress and carry responsibility comes because long exposure to these conditions tends to narrow the intellect unless a valiant effort is made to achieve an ever-expanding outlook. It is not enough just to try to keep up, to maintain the level of intellectual curiosity you have achieved in college. The intellectual life must expand. The great risk which the bearers of responsibility assume is that intellectual curiosity, the search for understanding, will atrophy and that only a calculating rationality will remain.

The test is in the heat of action. If one has a problem on which it is appropriate to act, and if one doesn’t know what to do (which is the constant dilemma of all bearers of responsibility), one should turn to the search for greater depth of understanding about the problem.

If you are only going to remember one thing from this talk, I hope you will remember this: the main reason you will ever be aware of a problem is that your understanding of yourself, of the other people involved, and of the area in which the problem lies is limited. Therefore, the search for understanding—an intellectual pursuit—is the most practical of ideas, even though the “practical” people often spurn it. But it is a difficult idea to hold onto when one bears the weight of responsibility for action, especially if the need is urgent. It is difficult to seek to understand when the heat is on. If one is to be well served by a liberal education, one needs to use this period of relative isolation from real life pressures to develop the firm habit of seeking to understand when the heat is not on. This is the best rationale I know of for concentrating such an important educational influence in your present age range. Learn how to seek to understand now, when the heat is not on; make it a firm habit, and try to be aware that this will only serve you well if the habit is firmly enough fixed so that you can manage it when the going is rough, when the stakes are real, and when the consequences of failing to understand may be overwhelming.

One of the important testing grounds in decision making is the meeting of personal conflicts, when ideas or interests differ. Please give some thought to Dr. Carl Rogers’ wonderful formula for meeting conflict. It is this: try to state to the other person’s satisfaction your understanding of his position; then identify and state as much of his proposition as you can agree with; then, and not until then, state your own point of view.

The risk in this procedure is that you might change. Opening one’s self to understanding always entails this risk. This is bad advice for the brittle, the fearful, the dogmatic, the “allness” people. But then, our subject is maturity.

If change is too painful to contemplate, then one had best adjust his blinders to shut out all peripheral understanding. But if one does this and winds up hating the world, then one shouldn’t blame the world for it.

There is a poignant line from The King and I when Anna is getting to the King with some new ideas and, in desperation, he pounds the table and shouts, “If you’re going to be King, you’ve got to be King!” He seemed to me to be saying, “Don’t mix me up with ideas when, at this point, the only thing I know how to do is to act!” This portrays dramatically the awful consequences of a life of action in which the intellectual lamp was not kept bright, in which the search for understanding was not a constant quest. And in this play, the end, for the King, is tragic.

The second issue is the tension between the requirement to conform and the essential person.

Conformity has become a nasty word. It has almost become the battle cry of those of our generation who see their role as the modern version of the muckrakers of 50 years ago.

The attacks on conformity confuse the issue because in any organized society there must be a lot of conformity. Whenever two people undertake to work and live together, there must be some conformity.

All organized effort, any concerted influence, requires to some extent that those who participate must think and act alike. Nothing important can be accomplished without a good deal of conformity. Only a hermit in his cave can completely eschew conformity and carry out his role. As our society becomes more complex, more highly integrated, it demands more conformity than was called for in simpler times.

The problem is to know conformity for what it is: a completely external adjustment to the group norm of behavior in the interest of group cohesiveness and effectiveness. Then, knowing conformity for what it is, always keep it in rational focus as a conscious adjustment in the interest of an effective society. Keep it external, never let it become a part of you. Hold it firmly on the outside. The great danger is that one will lose one’s identity in the act of conformity, not knowing which is the essential person and which is the conforming act, and thereby forfeit his right to be respected as an individual (by himself or by anybody else).

When I was a boy, one of the weapons of discipline held over little boys who used profane language was that their mothers would wash their mouths with soap. My mother never did it to me, although there was ample provocation; but it was one of the things I heard about. I recall a story about a determined little character who did receive this punishment, and he is alleged to have sputtered out through the soap suds, “You can soap my talk, but you can’t soap my think!” Don’t ever let anybody soap your think.

The third issue that needs to be dealt with, if the drawing forth of what is uniquely each one of us is to proceed, is the struggle for significance—the complications of status, property, achievement.

One of the hazards of prolonged schooling is that one becomes accustomed to living in a system in which the ends of the system are to nurture significance for the individual. This is what a school is for.

Once in the world of work, the institution one is in—whether it is home, school, business, social service—uses people for other ends. All such institutions have other obligations, and they commit people who do the work to these obligations. Most modern institutions are also concerned that the people who do the work find personal significance in their work. But this is a qualified obligation and one must not expect that any work will automatically provide the feeling of significance. A requirement of maturity is that one learns to find his own significance, even under circumstances in which powerful forces may seem to operate to deny it.

But what is it that one is expected to find? I see it as something latent in the individual to be fulfilled. It is the seed of what is uniquely each person. Providing the conditions for its germination, emergence, and growth is the search.

A healthy adulthood requires that one find it, and find it among the available choices. History and literature are surfeited with examples of barren lives in which the search was thwarted because the searcher could not accept the choices available to him. If only some out-of-reach circumstances were present, the search might go on.

One fictional account that has meant a great deal to me is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Great Stone Face. This is a simple story that can be read in 15 minutes, and I commend it to you.

In this story, we are in a small New England town nestled in the mountains with a view of a nearby mountain whose profile resembles a majestic face. The people in this town are living out a myth. Someday a noble man will come to them whose own profile resembles the great stone face. His presence will bring into their lives the qualities of majesty which the great stone face symbolizes.

In the course of the story, there comes a procession of people from the outside world, people of wealth and external status. The coming of each is heralded with great expectation; but always there is disappointment. The resemblance is not true.

Years go by. We see a generation live from youth to old age carrying this hope that the image of the great stone face will come and that their lives will be enriched by the presence of the man who bears this likeness. Finally they recognize the resemblance to this image among them—one of their own people. He has been there all the time, a living demonstration of those qualities which in his old age gave him the resemblance to the profile on the mountain.

Viewed symbolically, this community is a person seeking from external sources the qualities which are latent to emerge—if only they will be permitted to emerge. They did not realize that the external marks of character are the product of the way a life is lived. If they were truly seekers, they would not have been so preoccupied with the external marks. Rather they would have attended more to the process, to what was going on in the lives they were examining. Had they been examining lives in process, lives around them to be seen, they would have seen right before their eyes the demonstration of how to live nobly. And they would have seen it when they were young enough for it to make a difference in the way their lives were lived.

We see in this story the collective life of the community denied fulfillment because it is looking for a stereotype. Significance is more likely to come from holding an attitude of unqualified expectancy, of openness and wonder.

So often, too, significance is blocked by compulsive drives for goals that do not provide fulfillment, something we pursue that we really don’t want. When we achieve what we pursue, whether it is a tangible external thing or an internal state of mind, there is an emptiness. If we can name it and describe it precisely, the chances are we are seeking the wrong thing. I have seen so much of this among my contemporaries. If only they could lay aside the pursuit of over-specific and (therefore) meaningless goals and let their own uniqueness flower. The warning here is that our society holds up values which confuse the search—status, property, power, tangible achievement, even peace of mind—which subvert the emergence of true uniqueness, the only real significance. These are necessary elements of the society we live in at its current stage of development. We must make our peace with them and accept them as important, but we should not view them as basic or primary. Personal significance is primary.

Neither institutions nor aggregates of people have significance, except as it is given to them by living individuals who comprise them. Even traditions, powerful as they sometimes appear to be, are not viable unless contemporary people understand and believe in them and, by their thoughts, words, and deeds, give them current significance.

One of my favorite stories is about a now-prominent New York minister who was starting his career in the depression of the 1930s in a very poor church. He had no car and he needed one for his parish work. But since neither he nor the church had any money, this was a problem. Finally he bought an old battered jalopy for $25. It wasn’t much of a car, but it ran and served his needs. However, he was soon confronted by an objection from his parishioners. Poor as they all were, they didn’t like the idea of their minister riding around in that kind of car, especially parking it in front of the church. Finally it came out at a meeting of the governing board when one of the members said that their minister should have a car that “added to his dignity.” At this point the young minister rose and spoke one short sentence that disposed of the question about his car. “Gentlemen,” he said, “no automobile adds dignity to a man; man adds dignity to the automobile.”

This is a point ever to keep sharply in mind. Dignity, significance, character are wholly the attributes of individual people. They have nothing to do with anything external to the person.

The fourth major issue I see is facing the requirements for growth; accepting some process for drawing forth one’s uniqueness.

I would like to see a word that has fallen into disuse restored to common usage. That word is entheos, from the same roots as enthusiasm, which means “possessed of the spirit.” These two words, entheos and enthusiasm, have had an interesting history in the English language, coming down side by side through separate channels of meaning from the 16th century. Entheos has always been the basic spiritual essence; enthusiasm, until recently, its perverter and imitator. Entheos is now defined as the power actuating one who is inspired, while enthusiasm is seen as its less profound, more surface aspect.

I want to use entheos as it is now defined, the power actuating one who is inspired; and, at the risk of laboring it, I want to build a concept of growth around this one word. For those who are concerned with maturity seen as becoming, it is important to see entheos as the lamp and to keep one’s own private lamp lighted as one ventures forth into a confused, pressure-ridden world, but nevertheless a hopeful world for those who can maintain their contact with the power that actuates inspiration. From the little I know of history, I cannot imagine a more interesting time to be alive provided one can make it with entheos.

I see entheos as the essence that makes a constructive life possible; it is the sustaining force that holds one together under stress; it is the support for venturesome risk-taking action; it is the means whereby whatever religious beliefs one has are kept in contact with one’s attitudes and actions in the world of practical affairs; it lifts people above the prosaic and gives them a sense of timelessness; it is the prod of conscience that keeps one open to knowledge, so that one can be both aware and sensitive, when the urge to be comfortable would keep the door closed. I like that line from William Blake:

If the doors to perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.

Entheos does not come in response to external incentives. In fact, it may persist when incentives operate to destroy it. The individual cannot will it, it comes when it will and sometimes it goes when most needed. But it does grow.

All that can be willed is the search. There is no one pattern I know of. Each must find his own pattern. One of the great challenges of maturity: find your own growth pattern in the search for entheos.

I can suggest some tests. If one has a few tests in mind, these might help to plot the individual search. We are reaching for entheos, the power actuating one who is inspired. First some misleading indicators—some achievements that might throw one off.

Status of material success. One’s external achievement may be impressive and praiseworthy and yet, in the process of achieving, one may be destroying much that is really important to him.

Social success. The nongrowth people are sometimes more comfortable to be with.

Doing all that is expected of one. Who is doing the expecting, and what do they know about what I should be expecting of myself?

Family success can be a misleading indicator. Fine and desirable as it is, it can be an egocentric, narrowing development. Internally, the family may appear in good balance; but it may be taking more out of the wider community than it is contributing.

Relative peace and quiet. This may simply mean that the doors of perception are closed.

Finally, busyness—compulsive busyness. Beneath the surface of much action, there is the drive to avoid the implications of growth. “This is for monks in a monastery; I’m too busy,” they seem to say (Read the Mary-Martha story and ask, What does it have to say on this point?)

These are six indicators of achievement that can be misleading as evidences of growth. These can all be positive and worthwhile; but they don’t necessarily add up to growth of entheos.

Now, what I believe to be some valid tests, some indicators that there may be real growth of entheos.

First, two paradoxes, a concurrent satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the status quo. One is not so unhappy with his current level of achievement that he can’t live with himself. Neither is he so pleased with it that he has no incentive to break out of it. Then there is a concurrent feeling of broadening responsibilities and centering down. One is constantly reaching out for wider horizons, new levels of experience and at the same time the idea of “This one thing will I do” is in the ascendancy.

There is a growing sense of purpose in whatever one does. The idea of purpose becomes important. Without being obsessive about it, the most penetrating and disturbing of all questions, “What am I trying to do?” becomes a constant query. One never loses sight of this question.

There are changing patterns and depths of one’s interests. Old interests to which one was once attached drop away and newer and deeper ones take their place. Choices must be made.

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

As entheos becomes a more constant companion, one moves toward the minimum of difference between the outside and inside images of the self; one becomes more willing to be seen as he is. Living as we do in an unreal world, to some extent we all wear masks. Convenient as it is to let the mask do what only serenity can really do, I submit that all masks chafe; I never saw a well-fitting mask. It is a great relief to take them off. The power of entheos makes this possible; and the urge to remove the mask is one of the surest signs of its potency.

Then one becomes conscious of the good use of time and unhappy with the waste of time. As awareness opens, one of the measures it takes of our contemporary society is the number of elaborate and seductive devices lurking about that serve no other purpose than to waste time.

A further test is the growing sense of achieving one’s basic personal goals through one’s work, whatever it is—however menial, however poorly recognized. One of the popular illusions in our kind of culture is that one must reach a high status position in order to achieve one’s goals. In my observation, there is really nothing in status but status, and the proportion of frustrated people is just as great in high places as in low places. I know it is an old truism, but the only place to achieve one’s personal goals is where one is. Looking for a greener pasture for this purpose is almost certain to seal off the opportunity for achievement.

Going with some of these tests is the emergence of a sense of unity, a pulling together of all aspects of life. Job, family, recreation, church, community all merge into one total pattern. While there remain obvious allocations of time to specific pursuits, the sense of leaving one and going to another diminishes. Peripheral time-consuming activities that cannot be brought within this view are laid aside. None of us needs to accept all of the obligations that others would impose upon us, and one way of making the separation is to test their compatibility with the core of unified activities. As entheos grows, one becomes more decisive and emphatic in saying no!

Finally, there is a developing view of people. All people are seen more as beings to be trusted, believed in, and loved and less as objects to be used, competed with, or judged. It is a shifting of the balance from use to esteem in all personal relationships. In an imperfect world, one never achieves it fully; but there can be measurable progress. This is a critically important test. Unless this view of people becomes dominant, it is difficult for the inward view of one’s own significant uniqueness to emerge. Love of oneself in the context of a pervasive love for one’s fellow man is a healthy attribute and necessary for the fulfillment of a life. Out of this context, love of oneself is narrowing, introverting, and destructive.

The ultimate test of entheos, however, is an intuitive feeling of oneness, of wholeness, of rightness; but not necessarily comfort or ease.

These seem to me to be some valid tests that give assurance that entheos is growing. If this kind of thinking doesn’t strike a responsive chord with you today, please make a note of it, tuck it away in the back of your diary, and look at it 10 years, 20 years from now.

In closing, I want to return for a moment to work, vocation, and its relevance to growth, to the drawing out of the unique significance of the person.

Don’t just look for a job; even for an interesting and remunerative job.

Think of yourself as a person with unique potentialities, and see the purpose of life as bringing these into mature bloom.

Don’t think of your career in terms of finding a nice fit for your skills and abilities. You will find some work more rewarding than other work; but the perfect job doesn’t exist. Anyhow, neither the person nor the job stays put.

Since there are no perfect jobs, no ideal fields, take one that challenges you as a piece of work to be done. Make other requirements subsidiary to this one, because nothing else really matters if the job is not rewarding in this sense.

Whatever your work is, make something out of it that enriches you. Work itself cannot be truly significant except as it is seen as the means whereby the people who do the work find themselves in it. Do your work well; keep your sense of obligation high; cultivate excellence in everything you do; but above all use your work, use it as a means for your own fulfillment as a person—your own becoming.

If you have goals, be sure to state them in terms of external achievement, not in terms of what you will become. You don’t know what you can become, and no one can tell you.

This can be one of the great excitements of life—the surprise when you discover what you have become and realize that more is yet to come.