Humanity is busy creating more technology and prosperity that bring freedom but undermine old social structures. Therefore, as we weaken our social embedding, we need to build inner structure. While, so to speak, we as children explore the playground but in the process eliminate our guardian parent. This split development urges us to learn relying on ourselves.
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We live in times where we got the freedom to satisfy our curiosity about the world by travel and the Internet.
But once we arrive in new territories we have to learn how to find our way. What is more, we have to learn how to build and handle navigation tools. Such challenges create feelings of uncertainty and fear. Perhaps the excitement of new discoveries can hide such feelings for a while, but underneath they creep into us.
The old stable structures
And we get more freedom to escape from suffocating constraints of family life, the village, religion, political parties, authoritarian employers and national borders.
But by leaving the old stable structures such as family, party or nation, we also undermine their ongoing existence.
When a child explores the playground it works towards independence. The more a parent remains available for tapping into care and stability, the better a child can develop towards physical, emotional and social maturity. This also means the child builds an inner structure that gives grip and guidance once out there in the wider world on its own.
Our adult society of today is, apart from differences, in a similar type of development. While we are busy exploring the world, we still feel the need to tap into reassuring societal structures. But by leaving such an embedding, we diminish their existence.
We eliminate the parent by exploring the playground
We eliminate, so to say, the parent by exploring the swing and the slide. We cannot only enjoy our freedom and expect a reassuring structure remaining available when we need it. We have to build reassuring structures within ourselves.
Macro-developments force us into micro-developments.
We may feel happy with the rise of approaches and techniques that help us build structure within ourselves, be they psychologically, spiritually, or in the fields of management training and body-mind work.
Surely, these tools can be refined and reinforced, and made more available. But counter-natural or disquieting as it may feel when we are preoccupied by macro affairs, they offer a way out of uncertainty and fear for those in touch with the outside world.
This is a challenge now arising all over in the world.
