McKenna On Human Adulthood

Excerpted from Jed McKenna’s Theory of Everything, by Jed McKenna:

What’s not irrelevant is shaking off our self-imposed puniness and expanding into our full and rightful potential; Human Adulthood. That’s where everything begins. Whether it’s getting there or going beyond, there is no other thing to do or way to go. Human Adulthood is the key to everything, and if you’re on the wrong side of it, nothing else matters. Human Adulthood is the thing you should pray for and fight for, the thing you should quit your job, abandon your family, and risk your life for. There’s serious work to be done, and maybe you’re reading this because that’s the thing you want to know; that there really is something unbelievably awesome to be achieved, and you really can achieve it. And if it takes religion or a twelve-step program or prison or a broken neck to get you there, then those things are a hell of a lot more valuable to you than any book could ever be.

Forget all the spiritual malarkey. We have our hands full just becoming who and what we really are, and overcoming the all-pervading fear that subverts this natural process. Adulthood is not a lofty spiritual attainment, it’s just normal development unravaged by the epidemic of fear. It’s the death of the flesh and birth of the spirit, and in a well-adjusted society we’d all go through it at puberty. It’s not spiritual or religious or philosophical or scientific; it’s just our natural development uncorrupted, and getting there isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning.