Emotional Maturity

sThe purpose of this research is to examine the philosophical question of when a person is emotionally mature to receive and understand a religious belief and processes that take place to influence religious nurturance. The principal departure point for the research will be Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which focuses on myth as a mechanism for understanding life in general and which deals to an extent with the ways in which myths that have common elements between and among diverse cultures inform religious belief and practice. The research will explore mythic foundations of religious initiation and show how myth can help identify various points in psychological, cognitive, and emotional development of individuals that are consistent with religious experience and/or insight.

The impulse toward making meaning and significance out of a flood of inchoate content and experience is the particular province of myth. According to Max Weber, who studied the origins and development of various religious traditions, overarching the creative human enterprise is the tendency toward making the universe increasingly thinkable, or rational. Rationality, also translated as rationalism by Weber's translators into English, is a concept that is central to Weber's explanation of how virtually all social structures have developed. His way of using the term is important because it is not absolute. That is, he uses it to imply a whole range of complex issues that are not limited t

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t occurs only as one moves chronologically from infancy to childhood or from childhood to adolescence. That is, the transition is not--or anyway not only--the individual's movement out of Mama's protection and into the big, wide world but may present itself as a dilemma at many points in life. The choice (or change) of a career, a moral choice, the choice (or not) of a mate--all of these are points of transition, and all involve applying the gift of consciousness to the enterprise of a decision that may have consequences for the quality of the rest of one's life. Campbell cites the example of the husband who Oedipally clings to his parents instead of cleaving to his wife (5), which is bound to bring psychoemotional cleavage that may not be as dramatic as the union of Jocasta and Oedipus but that may nevertheless truncate the fullness of emotional experience in the man. The call of emotionally uncharted territory is a test of whether the individual is willing to risk exploring it or will retreat into what is perceived at the unconscious level as safe and familiar. Meanwhile, those who are willing to take the risk may be rewarded. That is because the hero's adventure into the unknown yields dividends. He says that, in myth, the hero

Category: Psychology - E