Jackson was a huge hit in my adolescence and teenage years, but I was never attracted to his brand of rebellious cool. His style was shallow and, frankly, a little boring. When I discovered it, punk and its offshoots spoke to me more – especially the honesty and passion of bands like The Clash and The Pogues.
Children are taught by their parents to be good, to act in the right ways so that their instincts are properly trained and socialised. A child learns that they will be in accord with their own needs and those of other people if they follow certain rules and observe boundaries. In the process, a psychic shadow effect is created as the child represses urges that would lead to “bad” (anti-social or inappropriate) behaviour.
In adolescence, physical changes propel an emerging sense of an independent self, a maturation in which the child mind must be left behind. Rebellion against the norms of the parents and the world at large, against “being good”, is part of the process of establishing a functioning adult personality as the emerging self reacts against other forces to form its own identity.
The path of maturation is a challenging one fraught with danger. Rebellion can be extremely destructive to the individual and their community: strained relationships, depression, drug abuse and various forms of risk-taking and self-harming behaviour often result as the formerly repressed shadow breaks forward. A psychologically healthy adult emerges to the extent he or she retains some measure of core “goodness” and is able to create their own, adult expressions of the good while accepting the ongoing presence of shadow.
In some sense, humanity is in a kind of teenage phase. If we take creation as a whole as our parent/teacher – call it God, divine essence, the Self or what you will – we are effectively trying to assume its power, to rebel against its demands. For thousands of years of our development we felt directly subject to powers greater than us. The social and cultural systems that we created were believed to come directly from the higher powers, were a reflection of the natural order of existence, and doubt was held back by mortal fear that it was against this order and could destroy an individual and their whole society.
The great changes in the West that began with the Renaissance in the 15th century, through the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, have propelled humanity in a new direction. In a grand sweep of rejection, we have finally declared that there is no God and no essential good. We’ve abandoned the old certainties, the totalising systems that clearly defined what is right and wrong, and set ourselves as “independent” of nature to pursue the course that We humans want.
There’s immaturity and folly in this in the same way that a teenager may declare themselves independent and storm out of the family home with no means of supporting themselves and no real knowledge of what being independent means. We are paying a heavy price for rebellion in the dislocation and chaos of human societies and in our increasing destruction of life on Earth, which ultimately threatens our own survival.
The reality is that humanity is still shaped by the physical and spiritual dynamics of the universe as in previous times. Our mother/father, the creative life essence, is still ever-present. Yet it seems we have felt impelled to consciously break away in order to develop something in ourselves, a dawning maturity that requires us to reach into the goodness within and find creative expressions worthy of a new, elevated way of being.
Every initiation, every threshold phase, is as much about return as it is breaking into a new order. Forces dominant in the previous period must be reconciled, internalised and reshaped. A functional adult takes the life-giving aspects of their parents, society and nature at large into themselves and creates new forms as part of a continuous process of life evolution. We have to find our way back to a reconciliation with the universe, the ground of our being. The spiritual-material unity that eventually emerges, if we are able to pass safely through this teenage moment in our development, will have been shaped by the best of the past but be relevant to the present. It will be a glorious incarnation of life ever-seeking and ever-changing in fulfilment of itself.
