1A Class Notes: Loss of Innocence and Maturity Entail the Following:

1.    To be expelled from the security blanket, the womb of comfort and to lose the delusion that you’re invincible because you’ve been wrapped in the cloak of your parents.
2.    To realize that your parents are not ultimate authorities or all-powerful protectors
3.    To have a consciousness of evil and a strong sense that the world is not fair or just
4.    To develop a strong sense that brutal madmen reign in high places and our conformity to their agendas makes us complicit in their evil doings.
5.    To have a sense of your lost innocence means part of you has died forever and you cannot get it back. All you can do is move forward; to look back is to indulge in self-pity and bitterness which will inevitably lead to death.
6.    To realize that a curiosity about how the world really works, even though traumatic, is essential to developing survival skills and street smarts.
7.    To let go of your idealized representations of people you’ve put on a pedestal and as such you take away their power and you become free.
8.    To let go of nostalgia, which you realize is a fixation on a romanticized past, which was weighing you down with cheap sentimentality and making you a drama queen.
9.    To free yourself from tribalistic prejudices and tribalist behavior, also called groupthink, which is to sacrifice your critical thinking in order to go along with the group’s ideas and ways. Immature people are forever tied to the tribal order and never question it. We see this in the movie Pleasantville.
10.    To give up a vain image you’ve had about yourself. The mature person has a self-image that is neither grossly inflated or under-inflated, but has a clear grasp of strengths and weaknesses.  Most people error in having an inflated self-image or they sells themselves short. In both cases, there is a failure of responsibility.
11.    To give up self-pity and resentment because you’ve found a life calling or passion that’s more interesting to you than your ego, which compels you to wallow in self-absorption.
12. To give up the naive (and stupid) idea that being right in the narrow technical sense doesn't make you right in the larger, moral sense. For example, becoming angry and self-righteous over a passive-aggressive driver who speeds through a yellow-red light only to go into "your" lane after which he/she suddenly becomes the Slowest Driver Ever, as if he/she takes pleasure from "hating" on you by making you slam your brakes and drive at a snail's pace. Yes, you're technically right to see this passive-aggressive driver for what he/she really is, an odious weasel, but if you obsess over the "grievance you've suffered" you will become too aggressive in your driving and endanger yourself and other drivers, thereby making you WRONG!