Being a Human Being

The following material is a synthesis of insights gained from my own personal experience with self-examination as well as the dissemination of a lifetime of diverse readings.

There have been two primary motivations for the writing of this material.  One has been my personal search for self-knowledge accompanied by a desire to be helpful to others with  experience and insights from that search.  The second has been my role as a parent to two boys and the desire to relate helpful information  to future generations.

The material presented in this course is not particularly original.  What may perhaps make this writing somewhat unique is that it is presented in a very basic and easy to understand format designed specifically for the young teenager.  The concepts and wordings are presented as simply, concisely, and clearly as possible, without a great deal of verbosity,  lengthy technical explanations, or lofty abstractions.

The second motivation for this writing is my own personal observation of the struggles of teenagers as well as my personal experience of being a young teenager.  The adolescent years are an interesting and transformative time in the life of the individual, and in many ways seems to be a very pivotal time.  One could almost conclude that something quite significant happens around the age at which we reach puberty.  This period in our physical development seems to initiate a biological and biochemical shift which tends to alter how we relate to the world outside.

It is around this time in our lives when we begin to concern ourselves with  questions about life and some of the deeper issues of our existence.  Many of us start to question answers which we have been given through our childhood. The blind acceptance of parental authority and wisdom often tends to diminish.

This questioning often results in outward defiance and what is called ‘seeking behavior’.  This sort of behavior often involves experimentation with mood and mind altering chemicals, sexual escapades, and a wide range of risk-taking activities. It may also manifest as withdrawal, clinical or sub clinical depression and escape via movies or electronic games.  It is often that near this age many young people begin the painful and destructive long road of alcoholism and drug addiction. 

With so many of us beginning this seeking behavior in our early teens, we may do well to ask just what it is we are actually seeking?  There may be several answers to that question, and it may vary somewhat from person to person, yet I can only relate my own experience along with the observation that my own case was not particularly unique.  What I was looking for was some basic satisfactory answers to some deep issues and seeking for ways to understand and to deal with the way that I felt about myself and life in general.

As a young teenager, I would look at the world outside and occasionally my ‘inner world’ of thoughts, feelings, and emotions and clearly get the sense that something was very wrong.  Much of my seeking was about trying to change the way that I felt- to numb out the discomfort and general unease which I experienced as the result of my perceptions and feelings.

The ideas presented in the basic format which follows are intended to help the young person (and perhaps a few of us older folk) to gain satisfactory answers to some of the questions that bedevil the average teen.  The hope is that given this basic understanding of the self, much of the destructive and unhealthy seeking behavior may be avoided or at least minimized.

As a closing to this preface, I offer the following quote, which  sums up the importance of the material being presented in this body of work:

            “Surely, without the understanding of oneself, the search for so-called reality is an escape from oneself.  Without self-knowledge, the god you seek is the god of illusion; and illusion inevitably brings conflict and sorrow.  Without self-knowledge, there can be no right thinking; and then a