THE RAPTURE OF MATURITY:
A Legacy of Lifelong Learning

Introduction

The universe is change;
life is what thinking makes of it.

—Marcus Aurelius

American mythologist Joseph Campbell once said that what most people are searching for is the “rapture of being alive.” The idea may not apply to everyone everywhere, but exploration of it may shed more light on improving quality of life than all of the advice offered during the second half of the twentieth century by America’s army of self-help gurus. Rapture is often defined as being in a state of ecstasy, or of being carried away in body and/or spirit with a sense of joy. It’s portrayed as a rare experience that we don’t very often talk about. Indeed, we learn as children that we must forsake ecstasy in favor of behavior more acceptable to our parents and community.¹ We create selves who conform at the expense of expressing what we really feel. So, to say that adults can expect to experience rapture may seem far-fetched, but that doesn’t make the goal any less desirable. Who can deny the ecstasy of ecstasy? By comparison, the pursuit of happiness seems tame if not trivial.

Examples abound in the world’s great literature describing the ecstasy of discovery, of sensual pleasure, and of sublime mystical experience. Firsthand accounts from soldiers in battle tell us of their heightened feelings of being alive when their lives were in imminent danger. In times of relative peace, we may observe a resurgence in popularity of high-risk activities, from skydiving and bungee jumping to snow boarding, among individuals seeking that same feeling. Such youthful, thrill-seeking behavior seems more like an escape than a path to bliss, however, in an era of global conflict, economic insecurity, environmental degradation, and human starvation.² In contrast, the rapture of maturity emerges from reflection and welcomes new insight about these matters.

After more than two decades of extensive self-education, I have become increasingly conscious that writers can spend years and hundreds of thousands of words trying to solve the same existential problems that prompted them to start writing in the first place. In that regard I am no exception. My quest has been to show that the quality of our existence depends upon learning. By learning I mean, not the rote memorization of facts, but sincere efforts aimed at better understanding the very nature of knowledge and the tenuous, cultural construction of the things we call reality. I’ve come to the conclusion that rapture and maturity are reciprocal products of authenticity, and that authenticity involves living your life as if you are really interested in it.

Clearly there are many activities in life, apart from intellectual endeavors, that are extraordinarily meaningful. Even so, regardless of who you are and where your interests lie, nothing substitutes for thinking, and no one is exempt from the need to do so. Excitement from dangerous activity, though exhilarating, is not an effective substitute for the mental effort necessary to reach emotional and intellectual maturity. Thrill-seeking activities are not always the heroic, death-defying feats they appear to be. Sometimes these acts mask intellectual fears of annihilation. It’s often easier to take chances than to contemplate nothingness.

Hackneyed though it may sound, the fear of death ultimately amounts to a fear of life and a sense of insignificance. In tending to people on their deathbeds, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner has said that the individuals who have the most trouble with death are the ones who felt they had never really lived.³ They dread insignificance.⁴ Similarly, we observe that people on the verge of success often sabotage their own efforts, but we seldom recognize that one of the reasons they do this is to avoid making their existential dilemma of existence even greater than it already is: if they are indeed able to experience a rapturous existence, then their deep-seated fear of death becomes magnified and their loss all the greater.⁵

My definition of rapture, for the purpose of this book, is similar to the idea of being swept up in a great sense of joy, but not as a one-time experience. Rapture may come in a multitude of subtle but insightful flashes of realization that life is indeed worth living, coupled with the inspiration that, given a choice, we would trade places with no one on this planet. The rewards we gain from intellectual efforts are the highest our species can reap. What holds us back is our culture.

When I use the term “intellectual,” I don’t have in mind groups of elites whose need to be above it all takes the form of pretentiousness designed to hide a fear of being understood.⁶ In my view, an intellectual is someone who thinks deeply about matters that deserve such attention. Unfortunately, American popular culture is vengefully anti-intellectual. You don’t have to watch late-night television comedians interviewing people on the street to know that many of our fellow Americans suffer arrested intellectual development, which, in the shadow of our great wealth, is a travesty. Millions of people forgo the pursuit of knowledge, settling instead for mindless entertainment to offset the pain of an unfulfilling life. This happens in spite of the fact that we know lifelong learning represents a literal fountain of youth. People with a thirst for knowledge live longer and better lives. Plain old everyday experience offers countless clues to validate that learning adds quality to our lives. Doesn’t everything that ceases to grow begin to die? Brains atrophy, just as muscles do when they are underutilized.

Learning as a principal elixir of life is hardly a secret to those whose quest for understanding is never satiated. People who spend their lives learning vitalize themselves and those with whom they associate. On the one hand, people who seem interested in everyone and everything going on around them radiate with enthusiasm. On the other hand, whether rich or poor, those whose thirst for knowledge has never fully developed have little difficulty projecting boredom and despair at any age. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Intellect annuls fate.” If he was right, and I think the evidence clearly suggests he was, then contemplation is a path to maturity and authenticity. This mode of rapture is available only to those who reach for it.

So, rapture in the simplest sense amounts to the sheer intellectual joy of being alive and the fleeting moments when one appreciates the feeling as such. Intellectual vigor gives range to experiences that enable a person to enjoy many more occasions of value, simply because depth and breadth provide more opportunities for experiencing quality. Just as an excellent swimmer can find more pleasure in a bottomless pool than in a shallow one, all of us can garner more from life when our understanding represents a deep reservoir of knowledge.

I believe that understanding the dynamics of maturity offers us a last chance as individuals to live a life that really matters. Of course, this admits to varying degrees of experience. Few people will say their lives haven’t mattered, regardless of the lives they’ve lived. And yet, when you read this book, I promise you will gain a better appreciation of the difference between what matters and what really matters. Marcus Aurelius’ assertion that “life is what thinking makes of it” is worth repeating often to ourselves. If we believe that what we think can affect the quality of our lives, it is by definition true; if not, it is by design false. My reading of two thousand years of philosophical debate about what really matters in this life can be stated simply: What matters to us matters because it matters, and that’s quite enough reason to care about such things.

Our brains have built-in pleasure centers, and these are activated by three primary stimuli: food, sex, and learning. Those of us in the developed world have enough riches to experience food and sex as aesthetic gratification. But too many underrate our most powerful pleasure: learning. This is a great irony in the problem of human inequality. Untold millions of people on earth starve to death each century. Only 20 percent of our species receive enough food during childhood to reach normal physical maturity without any kind of stunted development. For billions of people, sex and reproduction are part of a risky gamble to ensure their very survival. If learning were a priority, the global situation would surely be different.

All living things born into this world experience a life cycle, but not all creatures reach maturity. Some creatures die in infancy, plucked up as food by larger species. Some life forms are destined by their genetics to behave without a will of their own. Only humans contemplate their own fate and worry over their own deaths and the personal legacies they will leave behind. The final stage of human development, I believe, includes the capacity for a sense of rapture. Such transcendence comes about when our desire to better understand the world helps to make it a better place for those who live on after us.

The endorphin rush of learning has sent our kind into outer space, to the depths of the ocean, and into the strands of our DNA, and yet millions upon millions of well-fed, robust people live their lives in varying states of arrested intellectual development. The goal of this book is to show that the answers to human inequality, the misrelating among people and cultures that leads to conflict and war, and the existential angst of frustrated individuals in the developed world all depend upon our pursuit of the rapture of maturity. 

Apart from offering appropriate citations for source material, I have tried to use endnotes sparingly, but in some cases I have included them only to give a more complete explanation. Chapter One presents what I’ve characterized as properties of life. It offers opportunities to reexamine those avenues of life most of us think we truly understand but don’t. Chapter Two is a cursory examination of the existential angst of the human condition with hopeful insights about coping and displacing inescapable anxiety. Chapter Three advocates a quest for knowledge, advice for teachers, an examination of education as understanding, and a discussion of anti-intellectualism—a theme which, along with wisdom and maturity, appears repeatedly throughout this work. Chapter Four revisits many of these ideas within the contexts of maturity, discovering what really matters in life, and how to leave the world a better place than we found it.

This book is the result of more than 25 years of voracious self-study and more than 60 years of lived experience. I have attempted to make it the shortest possible explanation of matters that I view as being critical to quality of life. The only reason I’ve been able to say these things in so few pages is that I’ve been thinking about them for a long, long time—so long that I trust they will matter as much to you as they do to me.