Bodies grow up automatically. You moved from infant to child to adolescent to adult without ever having to investigate the process. Teeth fell out. Hormones arrived. Bones lengthened. Hair appeared in places nobody requested. Biological development took care of itself.
The juvenile self also developed naturally. You absorbed names, roles, beliefs, values, loyalties, fears, expectations, meanings, and countless instructions about how reality works and who you need to be within it.
This constructed identity is adaptive and useful. It gets the child into the game.
The problem is that we mistake this temporary structure for the finished product. Nobody is told that in order to reach existential maturity the identity built to carry one through psychological childhood must eventually become subject to examination. Instead, we spend decades reinforcing it through better education, status, relationships, and beliefs. Through better therapeutic explanations and spiritual concepts. Basically, better versions of self.
We mature biologically while continuing to operate existentially from a structure assembled largely before we were capable of examining any of it. That’s arrested development.
Unlike puberty, nothing biological arrives at adolescence to say, Okay, time to dismantle your inherited conception of self and reality now so you can become an authentic psychological adult. You have to do that part yourself.
Radical Inquiry is how you do it.