Brain researcher Marianne Diamond says, “If you challenge the brain enough, it will continue to develop throughout life", but all of this is on a different level than we talked about before. All these first 15 years have been devoted to what, coming into dominion over this whole physical process and then by 15, sexuality has appeared and what is sexuality all about? At the same time, intuitively the young person knows their erratically incomplete. We call on the silent areas of the brain, these frontal So therein lays the key of what the adolescent is all about.  They realize this incompleteness.  Now we say why do they always gesture toward their heart?  And they do, because all of these are felt as great yearnings of the heart and this isn't just metaphoric, it's felt physically as a pressure in the heart that comes up like a lump in the throat.

And the third issue is the feeling of hidden greatness as a person.  Hidden greatness.  I remember at 16 I was working a full-time job under an emergency full-time civil service job and quite an anonymous little person and I used to think, I completely filled myself, I was just exploding with this hugeness inside and I used to think now here I'm walking down the street or a completely unknown, if they, you know how teenagers are always referring to "they", if they just knew who I really was they'd all stand back and make way for me.  But I didn't know what this was myself and I would wonder, how, how am I ever going to let them know how incredibly great I really am?  And doesn't that register with us all, that teenage period?  This feeling of secret hidden uniqueness?  Nothing like me could have ever happened before. 

When I first read Thomas Wolfe, the original Thomas Wolfe back in the 30's, "Look Homeward Angel, You Can't Go Home Again", "Of Time and the River", these were great huge monuments written back then and remarkable works because he expressed this whole thing as perfectly as it's ever been expressed in this world.  So did Salinger in "Catcher in the Rye".  You'll pick up a lot of this from that.  And so this is the plight of the teenager, know what is going on?  Very simply let's look back, here we go again to those growth spurts and developmental periods, birth, age 1, 4, 7, 11 and then we speak of 15 as everybody saying well it's all over with.  Piaget didn't see any signs of any further developmental stages.  Rudolph Steiner did.  He supplied that the full mature ego doesn't even appear until age 21.  He spoke of much further developmental stages.  But none of the biologically oriented developmentally astute.  Karl Jung spoke of stages going beyond that, and no one else did.   Now we do know that the brain seems to myelinated completely and there's no further brain growth spurts we can detect and so on. 

Marianne Diamond says, “If you challenge the brain enough, it will continue to develop throughout life", but all of this is on a different level than we talked about before.  What's really supposed to happen, here we go again, this has to I suppose be hypothetical, even though I know it's not hypothetical, is that what's really supposed to happen.  Here we go again with those three levels of the brain.  We're still, all these first 15 years have been devoted to what, coming into dominion over this whole physical process and all of the learnings that have taken place have related to this rightly so and then at 15, by 15, sexuality has appeared and what is sexuality all about?

Well, it's still drowning us in the physical isn't it.  It's a very happy drowning.  Drowning us in the physical, re-focusing our attention on it, we become completely hormonal at that point and vitally aware of our body and so on.  And it also locks us into our society because only through this regular social channels can that sexuality achieve its end.  Now, all of that though, nevertheless, is essentially physically oriented to complete the species, species propagation and so on and so forth.  At the same time, intuitively the young person knows their erratically incomplete.  Here we get to the issue that all current research is heavily indicating.  It's a big debatable issue and you can't find any consensus about it.  But, very strong suspicion that the great frontal lobes, the frontal lobes that are evolutions latest thing, are absolutely not developed at 15. 

We call on the silent areas of the brain, the recent research, which I think is most exciting is that that I've mentioned three times now, this is my fourth time I know, that these frontal lobes are still laying down their tracks throughout childhood.  Still completing their development throughout adolescence and not fully mature and ready to function totally, that is the focus of development on until early maturity.  So therein lays the key of what the adolescent is all about.  They realize this incompleteness.  Now we say why do they always gesture toward their heart?  And they do, because all of these are felt as great yearnings of the heart and this isn't just metaphoric, it's felt physically as a pressure in the heart that comes up like a lump in the throat. 

Thomas Wolfe spoke of it as the "great bursting in the throat of this anguished longing".  What it is is the intelligence of the heart, now remember, you have to go back to what we were talking about, the heart is an endocrine gland and all those other recent discoveries of the role the heart plays, particularly with the limbic structure and organizing the functions of the limbic system, the emotional relational brain.  And then we have to go one step further and we find that the, according to Paul MacLean, the area of the limbic system.  The highest part of this great secondary or mammalian brain system, we have what he calls "species survival itself" and branching into, directly into, and has apparently very close connections with the frontal lobes.

Now briefly, and this is hypothetical, the reason that anguish is felt here is because you have whatever this mysterious unified field is within us that we call this kind of universal process, is literally longing for its expression and it's full opening into its expression through its instrument called the brain.  All the rest of this brain structure has been devoted to what?  To simply giving us our experience of a physical life and a physical body and our interaction and relationship with it, our ability to pro-create and do all these other things and keep the show going and now we're ready to open up what?  An area that is absolutely un-programmed.  Paul MacLean said, "well these frontal lobes seem to have to do with compassion, a kind of universality, sympathy, love, nurturing, care, we find that is apparent of what is awakened by the infant/mother interaction at birth which awakens in her a compulsion, a passion that seizes her whole life to nurture that infant at all costs.  Why?  Because it's connected with those frontal lobes.  And so now we have the possibility that through that mother/infant interaction the mother would find the entrance and access into her own frontal lobes and all of the possibilities that they contain, literally, the child in teaching the mother instant by instant might lead her into her own greatest realms of being. 

George Leonard in his recent book about sexuality gives strong indication that at the highest levels of sexuality it would literally access the frontal lobes themselves you see.  And read that, this is a very profound work.