6 posts · 3 participants · started Aug 26, 2014, 7:04 PM
What is the age of discretion? Please read Paper 107, introductory, last paragraph (107:0,7), which reads in part, “From this time to the age of discretion, about forty years……”.
Has anyone defined what is the age of discretion? What are your thoughts about how discretion at about forty years is defined?
Hi Mark!! Read sometime ago that young adult brains do not achieve “risk assessment” development until mid-20s…and this is just immediate risk consequence potential from immediate choice or act. I didn’t make any or many good decisions until I was in my mid-30s…..and I mean decisions that were truly forward perspectives of weighing multiple outcome potentials and identifying clear strategies and tactics for desired outcomes….planning and execution. I think that is the meaning of the word used here: “discretion”.
Others?
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
I would say that the age of discretion involves the attainment of a certain level of self-awareness. A self-aware individual is beginning to understand his/her own nature, character, feelings, motives and desires. At this point a person should be capable of more fully comprehending the consequences of their actions. This would require a level of moral growth, wisdom and the acceptance of personal responsibility. I would also think that it includes a budding awareness of one’s own soul and the realization of a inner desire for its growth (perfection) which would allow the Adjuster to do more controlling.
(1295.3) 118:1.3 There is a direct relationship between maturity and the unit of time consciousness in any given intellect. The time unit may be a day, a year, or a longer period, but inevitably it is the criterion by which the conscious self evaluates the circumstances of life, and by which the conceiving intellect measures and evaluates the facts of temporal existence.
(1295.4) 118:1.4 Experience, wisdom, and judgment are the concomitants of the lengthening of the time unit in mortal experience. As the human mind reckons backward into the past, it is evaluating past experience for the purpose of bringing it to bear on a present situation. As mind reaches out into the future, it is attempting to evaluate the future significance of possible action. And having thus reckoned with both experience and wisdom, the human will exercises judgment-decision in the present, and the plan of action thus born of the past and the future becomes existent.
Wisdom and maturity….fruits of experience in time. Can one have discretion, or poise, without them? Well said Bonita. Self aware, to me, means an awareness of my relationship to all other things….not just me, myself, and I as the center of all things or the most important of all things.
"Live loyally today—grow—and tomorrow will attend to itself. The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live loyally each moment as a tadpole."
Thank you Bonita and Brad. Both of you have great responses and I will do some thinking about your sharing. Sounds like aging is a necessary feature regardless of our age!
Mark Kurtz wrote: Sounds like aging is a necessary feature regardless of our age!
If you mean maturing, perhaps. I think that most mentally healthy people also gain some control over their negative emotions as they age. The growth of wisdom might come from the realization that some emotions consistently lead to undesired outcomes, disappointments and futility. Sooner or later it has to dawn on the average person that self-control has its merits. I think fine tuning one’s self-control is harder to do and probably requires a Thought Controller to assist the self in focusing on its true goal.
28:6.20 And the manifestation of greatness on a world like Urantia is the exhibition of self-control.
