Terry Mollner

Eldering Terry Mollner

We do not choose to breathe.
We have each been naturally and effortlessly breathing since we came out of our mother's womb. We do not choose to breath. In this book and while we are reading, Terry Mollner invites us to study our experience of breathing. We discover it is the universe that is doing our breathing. This has us also realize that the universe is an indivisible whole or it would not be able to do our breathing. We also discover this is the accurate fundamental fact about our human lives. He then guides us into understanding that we are not born with the skill of self-consciousness. Like riding a bicycle, it is a skill we can learn. Also like riding a bicycle, there are smaller skills that build on one another and at maturity integrate into the mature skill. The only thing that keeps us from self-consciously enjoying the fact that the universe is an indivisible whole is that we have not mastered the smaller skills of all seven layers of maturity of the skill of self-consciousness. He describes them and points out that we already know the rst three because they are common knowledge. We learn them as we mature during childhood. However, the fourth one is the discovery when we are teens that we have the ability and right of individual free choice. This means that to learn the last three we must self-elder ourselves into the mastery of them as the result of free choice. The focus of this book is on how to do that. It can be accomplished by our twenties. When we have mastered all seven smaller skills of the skill of self-consciousness, we can know the experience of what is often labeled "enlightenment." However, there is only one relationship activity that sustains this experience as the context of everything else we are experiencing: eldering. It is each moment giving priority with what is right in front of us to what we each judge to be our best relationship action for the maturation of the universe. We are going somewhere. Not primarily in the mutually agreed upon illusion tool of separate parts that allow us to create human languages and in turn become self-conscious. We are going somewhere in the reality of the oneness of nature. It is self-evident that the universe is maturing. For human beings, it is primarily building accurate knowledge on top of accurate knowledge. Maturation as the fundamental process in nature is particularly obvious by its evolution through us into simultaneously having the skill of self-consciousness in billions of locations. Now we each have to master the last of the seven layers of the skill of self-consciousness we still may not know to enjoy eldering the rest of our lives.