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Birth Until Death: The Culture of Resurrection by Bubba Free John
The First Stage of Life: Adaptation to the Physical Body The first seven years of life, or the first stage of human culture, is the time of the development of the vital or living physical being. Other functions may also be developing then, but it is especially the time for physical development. In the beginning the individual is a "babe in arms," without responsibility of any kind and essentially without response to life. He lives a calm, sleepy, vegetable like existence. At this stage of growth, the physical nature is not impinging on the child. He lives in a kind of dream state even though awake, free of concepts, not differentiating between the more subtle forms of consciousness and the waking or physical forms. Gradually he begins to adapt to the functional structures of physical existence. Therefore, in this first stage we see the development of coordination among the functions of the body. And that adaptation is appropriate. It is not that he loses something by turning outward to physical existence. Adaptation to lower, physical life is absolutely necessary. He is preparing the ground for responsible adaptation to higher life. In the first stage of life, then, there is only minimal development of responsibility for the emotional and the mental faculties. The mental life at this stage is a process of adaptation of attention, not of conceptualization. There is a functional mind, and the individual can learn rudimentary skills, such as reading and writing. But we cannot expect the individual during those seven years to become a true intellectual or moral representation of human integrity. The level of experience to which he or she is adapted in the present bodily form is too rudimentary to provide the vehicle for a truly creative intellect. This is true even of prodigies. They must adapt to the human condition through experience. Neither can we expect a range of sophisticated relational emotions or heightened sexual capacity during this time. If the child is a prodigy, with possibilities for intellectual or sexual development, and we exploit those possibilities without giving attention to the functions he should be developing at his stage of life, then we will eventually see an aberrated adult. He may be a genius at mathematics, but an idiot from almost any other point of view, because he has not adapted to forms of experience that inform the mechanical mind of what is above, below, other, and greater than itself. The education of children in the first stage of life is a process of nurturing them in a state of dependence, gradually serving their growth to relative independence through adaptation to rudimentary physical, emotional, and mental confrontations with life, and drawing them into life through feeling and playful experimentation with their possibilities as physical beings. The Second Stage of Life: Adaptation to the Emotiona lSexual Nature and the Transition to Independence As the child approaches the seventh year, from perhaps five to seven years of age, his emotional and also his concrete linguistic or mental development is beginning to become a little more sophisticated. Emotional responsibility is thus clearly required. He must begin to live in relational terms and to learn how to deal with the real existence of other beings, human beings especially! In the second stage there appears the potential of full relational feeling and the necessity for responsibility for the communication of life-force and sympathy with its vital processes. Thus, the individual develops an expanded bodily life through the extension of feeling, and he also becomes sexually aware, even very early in life. In this second stage he should develop a more sophisticated awareness of energy and healthfulness, of breathing and of bringing energy to others. The morality of love itself finds its seed form in the second stage. The second phase of life is the time of the development of the etheric or emotional-sexual life, of polarization to etheric life, of feeling alive and flowering, as the primitive physical sense, which once was the primary goad to living adaptation, begins to submit itself to awareness of the greater world of energy relations, the living world wherein solidity gives way to animation and rapid changes. It is the time of the development of sexual polarization and sensitivity, and of emotional life based on the forces contained in sexual differentiation. Emotion and physical energy of every kind, including sexuality, are simultaneously awakened as parts of the same process. Blood and breath, circulation, and bodily rhythms are also developed during this second stage of life.
The Third or "Student" Stage of Life: Adaptation to the Lower Mind and Integration of the Whole Body through Feeling In the third stage, the lower functions of mind, including will, intention, and self-control, and general integration of the living being in its relations should begin to develop. The weakness of this level of development, or the absence of the cultural demand for it, are the basis of the conflict that commonly appears at puberty. Not only has the individual developed physically by this time, but he has also developed an emotional and sexual presence. Then suddenly the suggestion of the functions of will and intention arise in him, accompanied by the social demand to be responsible, to control himself, and to develop himself mentally. The conflict between his readiness to throw himself into a life of self-indulgence (the habit of wasting life-energy) and the new demand for a life of self-control is the conventional theatre of puberty. The third stage of life should be the cultural moment in which the individual is clearly confronted with the obligation to be responsible, independent, and loving. Otherwise, the relative dependency of his earlier life will become a source of weakness, withdrawal, negative reactivity, and destructiveness in relation to himself and others. When the second stage is essentially mature, generally from twelve to fourteen years of age, the individual should be acknowledged, even by his parents, to be essentially responsible for himself (or herself), but within the context of a total educational or cultural structure that will guide him in his adolescent development. From this time on, he is to adapt to life from the point of view of intentional responsibility, until he is capable of being an integrated human being in the common world of human functions and human relations. Thus, in the third stage, the mind as intention and will must be integrated with the whole complex of feeling and activity that are an ordinary human life. It is in this stage that the individual must learn what the matter of life is all about, what relations are all about, what sexuality IS all about (without indulgence of the sexual functions), and it is also in this stage that he actually begins to practice moral responsibility for the relational context of human life. It may be appropriate to change the child's living circumstance when he enters the third stage of life. For example, in our own developing culture of devotees practicing the Way of Divine Ignorance, most often the teenager lives in a household with his parents-and with other families as well-but there is a tacit and real acknowledgment of his responsibility, his relative maturity. He is not independent in the sense that he can live independently and do anything he likes. Nevertheless, now he is no longer parented. He is a responsible individual within the culture in which his education appears. The whole culture, or in our case, the Church, is responsible to him rather than just his parents. He does not have a conventional child-parent relationship to anyone. Rather, he is a mature individual meeting other mature individuals of greater experience who are serving his growth in life, and he serves them with love and respect, not with childish needs to be either dependent or separate. Thus, the typical rebellion of the adolescent is not necessary. His essential independence is acknowledged, not threatened or prevented. Therefore, it may be appropriate during the third stage of life for the individual at least to move out of the childhood orientation within his household. He may even move out of his household to live in an educational environment with others of the same age or stage of life. He should not be completely separated from his parents and previous intimates, but able to see them by choice. It should be clear that he has been accepted into the sacred culture of the larger society, and there he (or she) is to learn his mature obligations and be instructed in the right use of his lower functional potential relative to a future in which he must also grow into expanded psychic and spiritual dimensions of existence. The incidents that inform his life from day to day must remain the essential responsibility of the cultural or sacred group into which he has been integrated (presuming such a group exists, as it does in our Church), and that order of his life should be maintained until his moral maturity is acknowledged, generally between the late teens and the age of twenty-one, when it should be presumed, based on evidence, that this individual is now able to live a true human and spiritual life. From that time, he should be free to combine himself with the world and, as in the case of our own Church culture, to continue to develop the sacred life of higher development as well. But he has learned what he can learn about the body, emotion, and mind in themselves and now he must go out and live them in further practical and intellectual education, work in the world, and marriage. In the third stage of life, the conflict between intentional responsibility and the desiring force of life is felt most deeply. It is the responsibility of the parent generation to help the adolescent individual understand this conflict and continue the process of adaptation and integration within the ultimate framework of the full seven stages of life. (Where there is no understanding or culture of the seven stages of life, clearly the young are not only disadvantaged but deprived of their birthright.) The growing individual at any stage must not be allowed to retreat just because the Way is difficult. The tendency of the teenager is to become self-indulgent, to exploit the physical and emotional forces already developed, and to yield to all kinds of gross social stupidity. This is essentially the very motivation limiting the development of common humanity at the present time. All the stupidity, all the false views, all the "scientific" heresies, all the psycho-social limitations of life are commonly implanted in subtle or obvious ways during this period. It is all learned essentially during those first twenty-one years and less, in school, among parents and relatives, in isolation and kid games, and in the media of daily communication-conversation, TV, books, and all the argument, hype, propaganda, and persuasiveness of random experience and the subconscious forces below thought. The third stage of life should be initiatory, but in the cultural sense, not in the spiritual sense. As an immature child, the individual exists essentially removed from the things of the world and does not know anything about them. In the second stage of life, however, he begins, through feeling, to participate more fully in the process of his incarnation, his bodily functional life. In the cultural process of this stage, he adapts essentially through physical and vital-emotional feeling. A rudimentary aspect of mentality is present in the second stage, but it is only in the third stage that the individual gains integral control and mastery of his life-functions-body, emotions, and mind-as he develops the use of attention, reflection, analysis, memory, and will. Among the principal and most significant adaptations that the individual must realize in this stage is the adaptation to his sexuality. Most present-day teenagers, adapted to the world with only partial acculturation (and, therefore, only partial humanization), are suppressed by the parental enclosure, required to be childishly dependent, even into and beyond their second seven years, rather than to move toward responsibility. When the individual is a teenager, in the society of high school, he gets rebellious. He acquires a secret life hidden from his family and the older people who are responsible to him. He starts to exploit himself emotionally, physically, and sexually, and to do so even violently and stupidly. Thus, we truly serve our children only if we set them free within the cultural circle of the wise during their teens. Then their nature will not be suppressed, but brought into a very mature relationship to that stage of life in which we all must realize truly human control over body, emotion, and mind, and a devotion of these to the spiritual point of view. Actual sexual contact should not be part of an individual's life until he (or she) is mature in the third stage of life. Only then is he prepared for true sexual intimacy, and only then should he be encouraged to live it in actual relationship. And he must be instructed in not only. the generative but the regenerative and esoteric functions of the sexual process. A life of sexual and personal exploitation is the result of being a reactive, psychologically dependent personality as a teenager. Such an individual is able to differentiate himself and feel his own life-strength only by extraordinary acts of independence through self-indulgence, promiscuity, manipulation of self and others, and so forth. The principle of the exploitation or elimination of life that we all commonly learn in our conventional relations simply must not be learned or reinforced. Individuals must see that independence based on self-indulgence and exploitation of bodily experience is a false principle, that it has nothing to do with Wisdom, with spiritual life, with Realization of Truth, or with being a human being. That principle is false, not only relative to sexuality but to the whole of life. The usual man empties himself in all kinds of ways. He exploits himself to acquire pleasure because he does not feel pleasure inherently. Rather, he always already feels a contracted or reactive condition, a dilemma or suppression of body, emotion, life, and mind. He is not a spiritual person. He is not consciously involved in the Divine Process. He probably thinks there is no such process. Therefore, he basically uses up his life, as his sexual tendencies and habits clearly demonstrate. Orgasm is a principal method people exploit for the sake of pleasurable release. They feel pleasure temporarily, but ultimately they empty themselves. Conventional orgasm is a reflex that discharges the life-force. But people commonly are not only addicted to orgasm, but they believe it is a healthful practice. In a true culture of human adaptation, the regenerative conservation of the vital force is realized through instruction in the third stage of life. The psycho-physics of diet, health, sexual intimacy, and so forth, as well as the Law of Sacrifice, fulfilled through unobstructed feeling-attention in all relations, must be learned before we are prepared for the human world. (Since most people have not grown to maturity in such a culture, the so-called human world of our time is peopled by subhuman, immature, and uninstructed individuals who know practically nothing about the spiritual order and ultimate functional destiny of human life.) Thus, the principle of the conservation of life force, the psycho-physics of the conservation of energy or of life, must be realized in the third stage of life. When this principle, understood relative to all life-functions, becomes the foundation of the practice of life, then the individual may become not only sexually active but maturely present in every common way as a human being in the world. By the time an individual is about twenty-one years old he should be ready to grow into what is more than "human" in the conventional sense. But the usual man is hardly even equipped to be human. He has gone through this twenty-one years, but he has not come to the point of integrated functional responsibility. He cannot control the force of life in himself and use it in creative ways. He is full of fear, continually subject to negative emotions and bouts of self-indulgence, and always looking to be consoled by the things of life and beyond life, rather than being responsibly and pleasurably integrated with the Great Process into which he was born. The first three stages of life should be served by cultural incidents and relations that bring the individual into more and more perfect coincidence with the inherent structural necessities awakened at each stage. The first twenty-one years represent the demand for adaptation and integration relative to vital-physical, emotional-sexual, and primary mental faculties. The mature individual who has entered into the greater human world, to live on the basis of what he has already learned as well as to continue growth in the fourth stage of life, should be fully instructed and responsible relative to the integrity and Lawful conservation of life-energy for the sake of common happiness, health, and well-being. The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace is a book of instruction relative to such conservation or Lawful practice relative to diet and health. Love of the Two-Armed Form considers the same responsibility relative to the sexual process. Conscious Exercise and the Transcendental Sun is a manual not only of exercise but the psycho-physics of feeling-attention, or love. The higher esoteric considerations of this culture are discussed in The Paradox of Instruction, Breath and Name, and other books, and are otherwise directly communicated in the Spiritual Company of Bubba Free John as well as in the private instructional and educational occasions enjoyed by devotees in The Free Communion Church.
Right Adaptation in the Mature Stages of Life: Reorientation to the Etheric Dimension It is in the first three stages of life, when others are culturally responsible to an individual for his development from dependence to autonomy (or truly human incarnation), that we see the process of growth in more or less concrete periods of years. The pattern of the first twenty-one years is more specific than the rest of life, but the later stages of life can also differentiate subsequent growth into periods of approximately seven years, if the individual is consciously applied to spiritual practice in a total culture. (Most individuals are likely to see future growth only in terms of lifetimes of slow testing and learning.) In any case, the kind of development that follows the first three stages cannot be fixed in terms of the time and space known to the grosser aspects of the body-being alone, and it ultimately breaks through the patterns of time and space altogether. There is no temporal or spatial end to human growth. We are, by virtue of our structure, fitted for growth into Light, or Eternal Life, via all seven stages of life. We are always, in one or another stage, obliged to purify and integrate ourselves at the functional levels in which we are already aware, and we are simultaneously obliged to be initiated (or introduced to the next food-source) into awareness at the next highest level of the functional body-being. In the first three stages, we are obliged to adapt to an autonomous, relational, feeling life in terms of body, emotion (including sex), mind, and their relations. When we are so mature, then we enjoy the foundation from which the body-being readily enters into the ascending order of higher mental, psychic, and intuitional awareness. This process is naturally keyed into play by a refining process in the lower body-being that occurs when the heart, the feeling core, ceases to be weighted down by the gross physical life and begins to flower in its devotion to Infinity and the Light or Source beyond all thinking. As we have seen, the body-being matures in the cycle of life by first adapting to his or her born individuality, to the physical, emotional, and mental dimensions of being. But then, quite independent of the level of psychological and philosophical preparation, the process begins to reverse itself. The grosser dimensions in which the whole body-being has been adapted gradually wind down, and the body-being becomes more refined as time goes on. Thus, in the teens and twenties the individual is generally disposed to a very vital and physically oriented play of life. He has a great deal of energy at the physical level, and his total development is organized around physical activity or the conditions of the gross physical world. In these early years, the etheric, or energy dimension of the being, is itself oriented or turned toward the elemental and physical dimension. Then in the thirties and on into the forties, the relationship between the etheric and the physical dimensions reverses. The gross physical or elemental dimension turns to the etheric, and the etheric becomes senior. The physical dimension of the being becomes finer, more apparently associated with the life-force and feeling dimension. The physical dimension becomes gradually weaker, or less and less active in the sheerly physical sense. Eventually, there is death. Since human beings tend to adapt to the reactive-egoic Principle of life, they also generally fail to develop or grow beyond a complicated organization of the physical-emotional-mental dimension of human potential. Therefore, death has tended to be interpreted (even "scientifically"- science being no more illumined than the stage of life of its practitioners) as a terminal event. ("When you are dead, you are dead.") This is because the event of gross physical death is a dropping off of at least the present configuration of all the levels of awareness to which the usual man has adapted. However, those who grow into adaptation above the grosser levels of the body-being become naturally aware in and as levels of conscious existence (levels of light) that cannot possibly be terminated by gross physical death. Even simple love is a tacit intuition of the heart, or the higher psychic condition that transcends the elements. And if the individual would become truly sensitive to the process and physics of thinking, breathing, feeling, and moving, the doctrine of mortality would lose its argument against love and light. However, full transcendence of death requires a consciousness that already persists independent of the changes in body, emotion, and thought. Therefore, we must grow beyond adolescence and early manhood. And the body-being itself contains a mechanism whereby the finer or more etheric and psychic dimensions of awareness, feeding, and growth are made to impinge on our vital motives to perpetual physical desire and fulfillment. That mechanism is aging. And death is the ultimate argument for higher and subtler adaptation of attention in the cycle of maturity and aging. We need not necessarily call the changes we can observe in the middle age of life "degeneration," unless the body-being is devoted to a degenerative way of living. The changes that inevitably occur are simply a refinement of the conditions of the body-being. As long as the individual leads a responsible, loving, and healthy life, the changes that occur in maturity are not a matter of essential degeneration. As the being becomes more fundamentally and profoundly oriented to the etheric dimension and the food that is life itself, and even perhaps to the more subtle mental or psychic and spiritual dimensions, the physical dimension itself becomes more a display of higher energy than a gross activity. Thus, the more forcefully intelligent life of the individual, which only begins in his twenties, generally only matures in his thirties or forties. As he matures, the release of his fixed orientation toward the gross physical permits the higher human faculties to become more prominent and obvious to the consciousness. Tragically, the usual man or woman is commonly unable to realize a free life of love and responsibility relative to the lower life. The struggle with the problems of childhood and adolescence tends to be lifelong. Thus, as the bodily life passes into its stages of refinement toward death, the dilemma of his failed adaptation is only more profoundly demonstrated. If only human beings could maintain Communion with the Mystery of their own existence and respect the Wisdom influence that is always present in various forms in this world! But the dogmas of egoic experience and of human suffering are constantly exercising a general and popular propagandistic force over the Voice of Wisdom and eternal growth. As a result, the clues in our maturing or aging are lost, and we fear annihilation is built into the world. We look for consolation in the vulgarities of this world and the illusions of the next. We seek escape. We look for the food of eternal life. But we despair or only hope until death, whereas we should grow all our lives and enjoy the blessedness of the Radiant Divinity whose secret processes are not merely in our minds, our subjective inwardness, but in the whole body-being itself, which has the potential to manifest all of the Genius and Form and Bliss of Light.
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