 105. Maturity (Transformation) |
There must be a transition from childhood to maturity. That transition is commonly acknowledged as a stage in the psycho-physical development of the human being. It is called "adolescence".
Like childhood, this stage also tends to be prolonged indefinitely and, indeed, perhaps the majority of "civilized" human beings are occupied with the concerns of this transition most of their lives.
The transitional stage of adolescence is marked by a sense of dilemma, just as the primal stage of childhood is marked by a sense of dependence. It is in this transitional stage that the quality of living one's existence as a dilemma is conceived. It is the dilemma imposed by the conventional presumption of separate, egoic, independent consciousness — and, thus, separative habits and action. That presumption is (altogether) the inevitable inheritance from childhood — and its clear, personal comprehension, felt over against the childish urge to dependence, is what initiates the ambivalent conflicts of the phase of adolescence.
Traditional Spirituality, in the forms in which it is most commonly proposed or presumed, is a characteristically adolescent creation that represents an attempted balance between the extremes.
It is not a life of mere (or simple) absorption in the mysterious enclosure of existence. It is a life of strategic absorption. It raises the relatively non-strategic and unconscious life of childhood dependence to the level of a fully strategic conscious life of achieved dependence (or absorption). Its goal is not merely psychological re-union, but total psychic release into some (imagined or felt) "Home" of being.
There is a mature, real, and true phase of human life. Real and true human maturity is free of all childish things and free of all that is attained, acquired, and made in the adolescent adventures of conventional life.
In that mature phase, the principle of separation is undermined by means of Real "self"-understanding — and the mutually exclusive trinity of "God", "self", and "world" is returned to the Condition of Truth Itself.
In the maturity of human life, the "world" is not abandoned, nor is it lived as the scene of adolescent theatre, the adventure in dilemma. "God-Apart" occupies the child, and "separate self" occupies the adolescent — and both child and adolescent see the "world" only in terms of their own distinct limiting principle (or characteristic form of suffering).
But, in the mature human being, the "world" — or the totality of all arising ("subjective" and "objective", high and low), not as an exclusive "reality" but in Truth — is primary. In the mature individual, the "world" is (potentially) apprehended as a modification of the Single, Indivisible, Absolute, Non-separate Reality — implying no "separate self" and no "outside God". For such a one, the Absolute Reality and the "world" are not "different".
The Absolute Reality Is the Divine Nature, Condition, State, Form, and Process of all-and-All.
The Absolute Reality Includes all that is manifest, and all that is unmanifest — all universes, conditions, beings, states, and things, all that is "within" and all that is "without", all that is visible and all that is invisible, all that is "here" and all that is "there", all dimensions of space-time and All that is Prior to space-time. It is in childhood that the idea of "God-Apart", or "Reality-Beyond", is conceived. The sense of dependence initiates the growing sense of separate and separated "self" through the "experiential" theatre of growth.
The intuition of the Whole, the One, is the ground of birth — but "growing up" is a conventional pattern of initiation in which the sense of "difference" is intensified. At the conventional level of the life-functions themselves, there is a need for such functional practical differentiation. However, in the plane of consciousness, the presumption of "difference" gives rise to an unnatural adventure of suffering and seeking-in-dilemma.
The passage of childhood thus becomes the ground for the eventual conception of the mutually exclusive trinity of "God-Apart", "separate self", and "world-in-itself" (any "world", high or low).
The drama implied in the added presumptions of "independent self" and "objective world" is generated at a later phase of life than childhood. The child barely comprehends the full force of implication inherent in the concepts of "ego" and "world-of-things".
