Chapter 2: We Have Outgrown the Cult of Childish
Religion Moving Beyond Childish and Adolescent
Approaches to Life and Truth In the current exchanges about the true Way of life,
people are alternately invited either to submit themselves
in childish, emotional, and cultic fashion, usually by grace
of “hype,” to one or another glamourous tradition,
personality, or possible effect, or else to assert their
adolescent independence from any Divine Influence, Master,
or Way by engaging in any one of the seemingly numberless,
cool, mental, and strategic methods of self-indulgence,
self-possession, self-help, de-programming, or certified
sudden transcendentalism now available in these
media-motivated times. In the midst of the pervasive
language of these offerings is all the implicit crawling
fear of children and adolescents, surrounded by Parent,
waiting for Wednesday, wasting weekends on authorities who
preach against authority, or who promote peculiar
enthusiasms for secret, unique, scriptural, and wholly
fulfilling techniques for bodily, emotional, and mental
absorptions in the One True Reality, which everyone
advertises, but very flew find sufficient. Religious,
spiritual, and philosophical revivals are so plastic and
popular, as mindless soap, and yet they seem always to
distract the world. I am not the usual man. All that I Teach has been
awakened and tested in my own case. There is Grace. There is
Truth. There is God, which is both Real and Reality. There
are true and false or fruitless ways to live. There are
partial revelations. What is only distraction and
foolishness has always been part of the theatre of mankind.
This need not concern us, if our need for true illumination
is strong enough. What we are obliged to do is realize, in
our own case, a heart that is the center of our life, that
is neither self-indulgent nor foolish, and that is
responsible only to Truth. “Experiences,” high and low, are required by those who
are still lingering in the conditions of their childhood and
adolescence. Everything a child does is a manifestation of
one underlying assumption: dependence. When you are a child,
the assumption of dependence is eminently realistic and
useful. But it should be a temporary stage of
psycho-physical life, in which ones functions are nurtured
and developed in conventional ways. However, there commonly
is a lag in the transition to manhood, because of the shocks
experienced in the immature attempts to function in the
world. Thus, to some degree, every man or woman lingers in
the childhood assumption of dependence. And, insofar as men
and women are children, they seek to enlarge that personal
assumption of dependence into a universal conception in the
form of the God-Cosmos-Parent game, the game of dependence
upon and obedience to That upon which all depends. That
childish aspect in each of us seeks always to verify the
condition of dependence in forms of safety and relative
unconsciousness. That childish demand in every man and woman
is the principal origin of religion, which means “re-union,”
or, literally, “to bind again.” It is the search to be
reunited, to experience the vital and emotional
reestablishment of some imagined or felt Condition or State
of life that is previous to responsibility. It is the urge
toward the parented, enclosed condition. This urge always
seeks experiences, beliefs, and immunities as a consolation
for the primitive cognition of fear and vulnerability. And
the “Way” enacted by such a motivation is principally a game
of obedience to parentlike enormities. It is in the childhood of Man 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, but the implications
in the plane of Consciousness are the cause of 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 assumptions of
independent self and objective world is generated at a later
phase of life than is realized by the child. The child
barely realizes the full force of implication in the
ego-concept or the world of things. His or her principal
concern is relative to the God-Parent-Reality, That on which
all depends, and his or her growing but as yet not fully
realized sense of separated self-existence. Separate self
and objective world are yet hidden in unconsciousness for
the child. They are themselves a mysterious and later
realization of that which is at first only felt, not
conceptualized, as fear and sorrow. Therefore, the child is
always grasping for permanent security in an
undifferentiated, unborn bliss, wherein the threats implied
in life are forgotten and unknown. Reunion through obedience
is the way the living child learns in secret, while the life
that grows the child through experience continually
demonstrates the failure of all childish seeking. There must be a transition from childhood to maturity.
That transition is also commonly acknowledged as a stage in
the psycho-physical development of a human being. It is
called adolescence. This stage also tends to be prolonged
indefinitely, and, indeed, perhaps the majority of
“civilized” men and women 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 existence as a dilemma is conceived. It is
the dilemma imposed by the conventional assumption of
separate, egoic, independent consciousness, and thus
separative habits and action. That whole assumption is the
conventional inheritance from childhood, and its clear,
personal comprehension felt over against the childish urge
to dependence, is what initiates the ambiguous conflicts of
the phase of adolescence. The dilemma of adolescence is a continual goad to
dramatization. It is the drama of the double-bind of
dependence versus independence. Adolescence is the origin of
cleverness and, in general, of mind. What we conventionally
call the conscious mind is a strategic version of
consciousness that is always manufacturing motivations. And,
in the adolescent, these motivations or desires are mutually
exclusive or contradictory. This is because he or she is
always playing with impulsive allegiance to two exclusive
principles: dependence and independence. The early or
childhood condition yields the tendency to assume
dependence, but the conventional learning of childhood, as
well as the general growth of the individual psycho-physical
state, yields to the growing person the equally powerful
tendency to assume independence. The result is conventional
consciousness or conscious mind, as opposed to the
unconsciousness of childhood, but it is strategic in nature,
and its foundation is the actual conception of dilemma.
Therefore, adolescence is the origin of the great search in
all men and women. It is an eternally failed condition, an
irrevocable double-bind. It is the very form of Narcissus,
or eternal self-reflection (immunity) achieved by impulsive,
psycho-physical flight from the impositions of relational
conditions. The solutions developed in the adolescent theatre of
mankind phase between the exotic and exclusive extremes of
either yielding to the states of egoic dependence (thus
tending to disintegrate character) or asserting the status
of egoic independence (thus tending to rigidify character).
Both extremes remain tenuous, threatened by the possibility
of the opposite destiny, and involve an ongoing sense of
dilemma. We make culture and adventure out of such
mid-learning. In the case of the yielding toward the
childish condition of dependence, we see more of the
mystical-invocatory-absorbed tendency. In the case of the
revolutionary assertion of independence, we see more of the
analytical-materialistic-discriminatory tendency. In the
adolescent range between these two extremes are all of the
traditional and usual solutions of Man, including the common
understanding of religious and spiritual life. Traditional religious spirituality, in the forms in which
it is most commonly proposed or presumed, is a
characteristically adolescent creation that represents a
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 nonstrategic and unconscious life of childhood
dependence to the level of a fully strategic, conscious life
of realized dependence or absorption. Its goal is not merely
psychological reunion, but total psychic liberation into
some imagined or felt previous Nature, Position, or State of
Being. When the child of Man fully realizes the way of obedience
to That on which all depends, he or she has also entered the
phase of adolescence. At that point he or she also has
realized the assumptions of the ego-self and the world as
apparently independent or objective dimensions, exclusive of
or other than the Reality that is the goal of all
dependence. Therefore, the way of obedience, fully
developed, is already a way of dilemma, of conflict, of
struggle with self, as every religious person realizes by
experience. Truly, then, the experiential realization of the
way of childhood, or dependence, is fully demonstrated only
in the advent of human adolescence. In every form of its adventure, the way of experience and
attainment conceived in the adolescence of Man is a struggle
for solutions to a principal dilemma. And that dilemma is
itself the characteristic demonstration of all such
adventures, as well as of the mere suffering of the usual
man or woman. In the adolescence of Man, the separate,
separated, and separative self is the motivating assumption
in our common suffering and our common heroism, both in life
and in spirit. The sense of permanently independent existent
is the source of that dilemma that undermines the
undifferentiated dependence of mere birth. In the
adolescent, there is the unrelenting search for the success,
salvation, realization, transcendental security, survival,
immunity, or healing of the assumed ego. The ego, self, or
soul as Self is the primary assumption of the adolescent
man, even as the assumption of God, or That on which all
depends, is the primary assumption of the child of Man.
Therefore, in the usual man or woman, who is embedded in the
adolescent conception, the idea of God becomes in doubt, or
is chronically resisted. Thus, “sin” (“to miss the mark”)
enters into the consciousness of adolescence. And the world
becomes merely a scene of the adolescent drama wherein even
the very “stuff” of the world is viewed as a problem, a
principal warfare of opposites, in which manipulation of
manifest things, rather than radical intuition of the
eternally Present Nature, Condition, Form, and Process,
becomes the hope of peace. There is a mature, real, and true phase of Man. Our
maturity is radically free of all childish things and all
that is attained, acquired, and made in the adolescent
adventures of our conventional life. In that mature phase,
the principle of separation is undermined in Real
Consciousness, and exclusive God, self, and world are
returned to the Condition of Truth. In the maturity of Man,
the world is not abandoned, nor is it lived as the scene of
adolescent theatre, the adventure in dilemma. Exclusive God
occupies the child, and exclusive self occupies the
adolescent, and both see the world only in terms of their
own limiting principle or suffering. But in the real or
mature man the world , or the totality of all arising
(subjective, objective, high and low), not in its exclusive
sense but in Truth, is primary. In the mature individual,
the world is felt as World, as a single, absolute,
nonseparate Reality, implying no separate “self” or outside
“God,” but including the Reality they each imply. For such a
one, the Absolute Reality and the world are the same. The
World is the inclusive Reality, the Divine Nature,
Condition, Form, and Process. It includes all that is
manifest, and all that is unmanifest, all universes,
conditions, beings, states, and things, all that is within,
all that is without, all that is visible, and all that is
invisible, all that is here, all that is there, all
dimensions of space-time and all that precedes
space-time. Clearly, the search for realization via experiences of
all kinds is the principal characteristic of both the
childish and the adolescent or conventional and traditional
stages of human development. The experiential or life
dimension of the Divine Transforming Power contains every
possibility for the holy or unholy fascination of children
and adolescents. But I must always work to disentangle men
and women from their lingering and strategic life-motives,
so they may realize the Way of the final or mature phase of
life. It is only in that mature phase of functional human
existence that life in Truth may be realized and the
experiential drama of unconsciousness, egoity, conventional
mind, and strategic motivation be understood. The mature phase of life is not characterized by either
unconscious dependence or the strategically conscious
dilemma of dependence-independence. It is the phase of
intuitive attention (rather than dependence) and real
responsibility (rather than exclusive independence). As in
childhood, there is no problematic strategy at the root of
the mature phase of life. But childhood is a realm of
unconsciousness, whereas the mature person is freely
conscious, because, unlike the adolescent, the mature man or
woman conceives no irreducible dilemma in life and
consciousness. This mature phase of life requires conscious, intuitive,
and radical Understanding, the Divine disposition or
presumption of Ignorance, for its ongoing foundation. The
separate and separative principle of independent self, the
strategies of mind and desires, the usual self-possessed
life of the avoidance of relationship, the urges toward
unconscious dependence and mechanical or wild independence,
and all the mediocre and mediumistic solutions that balance
or fulfill the extremes of experience, all of these must be
obviated in the radical presumption that, no matter what
arises as apparent experience or knowledge, “I” do not know
what a single thing is . Therefore, understanding initiates
the mature phase of life. The mature or responsible and
truly conscious phase of life is thus the origin of the real
practice of life, or true action. And to this mature phase
of life, perfectly realized, belong not the usual religious
and spiritual solutions, but perfect or radical Ignorance as
the Principle of life. Such maturity or true humanity is
characterized by no-seeking, no-dilemma, no orientation
toward the goal of any conceived or remembered state or
condition, but radical Enjoyment, the perfectly prior, and
thus always present, Nature and Condition that is Reality.
Only a man or woman thus free enjoys manifest existence in
the very Nature and Condition and Heart of the Divine, which
is also the Process and Form and Light and Fullness of the
worlds.
