by Bubba Free John (Adi Da Samraj) pp. 189-203
The Vision and The Way of Eternal Life
The Vision and the Way of Eternal Life
The Seven States of Eternal Life – First Become Human – The True Man – Love is Freedom from Fear, Doubt and Despair – We Must Consent to Become Agents of Life – The Work of Bubba Free John in Relation to the States of Life and Practice of Devotees
In the traditions of spiritual culture, the development of a human being has commonly been described in terms of seven stages, each spanning a period of seven years. There is a rational basis in Awakened Wisdom for this scheme. That basis is the very structure of the total bodily being (or body-mind) of every human individual. We are a composite made of elements and of functional relations, a coherent life-form expressed via the nervous system and brain, and levels of mind that may consciously reflect not only the gross or “material” realm but the realms of Life-Energy and all the cosmic realms or media of light. At the root of this system is the heart, the primal organ not only of life but of consciousness in man. It is here that the presumption and conception of egoic independence, or the separate “I,” arises in every moment. It is on the basis of this presumption that the human individual is predetermined to a reactive life of fear, vulnerability, flight from mortality, and a universal constitutional state of contraction. That contraction encloses consciousness in the limits of skin and thought, and it separates the whole bodily being of Man from the Divine Radiance and Perfect Consciousness that is otherwise native to it and eternally available to it in every part.
The Way of Divine Ignorance, which I Teach, is a complete Way of Life. It is not merely a system of self-applied methods of inwardness or of exclusively external and worldly functional improvement. It is a whole culture, lived principally among others who do likewise, and in complete touch with every level of our structural humanity, from the gross physical to the subtle and Transcendental ranges of Light: The presumption of independent conscious existence, rooted in the heart prior to mind, and expressed as forms of contraction or self-definition at every functional level of the bodily being, as well as in all relations, is the present foundation of the conventional and chaotic “culture” or habit of adaptation of most human beings. Therefore, if we are to be adapted (or readapted) to another Principle than the ego, or the independent and separative self, we must likewise become involved in a total culture of that alternative.
The culture of the Way of Divine Ignorance may also be related to the traditional scheme of seven stages of growth. But it is founded on the Awakening of the heart, from self-possession to free feeling-attention, via all functions, in all relations, under all conditions. Indeed, the whole Way is the Way of the heart. The first three stages purify and readapt the whole bodily being via the lowest dimension of the heart, the gross physical epitome. Thus, they involve the foundation growth of the vital-physical, the emotional-sexual, and the lower mental dimensions including the will, or integrated responsibility for the whole of the common human foundation. The fourth and fifth stages purify and readapt the whole bodily being via the middle heart, the subtle epitome. Thus, they involve the higher growth of the conceptual mind, the psyche, the subtle intuitive gnosis of the elemental world, and the higher or cosmic gnosis of the planes and “heavens” of the Great Process of manifest experience. The sixth stage purifies and readapts the whole bodily being via the upper or right heart, the epitome of the independent conscious entity and the Place of self-transcendence. Thus, it is in this stage that the presumption of independent, separate, and separative conscious existence is dissolved in the true Heart, the “Ignorance” or Unqualified Consciousness that is our Condition in Truth. The individual bodily being is not “snuffed out” at this stage. It simply persists free of the irreducible illusion of separate existence, and exists in utter Identity, or radical Love-Communion, with the Condition of all beings and conditions. Thus, in the seventh stage, the whole bodily being exists in a fully responsible alignment with its Source, “Food,” and Condition, and continues to grow at Infinity. This leads into more and more perfect identification, even bodily, with the Light, Love, and Consciousness that is the Absolute God and Self of Man. Thus, this final stage, which goes on into Eternity, shows the Divine Signs of Transfiguration and Regeneration while alive, and ultimate Ascension or Translation of the individual into the Divine Plane, the Heaven above all heavens, which is God and Truth.
The general culture of the first three stages naturally belongs to the first twenty-one years of life, but men and women in general fail to complete these stages to maturity because of reactive adaptation to the false principle, the experiential ego, untouched by transcendental insight. Thus, most “adults” are only bordering on the awakening of a life committed to love, the life of the heart and of psychic awakening. They phase back and forth from actual commitment to love and spiritual ascent, but they spend most of their time in various forms of problematic concentration in vital-physical, emotional-sexual, and lower mental dilemmas of will, morality, belief, and conventional knowledge. The reason for this is that the first three stages of their adaptation are immature, so they are still foundering in childish and adolescent motivations of character, the theatre of the struggle between dependence and independence. And this chaotic subhuman struggle will continue to bind the individual and also human societies as a whole until there is release from the ego-principle, the chronic contraction of the heart and the whole bodily being, the commitment to separation, avoidance of relationship, loveless self-possession, obsessive self-indulgence, doubt, and unconsciousness of the Source, Light, Love, Living Food, and Eternal Life by which all things are sustained forever.
Because of the ego-“I,” the presumption of separation and independence, we are constitutionally divorced from the Infinite Condition wherein we have appeared. We are separated from our primal Food-Source. Mankind is not merely hungry. We are starving. We cannot even hope to be satisfied, and, therefore, our hunger has become doubt, unlove, fear, self-possession, self-indulgence, violence, disease, and a death that is not merely a change of state but a suppression of existence to the point of the illusion of annihilation.
However, there is Wisdom to the point of freedom, and not merely or only immortality but eternal Bliss in God. There is Truth, Sustenance, Light, and Life. There is Awakening, even bodily, to the utter Consciousness and Radiance or Love that is God and Truth. The Way of that Awakening is expressed through a culture or Way of Life that evolves through seven stages. The first three may generally be associated with the first twenty-one years of life (three periods of seven years), but the last four (which grow beyond the limits of the grosser elements and functions) may not truly be considered in terms of limits of time, whether brief or long. Each stage develops as a process of adaptation (or readaptation) to a specific, functional point of view relative to the totality of experience. That specific point of view in each case depends on the organization of life and consciousness relative to any one of seven primal centers of the functional being of man. Those centers are expressed at the physical level, but they also reach deep into the subtlest and most transcendental planes of light.
The seven primary centers of the human body-mind relate to the seven primary levels of adaptation, integration, and Realization in the case of Man. Adaptation to the whole of existence via each of these centers in succession is the native Process of growth for which we are fitted by virtue of our inherent structure. And growth, at every stage, is a matter of “food,” or the success of the functional pattern of reception, ingestion, elimination, and adaptation not only at the physical level, but also at the vital level, the mental level, the psychic and supermental level, the Foundation level of Consciousness, and the Transcendental level of Radiance, Light, Vibratory Power, Love, and Mysterious Creation.
There are as many kinds of food as there are levels of adaptation. Elemental food is the common food of the lowest dimension of our appearance. But we require other kinds of food to sustain us in our parts above or subtler than the elemental physical. All manifest things and beings appear within a universal cosmic theatre of the physics of light. Even the most solid configuration is an illusion, or a mysterious objectification that is not other than light. The essence of things is light, or Life-Radiance, and the right functioning of every individual life depends on right communion with light, or the Light above all lights, and above all the levels of energy or vibration that lie between the subtlest light, or mind, and solidity.
Therefore, there are many kinds of food on which we depend and which we must learn to eat, humbly and in peace. There is the elemental food of the physical aspect of the whole bodily being. There is, at the next level, the etheric food, the Life-Force or pranic’ “substance” that is received and ingested via the processes of breathing and feeling. And beyond this are all the ascending and subtle degrees of chemistry and energy associated with each of the primary physical, glandular, and nervous centers of the gross bodily being, and their subtle extensions to Infinity.
The primary centers of the whole bodily being are seven. And we are obliged to adapt our whole bodily being to the view established at each center in succession. Thus, there are seven primary stages of growth or adaptation native to Man. But since we are generally born into conditions where human development is minimal or rudimentary, and where the culture of Wisdom is unknown, in doubt, or denied altogether, we tend to adapt, through random influences, to arbitrary, reactive, ego-based, and even subhuman levels of awareness, ability, experience, and responsibility. We tend to develop in patterns that disintegrate rather than integrate the bodily being, and human societies tend,
1. In the physics of the worlds, ether or functional energy is the senior and most subtle of the gross elements, which also include solid, liquid, fiery, and gaseous substances (the ancient esoteric elements of earth, water, fire, and air). Ether, the most subtle state of gross or material appearance, is the all-pervading element of the physical universe, analogous to space itself. The etheric dimension of force or manifest light pervades and surrounds our universe and every physical body. It is the field of energy, magnetism, and space in which the lower or grosser elements function. Thus, your “etheric body” is the specific concentration of force associated with and surrounding-permeating your physical body. It serves as a conduit for the forces of universal light and energy to the physical body.
In practical terms of daily experience, the etheric aspect of the being is our emotional-sexual, feeling nature. The etheric body functions through and corresponds to the nervous system. Functioning as a medium between the conscious mind and the physical being, it controls the distribution and use of energy and emotion. It is the dimension of vitality or Life-Force. We feel the etheric dimension of life not only as vital energy and power and magnetic-gravitational forces, but also as the endless play of emotional polarization, positive and negative, to others, objects, the world itself, everything that arises.
“Prana” is a Sanskrit term meaning “life-energy” or life-force. In yogic esoteric teachings, “prana” is also a specific technical name for one of a number of forms of etheric energy in the bodily being. Bubba uses the term here more generally, in reference to the whole dimension of living energy that pervades and sustains the physical and vital processes of Man. Thus, “prana” is the manifest life-energy. It is an aspect of the Transcendental Current of Life, which is All-Pervading, but also Eternal-but manifest or “pranic” energies are only temporary phenomena of the Realm of Nature.
therefore, to function as “schools” of disintegration, reactivity, and mediocrity, rather than as cultures of adaptation to Wisdom in Truth. Truly, most human beings are human only in the sense that they are specimens of an inherent structure that can realize a human level of expression. If we consider the level of actual adaptation and responsibility of the usual man or woman, he or she is certainly subhuman, either in the sense of being little more than a talking beast without instincts or in the sense of being merely adapted to the physical, emotional-sexual, and mental levels of experience, but severely compromised or unstable in the demonstration of the integrity and natural superiority even such adaptation should represent in action.
It is necessary, first of all, for each individual to return to all previous levels of functional adaptation that have been developed as reactive and egoic mechanisms. Every functional level must be re-awakened and readapted to the Divine Principle beyond and yet pervading all contractions, all parts of the whole, all defining limits of light and consciousness. Even the cells of the body are obliged by this Principle. Therefore, the Way or Culture of this Process is a Way of total readaptation or rebirth. It is the Culture of Resurrection, or the Enlightenment of the whole bodily being of Man.2 The seven centers of progressive readaptation are (1) the body base (at the perineum), (2) the root of sex, (3) the region of the navel and solar plexus, (4) the heart, (5) the region between the lower throat and the lower rear of the brain, (6) the brain core, and (7) the crown, or the Light-Terminal of the whole bodily being. But the Principle of human adaptation (or readaptation) is not found in either the lower or the higher dimensions of the bodily
2. The written Teaching of Bubba Free John contains all necessary instructions for practical and spiritual life in the Culture of Resurrection, or Enlightenment. The Eating Gorilla Comes In Peace is a book of instruction relative to right adaptation or Lawful practice of 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 of the psycho-physics of feeling-attention, or love. The devotional and higher esoteric or meditative considerations of this culture are discussed in The Paradox of Instruction, Breath and Name, the present book, and others, and are otherwise directly communicated in the private instructional and educational occasions enjoyed by devotees in The Free Communion Church.
being. It is at the center, between the lower and the upper divisions or coils, each represented by three centers. The center wherein the human being becomes Awakened to the Principle on which it always already depends is the heart. The heart is the key to human consciousness, human Awakening, and truly human adaptation. Therefore, the culture of human readaptation depends, from the beginning, on the intuitive Awakening of the heart to its Condition in Truth. That Awakening is Realized through true “hearing” of the argument of the Spiritual Master, and it is progressively intensified through spiritual Revelation in a whole life of “hearing,” “seeing,” and “feeling” in Communion with the Divine Company of the Spiritual Master, wherein devotees are restored to God, even bodily.
Since the Awakened heart is the Principle of the culture of true human adaptation, that Awakening must come at the beginning of the Way and progressively intensify or mature through its stages. Therefore, the Awakening of the heart does not only come, as one might expect, in the fourth stage of life. It is continuous, from the beginning. In the fourth stage, the intelligent psychic dimension of the heart must flower, but the heart must be already Awake. And in the sixth stage of life the Awakening of the heart becomes perfect, so that the presumption of independent or separate consciousness is forever dissolved in radical intuition of the Divine Condition of all beings and things. Therefore, in the seventh stage, the apparent individual (no longer suffering the illusion of separateness, but, paradoxically, still persisting as an integral structure in the conditional realms) is able to be yielded perfectly into Light, Love, the Radiant Bliss that is communicated via the crown of the whole bodily being. In the seventh stage of our Divine readaptation, we are perfectly restored to the primal Food that the ego contraction and all the bodily and psychic locks of our reactive adaptation have denied us. All the centers of the whole bodily being have then become open doors to the stream of Vibratory Bliss, and we are Transfigured, Regenerated, and Translated into Light, in both the spiritual and the literal bodily sense.
The stages of readaptation in this Culture of Resurrection are (1) the physical-vital, (2) the emotional-sexual, (3) the higher vital (will) and lower mental, (4) the truly moral, higher mental, and the lower psychic, (5) the higher psychic, the cosmic “gnosis,” (6) the Realization of the unqualified Condition of Consciousness, or the prior Freedom of the soul, and (7) the Sacrifice of the body-mind through the Sacrifice of the Awakened Self into the Infinite Radiance of God, or the Translation of the soul of Man into the Divine Domain.
In the higher stages of readaptation, esoteric spiritual responsibilities in life and meditation become natural, creative extensions of the life of the human being. In the fourth stage of life, the Way of Divine Ignorance, which I Teach, truly begins. Prior to that time, the individual must pass through functional disciplines in the common dimensions of life-physical, emotional, and mental. And it is only when that rudimentary human foundation is established that the esoteric or higher development of Man may begin.
Top of Page First Become Human
The third stage of life is mature when the individual enjoys integrated responsibility for the whole of the living being (physical, emotional-sexual, and mental). Thus, he is in that case able to be present as a clear will and as love under all the otherwise frustrating or pleasurable conditions of lower experience. Those who seek to begin spiritual life must be mature in this sense in order to move on to higher maturity. Otherwise they will have no stability of will and love to keep them in the practice. Those who are constantly complaining and regressing in the practice of the Way are simply not yet mature in the ordinary human sense. They are weak of will (thus of mind) and of love (thus of life and body and feeling). Prepare yourself first. Approach me when you are strong in the human way. And waste no time in that preparation. Otherwise you will only suffer a life and a future that are mediocre, foolish, frustrated, obsessed, and unawakened to Truth and Happiness.
Top of Page The True Man
The childish individual wants someone to save him. The adolescent individual wants to fulfill himself, absolutely and independently.
The true man simply serves Good Company and surrenders to Truth, the Living God.
The Mature Individual Is Not Bound or Afraid
The childish individual depends on the Spiritual Master as a parent, seeking his loving attention, expecting to be nurtured and consoled and fascinated and saved from death by his Company. He wants to be saved from that for which he must himself be responsible-which is the demand to love and be a sacrifice, even to the degree of death.
The adolescent individual identifies with the Spiritual Master, thinking himself to be identical and equal to the Realization of the Spiritual Master, and thus requiring no Grace, no practice, no transformation. Such an individual likes to engage in casual association with the Teaching and Person of the Spiritual Master, disguising a secret need and intention to become truly the Master’s equal (at least in the eyes of others) by mere association. Such a one also likes the glamorized sense of himself that he appears to acquire or about which he boasts, because his casual friendship with the Spiritual Master seems to indicate an acknowledgment of his own superior qualities. He wants to be known for being what he can only Realize in eternal sacrifice into that which includes him but which is not him in his exclusive independence.
The mature individual or true devotee is free of childish and adolescent approaches to the Spiritual Master. He is neither childishly dependent, as upon a parent, nor adolescently independent, as in revolt against a parent. Rather, he turns to the Spiritual Master freely, in love and service, in gestures of surrender to the Process and the Reality that are always Present and Awakening in that Company. Such an individual is not motivated by the neurotic dilemmas and the self-protective searching for solutions that characterize the usual man. He has been awakened to intuition of his own Real Condition and to the native activity of love in service. He has been awakened through “hearing” the argument and “seeing” the Presence of the Spiritual Master. Thus, he is not bound or afraid. He is free to surrender in love to the Agent of his own Destiny, and in such surrender in love he fulfills the Law of practice wherein Grace may be given and transformation made.
Top of Page Love Is Freedom from Fear, Doubt, and Despair
Men and women are commonly childish and self-possessed. They fear relational commitment and marriage primarily because they fear the loss of the right of promiscuity, they fear the promiscuity of any other to whom they might become attached, and they fear that the sexual attractiveness of any individual, including themselves, is short-lived. Doubt of self and other, and despair of life itself, are the critically disabling factors that disturb and prevent lasting sexual relationships, as well as friendships, and the stability of life-circumstances in general.
However, all doubt, despair, and fear become insignificant once the intention of life becomes love, rather than the childish dependency on love. Childish dependency on the love and attention given to us by others is disabling because it cannot love or grant attention until it has already been granted a high degree of love and attention. The childish individual is always on the verge of feeling rejected and unloved, and he is bright and lively only when he is the primary object of love, attention, and good fortune from without. But the mature individual is active as love, under all conditions. Such a one always primarily grants love and attention, rather than seeking or watching for whether or not he is being given love and attention.
It is not that the mature individual does not enjoy or need the love of others and the Blessings of God, but the mature individual enjoys such love and Blessings as a happiness that arises in the midst of a life in which he is himself perpetually responsible to love and to be a personally, morally, and spiritually responsible sacrifice in God.
Thus, those who have been initiated into the human principle of responsible love are already free of the burdensome fears, doubts, and reasons for despair that plague the childish and subhuman world.
Top of Page We Must Consent to Become Agents of Life
We cannot ultimately depend on any of our objective relations (high or low in the scale of manifestation) for love, attention, support, sustenance, or their unchanging continuation through time and space. First of all, we discover that our relations are themselves generally dependent and undependable, changing or mortal, coming and going, and always changing the objects and the quality of their feeling and attention. Thus, if we depend on them, we will surely feel betrayed, and anxious about the line of love or Life that feeds us through our relations. Then we become possessed in our relations with the testing mood of “You don’t love me.” But, more than this, if we depend on love or Life to come to us through our relations, then we ourselves tend to remain irresponsible as love or attention and Life. Always watching to see if we are loved, fed, and our pleasure and existence protected, we never abide as love simply. Such is the error in our childish and adolescent adaptation to born existence.
We enter our maturity and our true humanity when we come to terms not only with the variability in the energy that comes through our relations, but with our own reaction to that observation. The child adapts to the energy that comes through relations and becomes dependent. Then, as experience becomes more objective and complex, the sense of betrayal (as possibility or actuality) begins to intensify. The mortal news is heard in the very time of children. Consequently, children develop strategies of survival in the midst of their vulnerable dependence. They look for more dependable relations. They sulk. They despair and complain. They break out. They learn to compensate for the variability and ultimate betrayal (by death) of all relations by discovery of private and inward consolations.
Thus, adolescence follows childhood. It is a time of critical awareness that all relations are changing and mortal, and that dependency is futile but yet a profound motivation (because of childhood adaptation). Thus, it is a time spent in testing the worlds of relations and the degrees of consolation or pleasure offered by both inward and objective sources. It is a time of struggle between the motives of absolute dependence and absolute independence, between commitment to self and commitment to the play of relations.
Human beings tend to waste their whole life in that struggle or early awareness of the conditions of manifest existence. The spell is broken only when there is awakening from both the burden of dependence (wherein mortality is still the last word) and of separative independence (which is limited to rituals of self-consolation and of exploitation of relations in a self-possessed mood).
Our human freedom and maturity comes only with the abandonment of the whole disposition of dependence-independence, or the ritual of “You don’t love me” and “I don’t love you.” It comes when we are reestablished in and readapted to the prior Condition of our existence, which precedes all relations (even if the great pattern of human and cosmic relations is the agent of that Condition in the framework of conventional experience). Our parents never were our Food or Life. They were only agents, more or less capable. They were a connection to Life. They were not Life Itself. But in our childish fear, founded in our own bodily and psychic individuation, we began to depend on the agents themselves, to the point that they no longer functioned as a connection to Life, but were objects to which we turned in despair, seeking the Absolute in them, but not yielding enough to find It in them or through them.
Thus, we grow beyond the experiential limits of the parent domain, but we cling to all other relations, conditions, experiences, and objects, high or low, in the same ritual manner. And that pattern does not pass until a new and mature level of understanding, response, and adaptation appears in our case. Otherwise we live until death crying for love and safety, absolute pleasure and help, immortality and an unchanging world of glorious fulfillments of our ordinary functional needs. Such is the root of conventional religion, in which dependence on the parent agency is projected on all relations to Infinity, where we install the cultic Deity of our childhood, the archetypal and immortal Parent, and spend our days alternately pleading for the fulfillment of our needs and turning away, in adolescent fashion, to doubts and the consolations of functional fulfillments themselves.
We must awaken from the spell of our childish presumptions and become human. We must neither depend on (in the absolute sense) nor recoil from any relations. We must discover Life Itself, prior to all agents, mediators, or means. We must become established as love rather than the search for love via agents outside us. We must enter into most direct Communion with the Life and Truth that literally sustains us, and with which we are ultimately identical, in consciousness and even bodily. We must be free of the illusion that the ordinary agents of Life are necessary in themselves. We must come into the responsible disposition of stable love (unobstructed feeling-attention) toward all the numberless and ordinary agents of Life that appear in the universal pattern of our relations, but we must be free of all illusions that bind us to others apart from the Radiant Life Itself. We must ourselves consent to be agents of Life through love, and, through Communion with the All-Pervading Life, we must become less and less obstructed in that function.
The Teaching of Truth, the Way of Divine Ignorance, is an argument or consideration and a path of new adaptation whereby and wherein the childish and adolescent man or woman, of any chronological age, may be awakened to mature responsibility in Communion with the prior Divine Reality. That Reality is not objective, within or without, but the prior, absolute, and most radical Condition of all conditions. It is not our Parent but our Condition, Truth, and Happiness. The Spiritual Master communicates the Teaching and Reveals the Way at every stage of our new adaptation. As such he is an ordinary agent of Life, to which we should turn with love, and not dependence, but responsible surrender. He is not a Parent, but the awakened Agent who abides as love to Infinity in all relations, and in relation to whom we discover the prior Reality as Grace, quickening our new adaptation and liberating sacrifice. He does not ultimately draw us to himself, as an objective and independent entity, but he serves our Awakening, through spiritual relationship to him (wherein we Realize Communion with the Real), to the very Condition that is his own Realization. He is the direct Agent of the Real Condition. He is not other than that Condition, because he is surrendered, beyond all agents or relations, to that Condition. Therefore, the Spiritual Master is the Advantage of all true men and women.
Childish and adolescent individuals also approach the Spiritual Master. Those who are still critically burdened by their childish dependency look to the Spiritual Master, and to the Divine, as an objective, independent “other” or Parent, a Source that is also a perfect Agent. Such individuals must be awakened to the egoic illusion in their own approach, since it will prevent their Realization of the Truth served by the Spiritual Master and his Divine Revelation. Adolescent individuals tend to be interested in and even fascinated by the potential in the Spiritual Master and the Divine, but they remain self-protective and, therefore, possessed by doubt and even critical denials of both the Spiritual Master and the Divine. Just so, they remain self-possessed in all their relations, since doubt and fear of dependency are at their hearts. Love, in its true form (which depends on direct Communion with the Condition prior to all conditions) is not in their capacity, but only seeking, temporary satisfaction, self-protective fantasies of independence, and a constant doubt of love and Bliss. Therefore, such individuals must be tested until they are awakened to love in Divine Communion, or else they will live until death in doubt of love, certain only of their mortal independence, and without connection to the prior Life.
This is the Way. Be converted to love. Be awakened from the illusory incident of independent incarnation and self-possession and be turned to the Real and Eternal Incident of Divine Bliss, existence as love in all relations, and transcendence of all conditions, within and without, high and low, now and then. Hear me and resort only to the prior Divine in my Company.
Top of Page The Work of Bubba Free John in Relation to the Stages of Life and Practice of Devotees
The fourth stage of spiritual practice in the Way of Divine Ignorance is also the seventh or perfect stage of human life. It is that stage of life and practice wherein the individual body-mind is Translated into Transcendental Life, or the Divine Ignorance-Radiance. This ultimate stage is named the Way of Radical Intuition.
The first three stages of life precede actual spiritual practice. They are the stages of (1) bodily adaptation, primarily to the cycle of assimilation-elimination, and to the processes of eating, excreting, touching, and moving; (2) vital adaptation, primarily to the cycle of reception-release, and to the processes of breath, emotion, and sexual awareness; and (3) mental adaptation, primarily to the cycle of acceptance-rejection, and to the processes of speech, thought, and intention.
The levels of adaptation that correspond to these first three stages of life develop more or less in coincidence with one another after the initial period of infancy. However, relative maturity in each of the three areas develops or may be expected to develop at a different rate. Thus, the first stage is considered to be relatively mature after seven years. The second stage is considered to be relatively mature at puberty, or at twelve to fourteen years of age. And the third stage is considered to be relatively mature at eighteen to twenty-one years of age.
However, many factors enter into this process of adaptation in the first three stages of life. Each individual, by tendency or capacity at birth, represents a different complex of adaptability. And the circumstances in which each individual learns to adapt are also unique. Also, the higher wisdom that should be brought to the whole affair of human adaptation is almost universally deficient. Therefore, unless the individual is born and raised in a cultural setting of the highest human and spiritual kind, his adaptation in the first three stages of life will necessarily be deficient and more or less subhuman. And such is the situation for most human beings now alive.
The Free Communion Church is the institutional setting for a culture of truly human and spiritual adaptation. It is itself only beginning to develop its potential characteristics and services. Relatively few people are born into this Church. Most come to it after a childhood, adolescence, and even many adult years of struggling at a subhuman level in this subhuman world. Therefore, the Church has had to develop various cultural means to enable people to reexamine and complete the first three stages of their adaptation, so they can be responsibly prepared for a devotional approach to the Spiritual Master and the continuation of their growth and sacrifice in the fourth stage of life and beyond.
Much of the activity of Bubba Free John has had to be devoted to this reeducation of those who came to him. to be continued..in progress