The Childish, Adolescent, and Mature View

he childish individual depends on the Spiritual Master as on 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 in 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 solution 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.

The Enlightenment of the Whole Body