Signs of Maturity in the First Three Stages of Life – from the teaching of Adi Da Samraj

Signs of Maturity in the First
Stage of Life

A child has fully adapted to the
first stage of life when he or she shows the following
signs:

a. The child has achieved physical,
emotional, mental, and psychic independence from the mother,
and is moved towards a more complex socialization with
adults and peers. From the moment of birth, and then
continuing throughout the first stage of life, the child is
adapting to the fact that he or she is a person autonomous
from the mother. When this adaptation is complete, when the
child has fully grown beyond the feeling sense of
identification with the mother, then the child can be said
to be fully individuated, and mature in the first stage of
life.

It is important to note that even in
the maturity of the first stage of life the child is still
functionally dependent on others. In other words, the child
is still not capable of living independently on his or her
own without the help of adults. What has been relinquished
is the feeling sense of the “two-who-are-one” bond with the
mother and a happy resolution about the child’s actual
circumstance of dependency on, rather than identification
with, others. At the point of maturity in this stage, the
child naturally turns outward in his or her feeling towards
the greater realm of relationships with others, because the
concentration on the mother as the sole source of
sustenance, support, and identification has been
outgrown.

b. The child feels sustained by
food, other individuals, and the Divine. For the young
child, the mother is intimately associated with the sense of
sustenance. Because of this, food (and the whole
relationship to food-taking) is one of the primary arenas in
which an individual’s maturity in the first stage is
demonstrated. A child who is mature in the first stage feels
sustained, and has a healthy and uncomplicated relationship
to food. Similarly, the child feels sustained by other
individuals upon whom he or she depends. And most
importantly, the mature first stager feels sustained by and
connected to the Living Divine, who is the Ultimate Source
of support and love.

c. The child demonstrates a feeling
orientation to other people and the realm of nature. As the
first stager has increasingly relinquished his or her
concentration on the mother, he or she has naturally become
increasingly aware of and sensitive to relationships with
others. Thus, simultaneous with maturity in the first stage
of life, the child demonstrates an awakening of
feeling-sensitivity to the relational realm. This truly
marks the point of readiness to begin the second stage. At
this point, the mature first stager should be responsible
for the rudimentary relational practices of using manners,
being respectful of adults, and being responsive and
obedient when asked to go beyond himself or
herself.

Completing the Work of the First
Stage of Life

In The Dawn Horse Testament, Beloved
Adi Da Samraj makes it clear that very few individuals
complete the work of the first stage of life within the
first seven years. Most of us begin the second stage with
unfinished business, or what Beloved Adi Da Samraj calls a
“Workable (Even Though UnHappy, or self-Contracted)
Settlement”. An individual who is not fully mature in the
first stage of life tends to associate individuation with a
feeling of separation. This primarily involves the sense of
being separate or cut-off from the Divine. Secondarily, it
also manifests as a sense of doubt or anxiety relative to
all others upon whom one depends for love.

Incomplete adaptation to the first
stage of life is also characterized by an unwillingness (to
some extent or another) to relinquish the feeling of
dependency upon one’s mother, or others in general. An
unhappy or irresponsible relationship to food and
food-taking is also a sign of unfinished business in the
first stage of life.

It is definitely optimal for
children to complete the full adaptation to the first stage
of life by the age of seven (or the beginning of the second
stage) because this provides the base of free energy and
attention for continued growth in the second and third
stages. However, this is not always the case. In fact most
adults (and even many second and third stage children) have
an incomplete adaptation to the first stage of life. Beloved
Adi Da Samraj has Gracefully accounted for this by
indicating that any unfinished business from the first three
stages of life is completed in the initial period of adult
practice in the Way of the Heart, as part of the
listening-hearing process.

Signs of Maturity in the Second
Stage of Life

Beloved Adi Da characterizes
maturity in the second stage of life in the following
manner:

… the second stage of life is
fulfilled when the individual has realized a state of social
individuation. In other words, the individual is free, not
merely of the unconscious bond to the mother, but free of
the parent-child style of relationship altogether He or she
can function as a socially independent or free individual
responsible to the adult community. He or she is not yet an
adult, or a person who can go into the world and do what he
or she wants, but rather he or she is a physically and
socially individuated person who is responsible to and is to
be guided by the adult community… [March 1,
1983]

There are two specific components
involved in the maturity of the process of socialization.
They are:

a. The individual has fully learned
about the etheric energy dimension, and is responsible for
it. The individual knows how to communicate through the
etheric energy field, and how to be sensitive and helpful to
others in terms of etheric energy.

b. The individual is capable of
transcending the presumption of unlove, and living as “I
love you” in relationship with others.

Like the first stage of life, most
individuals only partially complete their adaptation to the
second stage of life by the beginning of the next stage. As
Beloved Adi Da Samraj says in The Dawn Horse Testament, “The
Second Stage Of Life Tends To Develop Only To The Degree Of
A Tentative (or egoBased and Ultimately Unsatisfactory)
Resolution Of the relational and social character.” An
individual who is struggling with issues of self-esteem,
self-doubt, or doubt of the love of others is still dealing
with incomplete second stage business. The second stage
egoic presumption is characterized by the feeling of being
rejected, and the feeling that we must, in turn, reject or
punish others for their unlove.

Another sign of incomplete
adaptation to this stage is not being fully sensitive to and
responsible for the etheric dimension of life. This includes
responsibility for one’s own etheric energy, one’s effect on
others relative to the etheric dimension, and the
communication of positive, happy energy etherically. And a
fully mature second stager should also be responsible and
unproblematic in regard to the functions of
elimination.

Obviously, this sensitivity to
etheric energy and the knowledge of how to conduct it in
relation to self and others is a remarkable and important
adaptation, one that most adults still very much need to
develop. And the capability to transcend the ritual of
betrayal and the tendency to punish others when they fail to
love (or even when they only seem to fail to love) is a
major developmental step. As it stands in this day and age,
almost every adult on the planet is dealing with this issue
until the day they die. Reflecting on this, we can
understand what a great process of learning is involved in
this

stage. How fortunate we are to have
Beloved Adi Da’s Graceful Help to extend to our children,
and to help us complete this important
adaptation!

Like the first stage of life, we can
(and indeed, must) complete our unfinished business from
this stage in the listening-hearing stages of adult practice
in the Way of the Heart, so that we may go on to the
advanced and ultimate stages in Beloved Adi Da’s Divine
Heart-Company.

Signs of Maturity in the Third
Stage of Life

Beloved Adi Da Samraj has Said that
“the third stage of life is the summary or the crown of the
early life of the individual who has achieved competence and
responsibility for everything that you ordinarily call
human.”

Maturity in the third stage of life
is characterized by:

a. Basic human
equanimity.

b. Discriminative intelligence. c.
Responsive heart-feeling.

d. The active impulse (or
counter-egoic will) to always continue to grow (by
self-transcendence, and, necessarily, by entering into the
devotional and, eventually, Spiritual context of the fourth
stage of life)

Beloved Adi Da Samraj summarizes
maturity in the third stage of life in the following
Talk:

AVATAR ADI DA SAMRAJ: 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). In that case, he
or she is able to be present as a clear will and as love
under all the otherwise frustrating or pleasurable
conditions of ordinary human experience. To truly begin
Spiritual life, in order to move on to the advanced and
ultimate stages of practice in the Way of the Heart, you
must be mature in this sense. Otherwise, you will have no
stability of will and love to keep you in the
practice.

Those who are constantly complaining
and regressing in the practice of the Way of the Heart 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. Become strong in
the human way-and waste no time in that preparation.
Otherwise you will only suffer a life and future that is
mediocre, foolish, frustrated, obsessed, and unawakened to
Truth and Happiness. [October 3, 1977]

Further reading and
study:t

Discriminative
Intelligence and The Seven Stages of
Life – Laughing Man
Magazine

The
Seven Stages of Life