The Failure of Adaptation

 

Beezone edit and adaptation from a talk by Adi Da Samraj, 1978

The Failure of Adaptation and Function Life

 

The roots of human failure to adapt and master functional life are in the childhood of men and women. The ‘child’ or adult who is adapted only to an earlier stage of development is ‘caught’ in a dependent and vulnerable state of mind. The person feels him or herself to be surrounded by great natural and parental forces, confused, overwhelmed and fearful.

She or he is weak, unadapted, without functional facility and power, and without conceptual and intuitional understanding of his or her experiences or even their ultimate situation. The mind of a child is scattered, undisciplined and instantaneously distracted by the next available stimuli. Thus, to the degree that they try to make solutions to the dilemmas they lack basic concentration abilities. They find faults and failures in what they depend on to protect and fulfill him. They will ultimately find blame and betrayal in what they depend on for sustenance and security be it a person, group, state or any ‘other’ – even God.

The child inverts or turns within him or herself and resorts exclusively or negatively to themselves, absorbed in their own dilemmas. The unrelieved fears of childhood dependency and vulnerability leave the childhood vision of the world intact, frozen in time – repeating patterns over and over again as the world changes around them. Unless a higher adaptation is made possible through the help of mature others and through initiation into higher human wisdom, the individual remains more or less childish throughout his or her entire life.

This is generally the case, and, therefore most people remain possessed by an inverted or self possessed, subjectively oriented disposition, in which functional and bodily relations with the human and natural dimensions of the world are at best complicated.