Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing

Chapter Three

The Principle of Attraction

By Means Of The Way I Will Describe To you, I Will Attract All To The Divine Happiness and, At Last, I Will Carry All To The Divine Domain. (The Testamental Hymn of the Master.)

Session One

Inappropriate Behavior Is Simply the Sign of the Failure of Intimacy

This session addresses a critical point that must be understood by all parents, teachers, and guides. It is that signs of frustration, reactivity, and inappropriate behavior in children or young people are indications of a failure of human intimacy—the failure of the principal adult individuals in a young person's life to engage him or her in an effectively loving relationship. Intimacy, or the real enjoyment of relationship, is the ground of the principle of attraction. Every being is naturally attracted to relations—to other beings and things. The first and strongest attraction the child enjoys is, of course, to his or her human mother. It is a relationship of pleasure, consolation, and sustenance, which is necessary for growth. As he grows, the child also naturally feels the desire, the necessity, to move beyond this attachment. This occurs naturally through the relationship to the father, other individuals, Nature, and the Divine Mystery. In every child there is also the natural urge to ecstasy, an attraction at the heart that leads the being not merely beyond attachments, but beyond itself. Love and worship of the Divine is as natural a human need as intimacy with others and Nature. Therefore, we need not attempt to willfully or stressfully turn our children to the Mystery or to the Spiritual Master and His Transcendental Presence. We must simply and naturally, through our whole-bodily enjoyment of our own relationship with the Divine Presence, become a window to It and thus an attractive spiritual influence in our children's lives. However, the reaction that is vital shock constantly leads attention away from what is attractive. The consolations and distractions of conventional, self-possessed living are what children resort to unless the Way of submission to the Divine as Spiritual Master and Transcendental Presence is felt by them as a more attractive offering. Children will constantly seek pleasure and union through self-exploitation unless they are drawn, through intimacy, into devotion to Happiness Itself. They must see the demonstration of and be distracted and guided into the practice of ecstatic release of the self-contraction, rather than the temporary distractions from suffering, which are their usual life. Adi Da offers us this wisdom:

The secret with children, as with all human beings, is that everybody stays Happy, ecstatic, full of pleasure. If you can find the pleasure or the free attention in a child, then you can redirect him. But if you confront the aberration that is present in the moment, they will not come out of it because they have a ritual to perform. It is the same with everybody. Therefore, the secret of living is to remain in a state of pleasure. That is your responsibility. The secret of living with others is to locate the free attention and essential pleasure in them and in yourself and redirect them to their sanity by that means. (Ice Cream & Shoe, p. 5.)

To draw attention exclusively to the aberrated or problematic behavior of a child always draws his attention to himself or to the self-contraction. Every child, like every adult, lives a mechanical ritual of self-contraction, and it is only intensified when he is merely confronted with his difficulty. Thus, rather than confronting and attempting to solve the "problem" of his behavior, we attract him via intimacy to right action. The natural enjoyment of the feeling of the Mystery and the love-relationship with the Spiritual Master are inherent in every child. We need only provide him with the constant option of Divine Distraction. This will occur if we awaken to our native Happiness and pleasure and extend this opportunity, this bodily Way of Happiness, to our children.

Adi Da: They [children] will have some difficulties, but the difficulties should not be taken seriously. Adults should simply provide them a way out of their difficulties, and this way is the positive spiritual and human process altogether. That is the secret. In every case, draw them into the spiritual process. Do not let them become involved in all kinds of deep, heavy, obsessive considerations of their emotional and other problems. All such problems arise only because children or young people have been diverted from the process of life, as it presents itself in terms of the first three stages. If they are led back into that process, any problem will naturally fall away, and a state of balance will be achieved. Thus, rather than keying in on problems, one should notice and discuss them and draw the individual's attention into the right process of living. (LOOK, p. 47)

Session Two

Applying the Principle of Attraction

In the last session we considered the principles of the art of attracting children and young people from their problem presumption and to present Happiness, intimacy, and relationship. Here, we will study further Teaching from Adi Da on this principle of attraction and review practical guidelines for its application in the home, classroom, or spiritual guide situation.

Adi Da: Basically, there is one thing that children are reacting to, and that is the absence of intimacy. Reactive emotions and inappropriate behavior in general are secondary symptoms of a primary frustration. What is being frustrated is intimacy, or Life-positive, associative energy. Thus, you cannot deal with these secondary, reactive emotions directly, as if they were the point. What the child is actually suffering is the point, and that is what must be addressed in him or her. A circumstance must be provided in which the primary emotion of love can be expressed or chosen in any moment. (LOOK, pp. 66-7.)

Adi Da: In their relations, everyone must draw one another out of the contraction of self into the field of love, of energy. Therefore, a basic technique with children is to draw them out of their contraction, out of their fear, out of their dramatization, and into human connection. When you do this, then children are not punished, nor are they full of abstract concepts. When they are drawn into a love relationship, then they are also connected to what is Life, what is Divine. ("The Great Lifetime Illumination")

Adi Da: The fundamental orientation of children must be the intuition of God, the feeling of Happiness. Otherwise, they suffer the strategic attempt to perfect their experience. The great Force of Happiness, or God, that undermines all unHappiness must penetrate their being. ("The Key to Higher Adaptation").

Adi Da: Reattract the child's emotional quality when you notice that he or she is becoming depressed or reactive. You must reattract the emotional force of that living personality. That is an art of dealing with infants and children of all ages. ("The Spiritual Art of Attraction," unpublished; 10/19/80)

Session Three

Attention and Attraction

In this session we will consider the mechanism of attention in the dynamics of the relationship of parents, teachers, and guides with children. We will consider the "targeting" habit and the skillful means of effective, reaction-free teaching and will deepen our understanding of the art of attracting children and young people to the process of whole-body feeling.

The Art of Spiritual Life

from a talk by Adi Da, 8/13/83 (Crazy Wisdom, Vol. 3, No. 1)

That is the art of spiritual life, granting attention and following it with total psycho-physical submission to the Spiritual Reality. People are not tending to do that, of course, and so attention is constantly getting locked into problems, conceptions that are problematic, states that are uncomfortable and problematic. The art of spiritual life, once you have heard and seen, is this capacity to be re-devoted in any moment to the Living Spiritual Reality. To do that you must be equipped with hearing and seeing, you must be able to observe and understand yourself, and primarily what there is to observe is how attention is functioning

Attention is moving toward forms and conditions, and because the individual is tending to be in the self-contracted state, attention is moving toward forms of contraction. These forms of contraction are all the things that bother you. The ego is bothered, contraction is a bother, and attention is tending to move toward the weakest point, the bother, the difficulty in the moment. However, there is usually nothing in the environment or as immediate as a physical pain to be bothered about. The mind produces problematic conceptions. Attention is always getting locked into these problem states, and thus you are experiencing contraction, a problem, a limit. You do not experience the Spiritual Reality, you are not whole, in fact you are not even aware of the Spiritual Reality. Thus, the art of spiritual life is to notice this mechanical, contracted state and be wholly reoriented to the Spiritual Reality through Remembrance. In other words, in the midst of a mechanical state that is tending to take on this contracted form, you must be able to merely notice it, and rather than working to untie the knot, be reoriented through devotion, as well as by being artfully responsible for the mechanics of your activity.

Last night I was talking about the mind, how the mind itself is contraction. Unless the mind is informed in the moment by spiritual consideration, it is a form of contraction, and attention is locked into that contraction. People are constantly engaged in thinking, thinking. Thinking is really a conversation you are having with yourself. Speech is the same thing engaged with others. That process is a meditation on contraction. The mind is a problem, it takes the form of a problem. You hope that thinking will produce release from this contraction, this problem. You are trying to get free of a knot, an oppressive sense of existence. You are trying to think your way out of it, trying to solve a problem, get an answer. And, of course, occasionally the mind does let loose with some relieving concept or other, but it always returns to these contracted states, because the mind is about this self-perpetuating disease. This disease is as much a lock on attention as a cramp in the body. If you have pain in the body, attention dwells on it very directly, or at least subliminally. Thinking is pain of this kind. It is a compression of the Living Conscious Force, a suppression of it, a knot in it, a contraction of its field. Therefore, this perpetual thinking is pain.

In these moments of chronic thought, rather than put your attention in that thought process and try to think your way out of the pain, you should understand yourself, be able to find yourself out and divert your attention, submit yourself with full attention to the Living Reality. Submit yourself whole bodily, release yourself from the oppression of chronic thinking, chronic conversation with yourself, Narcissism. The art of spiritual life is a matter of relocating attention, noticing that attention is simply dwelling in a contracted state and giving it over to the Transcendental and All-Pervading Force and Being with every aspect of the body-mind. This is the direct way of practicing. Your common technique, however, tends to be developed on the basis of contraction itself, or egoity itself. You think and feel that you have a problem, even though you might not be able to explain just exactly what that problem is, and you generally try to keep on thinking. You think and think and think and fret and fret and read and read and talk and talk and are in pain the whole time.

I was considering this cramp in the solar plexus with you the other evening. We were having a conversation about the yoga of the frontal line. Perhaps the most common experience people have of contraction in this frontal line is a cramp over the solar plexus, the "knot in the stomach" that people refer to. If you become aware that you are suffering this knot and this anxiety over the solar plexus, your first resort, by tendency at any rate, will be to try to relax it. You will take deep breaths and so forth. That may work if the contraction is rather superficial and your attention is relatively free, but you may also discover that you cannot do it, that you cannot relax it. In that case, you will begin to think some more and work on your trouble, whereas the most direct way of dealing with it is to divert attention from this knot, rather than keep attention in the knot and try to undo it. I suggest to you, as a practical matter, that instead of keeping your attention in this knot over the solar plexus and trying to relax it, you should simply remember that attention goes wherever the knot is. Attention gravitates toward the contracted states and becomes fretful, suffers the pain of these contractions, gets stuck in these contractions and then tries to work its way out of them, you see. Well, this knot over the solar plexus is occurring a little more than halfway down the frontal line of the body. The Current of life is not descending below that point. The knot over the solar plexus is a little bit like nausea, the urge to vomit, weeping, and anger. This contraction is a revulsion, a reversal of the Current in the frontal line of the body, and in effect it prevents this line of force from going to its lower terminal in the bodily base.

One way of naturally relieving this contraction, in addition to the basic resort that is your devotional practice, is to place your attention lower down in the body, below the point where you feel that cramp. If you place your attention above the point of disturbance, the revulsion will continue. The most intelligent approach, therefore, is to place your attention below that point, where there already is no contraction, you see. Place your attention below the navel in the vital battery region, in the genital region, or at the perineum. Do nothing other than that. Simply place your attention there, and then practice the meditative disposition, the devotional disposition, the breathing and relaxing that are your daily practice You will very likely notice that in those moments when you otherwise would not be able to release such a contraction, it will naturally relax, and you will enjoy the capacity to breathe and feel and submit the total body-mind to this Fullness. Indeed, this is how conductivity must be practiced, by submitting yourself to the native disposition of the body rather than fastening your attention to some point in the circuit of the body-mind. The way, then, to submit whole bodily when the body-mind is in a contracted state is to place your attention lower down in the line of the frontal Current, place it in the lower abdomen, in the genital region, in the perineum. In these regions there is in general a residual sense of pleasure, because there is a portion of this Current always descending—it does leak through this knot, you see. Thus, if you place attention in this pleasurable expression of the Current, the knot, which is being reinforced by holding attention in this anxious place, will tend to relax. Then resort to the devotional disposition, and the practice of conductivity will be found to be fruitful.

The same wisdom applies to thinking. Instead of talking to yourself through thought or talking to others about this contraction through speech-thought and trying thus to get out of your problems, simply submit attention to the Living Reality, submit attention with the total body-mind, or whole bodily. Instead of trying to do something with thought, simply submit to the Living Current. Submit yourself to the Feeling of Being. Instead of making this knot in the head which becomes thinking, let the head relax into the Living Current. In that case, thoughts will change, thought becomes an expression of Spiritual Consciousness. Apart from this submission, thought is only an expression of the self-contraction that precedes your thinking activity. If you are going to think at all, you should think in an already awakened state of natural submission, so that even your ordinary communications become a feeling expression, a spiritual sign. There is very little thinking that has even practical value if you are not in such a submitted condition. This is why most of the communications that human beings make to themselves through thought, and to others through speech, are diseased, troublesome, angular, and disturbing. Most of the communications that people make verbally, emotionally, and physically disturb other people and are evidence that they themselves are disturbed. Therefore, you must first of all and in every moment be submitted, and grant attention to the Spiritual Reality rather than to these knots and disturbances.

Summary Points

1. The art of spiritual life is to grant attention, and follow it with total psycho-physical submission, to the Spiritual Reality.

2. Once you have heard and seen, the art of spiritual life is the capacity to be re-devoted in any moment to the Living Spiritual Reality.

3. To do that, you must be equipped with hearing and seeing. You must be able to observe and understand yourself.

4. Because the individual is tending to be in the self-contracted state, attention is moving toward forms of contraction.

5. Attention is tending to move toward the weakest point, the difficulty in the moment.

6. Attention is always getting locked into problem states.

7. You must be able to merely notice that attention is tending to take on this contracted form and, rather than working to untie the knot, be reoriented through devotion.

8. The art of spiritual life is a matter of relocating attention—noticing that attention is simply dwelling in a contracted state and giving it over to the Transcendental and All-Pervading Force and Being with every aspect of the body-mind.

9. Your common technique tends to he developed on the basis of contraction, or egoity itself.

10. Attention goes wherever the knot is.

11. Most of the communications that human beings make to themselves through thought, and to others through speech, are diseased, troublesome, angular, and disturbing.

Further Reading:

Adi Da : You tend to exist as a social personality, and occasionally as this aggravated ego, and do not truly enter into the domain of Feeling or of Love. Love one another and there is nothing cool about it. What I mean by this love for one another is to become wounded by love, to submit yourself to that, to live in that world and make your relationships about that. Be vulnerable enough to love and be loved. If you do this, you will be wounded by this Love. You will be wounded, but you will not be diseased. Human beings in general do not want anything to do with it. They do not want to come close enough to it to be wounded in their intimacies with one another. You must be wounded in order to Realize God. You must be wounded to hear and see. It is felt even physically as a kind of wound. It is felt as intense, armorless vulnerability. If you can begin to awaken to this principle, then you will love one another. Your friendships and your community life will become possible. You will make a different kind of community, a true spiritual community, which is a process that only uniquely free people can enter into. This wound enlivens you. It releases great force, great energy. It releases all of the armoring of the usual personality. It enables you to Love, to be in Love. You must make a community of Love with one another, a spiritual community. ("Become Wounded by Love".)

Session Four

Reattracting Children to the Present Emotional Force of the Being

Most of us tend to confront the unacceptable behaviors of children with "knee-jerk" reactions of various kinds—unconsidered responses designed to contain and control their vitality. The art of serving children, however, requires that we respond from an unproblematic point of view, from love. But this is not yet our natural response. Therefore, it requires observation and intention. This session is both inspirational and practical—it combines ecstatic readings with a consideration of exactly how you can change your act with children in order to reattract them to Happiness. Thus, the dynamic combination of observation and concentration as a principle of spiritual growth is brought to bear in our service to young students.

Love of the God-Man

(excerpts from a talk by Adi Da, 10/10/83 (Crazy Wisdom, Vol. 3, No. 1)

What is supremely Attractive in the manifest universe and in the human world is the God-Man. All beings, male or female, must become Attracted, Distracted, by that One. This is the Ultimate Means, the Supreme Means, the Supreme Yoga. It is for this reason, you see, that the Divine appears in manifest form in the likeness of those who are to be drawn out of bondage—but only in their likeness. It is the Divine that appears in that likeness, and it is the Divine that is made visible through that likeness. Those who become capable of recognizing that One become capable of responding to that Attraction. Those who become capable of being Distracted by that One become participants in this Supreme Way, which truly is the Way of Grace, because it requires no effort at all. It requires nothing but Grace and the response to it. That response is not effortful. It is easy. It is easy to respond to what is Attractive, except for those who refuse to do it. Those who refuse are bound to the will, are willfully binding themselves in one form or another, may even be willfully trying to liberate themselves, willfully trying to love, willfully trying to understand, willfully trying to buy their way out of hell and purgatory and take heaven by storm. Such beings are not responding to the unique advantage that the God-Man represents.

Those who are Distracted by me are not merely distracted by this physical form. This form is simply an Agent for their attention. What they are Distracted by is the Divine Presence, the Divine Condition, and they enter into Communion with That, union with That, unity with That through the real process of spiritual life. Worldly people want nothing to do with that process and likewise worldly religionists, scholars, pandits, and self-possessed guru-figures want nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, the supreme secret of spiritual life is this Distraction by the God-Man. But even though it has been made available in many times and places, it has unfortunately not been accepted and truly fulfilled by many. The stories of the gopis and Krishna are rather fanciful and idealized pictures of what it is like when human beings crave to be Distracted by the God-Man, when their Distraction is so great that they would forget their problems and be Happy if only that One would appear.

Both men and women must be Distracted by the God-Man, Distracted by the Divine, submitting to That which is Attractive, loving that One. By virtue of that submission they can love one another and others and this world rightly, in themselves but in the Divine. If they cannot or will not be Distracted even though offered such Company, then they cannot get out of purgatory. At least, they will willfully, or at the self level, engage the practice of the outwardly associated with the Way. At worst, they will simply dissociate themselves, convince themselves that there is no great Distraction, no God, Truth, and commit themselves to self-indulgence and to the conventional destiny.

You cannot idealize this great Love-feeling and say that, from now on, that is how you are going to live. You will discover, as you have discovered on countless occasions previously, that you do not do that. You cannot merely make it an ideal, in other words. You must first become involved in love by finding That which is Love, which comes to you as Love, and which is supremely Attractive. Acknowledge That One, know That One, and allow yourself to respond to That One in love. You cannot find what you are looking for in one another. You must find It in person, directly. Become the devotee of That One, and you will find Love everywhere. You will find It in a special way in your spouse. You will make your marriages out of that Love disposition when you hear and see me. Then you will have the means to practice truly.

Thus, it is my purpose to sacrifice myself, to appear in this hellish domain, in order to make it into purgatory. But it is not my purpose to live in purgatory forever, any more than it is my purpose to have you live in purgatory forever. The purpose of my living is heavenly or Divine. In other words, I have not come here simply to suffer your resistance and absorb your limitations, but to Distract you out of this condition, out of this place, into the Divine Domain. My purpose is to awaken you to a disposition of Divine Distraction, in which you are Ecstatic, free of your limits, inherently sinless, karmaless, so that without effort you can move with me out of this limitation, this place of purification and suffering.

Therefore, there is the wounded Master in your company, but there is also the Glorious Master in your company. That wounded one is an instrument with which to draw you out of yourself so that you may enter into the Glorious Domain. In order for this to occur, you must become a devotee.

The Spiritual Art of Attraction

(excerpts from a talk by Adi Da, 10/19/80)

The free and right functioning of human existence is determined by one's emotional state, and how one relates emotionally to the conditions of existence directly affects one's physical state and all of one's actions in physical terms. Therefore, all of one's functional associations are controlled by the fundamental force of one's emotional association, one's feeling association, because the feeling association with objects and others is primary. Feeling association is what dictates states of mind, perceived emotion, and physical states.

You can read your emotional state from moment to moment. You can see how you tend to be essentially in a contracted emotional state, a dissociative emotional state, a mediocre emotional state. You are emotionally vulnerable. We learn this vulnerability because in infancy and childhood we are made emotionally vulnerable through infantile learning and through our education—the intentional education that we are given by our elders as well as by the society into which we are injected, which does not basically relate to emotion. Rather, it relates to mental, physical, and social adaptations. Therefore, the emotional force of the being is never truly trained. Instead, it is primitively inhibited by infantile learning, with the result that in emotional terms we rarely mature much beyond the infantile state of reactivity. We go beyond the learning of infancy in terms of mental and physical adaptation, but emotionally we remain reactive and relatively infantile.

The emotional force of the being is like an infant. It has no ability to change merely because you think differently or because you change your physical habits. This very primitive emotional reaction was created prior to the time of sophisticated mental and physical development. We have accumulated years of physical and mental development, but the emotional development, the disposition or range of our emotional existence, was determined in infancy when we were in a totally unsophisticated state of perception, at a time when we perceived things in an exaggerated fashion. The primitive, infantile emotional reaction is a reaction to the perception of how things are, not merely to what might have actually occurred. From the infantile, unsophisticated mental and physical point of view, very simple little intrusions—that from the point of view of adults are part of our ordinary social involvement with one another—can be perceived to be profoundly threatening and suppressive. Such intrusions do effect the being emotionally in a very profound and suppressive fashion. Those of you who have had children or have been around infants have noticed how infants react to laughter, for example—a lot of people in the room laughing suddenly. We are just laughing, but you notice how startling such laughter can be to the infant. Just so, any kind of forceful, explosive expression of laughter, sounds, or sudden gestures tend to be perceived by infants as threatening. Therefore, very young children and infants should not be arbitrarily introduced into common social settings. Infants should be retained close to the mother and nurtured, not introduced arbitrarily into social gatherings. You should be aware of the reactive nature, the primitive emotional state, of an infant and not create startling kinds of phenomena for them to deal with.

The emotion of the being is the primary controller of the very condition of mind and body, the very condition of the chemistry of the being, the blood stream, the nervous system, the endocrine system. All of that is controlled by emotion and, therefore, all of those systems are controlled by a very primitive, infantile emotional reactivity. Thus, in terms of developing the spiritual process, you must all be drawn into a fundamental emotional responsibility while your emotional life is still in a very primitive condition. The other aspects of the being that are appealed to in this process—the mind and the body in terms of disciplines and understanding—are in a more highly developed state but are dissociated from the fundamental emotional force of the being. Therefore, you can change mentally and physically, but nothing fundamental changes because it is this emotional force that must be brought into the sphere of Practice. And that emotional force is held in place by very primitive kinds of reactions that are not informed by sophisticated thinking and high levels of physical development. The psychiatric point of view attempts to locate events that occurred early in life that have had an effect on one's psychological disposition throughout life. You always expect to find some terrible thing that happened prior to your memory. Who knows what? You expect some dreadful thing. However, you are unlikely to be able to remember a great, calamitous event in your child's infancy or your own. In most cases, it was a perception rather than an actual event that caused the reaction. In any case, it is not a matter of remembering an incident but of relocating the emotional capacity of the being in present time so that you can be responsibly emotional or feeling in your association with the Divine, with the universe, with all the relational factors of existence. Recontacting the emotional force of the being is essential to the development of the spiritual process, and likewise it is essential to the regimen of emotional healing.

The principle of healing must be applied even though the young child or infant is not able to responsibly participate in that healing. If shocks occur, you must introduce the nurturing, intimate quality for the infant or child. Help him to feel beyond the shock by reattracting the emotional force of the being when you notice it becoming depressed or reactive. In that case, you must reattract the emotional force of that personality. That is an art of dealing with infants and children. A basic level of intimacy must be maintained with the mother in particular, and a calmness of association must be maintained altogether. Introduce an infant or child gradually into the various factors of experience. Teach them techniques of associating rightly with experience—socially, personally, and intellectually.

Do this rather than believe the popular myth that infants are free beings of some sort and that if you leave them alone they will be happy when they grow up. That is not true at all.

An infantile personality is the beginning of a human being. Stage by stage, infants become capable of adaptation to the relational world. As a parent or a person associated with the growing individual, you must serve his or her transition to these various levels of adaptation. To be an individual in the first three stages of life is to be a growing personality. In fact, one is a growing personality one's entire life, and therefore one should live in a culture of elders, a culture of wisdom, in which everybody is treated as a growing personality and one's reactions are observed and one is drawn out of them. Particularly in these first three stages of life, however, a certain kind of sensitivity is required because there is a kind of primitive level of awareness and, therefore, reactivity associated with being a young and growing individual who does not have the sophisticated social, personal capability of an adult. Therefore, the quality of nurturing, being close to the parent, being kept from startling intrusions, and not being surrounded by arbitrary social intrusions is essential for an infant and child, particularly during the first three or four years of life.

As children grow during these years, you will see them naturally want to move away from the breast, move away from the mother, turn to others. As soon as you notice that movement in them, make use of it. That is the sign of the capacity for a new adaptation. You do not want to startle the individual, but you do want to draw them into these new relations. You do want to socialize the personality. Stage by stage, relieve them of dependence on the mother, on the mother-father-household situation. Socialize them more and more. Universalize them more and more. When a person enters into the third stage of life, the parent-child game should be completely surrendered. It is a moment in which the parents can acknowledge the independence of this individual from parenting in the conventional sense. In summary, when we notice that an individual has been startled and made reactive by whatever factors may have intruded upon him or her, we must learn how to reattract him physically, mentally, and emotionally into the relational environment, the universal pattern of existence. The fact that a child, or even an adult, has become involved in a reactive mode is not an absolutely negative event. Simply notice it and reattract him. Every individual is in a moment of growth. You people are not finished. You are not yet adults. As a matter of fact, you are frozen in levels of reactivity that belong to the first, second, and third stages of life. You are a complex of failed cases, and you each represent different levels of reactivity in relation to each of the stages through which you have already passed. The community of practitioners must know how to introduce cultural circumstances that will draw an individual's fundamental energy and attention, mind and body, from the field of reactivity and that will reintroduce the reactive personality into the continuing pattern of growth. Growth does not end. There is a summation of growth in the seventh stage of life, but until that time one is involved in a process of growing as an individual, of adapting to further stages of association with the phenomena of existence. This process must be noticed by the elders, by the force of the community in general. The factors of reaction, contraction, and self-possession that have been introduced into an individual's life and that have inhibited the growth and adaptation at particular stages of life must be observed. On that basis, there must be the skillful, or artful, introduction of cultural influences that attract the individual out of those states of reactivity.

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