Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing

Chapter Four

Transcending Sexual Neurosis in Childhood

Thus, sexuality is inherently right and good and necessary. Conflict about rightness, goodness, and necessity of sexual play in the life of a human individual is essentially an expression of retarded adaptation. (Love of the Two-Armed Form)

Session One

The Pleasurable Alternative to a Secret Life

Close your eyes for a few minutes and feel into your experience of this moment through the following questions: Is life about pleasure? Can you abide in a simple but constant state of pleasure without sacrificing your intellectual, "productive," and even "spiritual" capacities? Do you notice a separation in your being between the bodily feeling of pleasure and the mental tendency to abstract and detach yourself from pleasurable states? You are not alone in having adapted to experience in this way. We all have developed this functional schism in the body-mind because of the presumptions we make based on vital shock. Recoil from the presumption of pleasure as the condition of existence is bodily recoil from love. Recoil from love and relatedness is recoil from the Real, the Divine Reality, the Truth of every body.

Thus, "only men of pleasure know the Truth." (Crazy Da Must Sing, Inclined to His Weaker Side, p. 65.) Only those who have become fully human, not recoiled upon themselves through guilt and every other form of lovelessness, and who thus do not recoil from the inherent pleasures of life can Realize the Divine Condition of manifest existence. As Adi Da writes, "Enjoyment, or prior Happiness is, the foundation of the fulfillment of the law in the true man." (Breath and Name, 4.7, p. 77). And only spiritual practitioners who are already full in such enjoyment can enter into true sexual intimacy, founded in the feeling-recognition of love as the Condition and Circumstance of life. Those who seek for God generally make taboos out of sexual experience and sensual pleasures. Sex is the greatest pleasure that the body-mind can enjoy below the heart. Precisely because of its powerful capacity to distract the being from pursuit of "higher" or other-worldly goals of mystical union or the conventional goals of worldly society, it has been manipulated or avoided by the spiritual and religious traditions of Man. The radical Teaching of Adi Da reveals the error of sex-negativity or manipulation and offers a Way of present, whole-bodily enjoyment, leading to the natural transcendence of the neurotic, or stress-based, motivation to engage in sex.

We are called to bring this same freedom and wisdom to our children from their very earliest years. This requires that we be at peace with our own sexuality and with theirs. The principle of coming to rest with sexuality is—as always in this Way—relationship. When, for example, we observe our children exploring by themselves or with others in a sexual or merely sensual way, we must encourage them to bring this experience into relationship. In other words, children should be encouraged to talk about their experience and feel that ordinary pleasure need not be concealed from others. This understanding and openness can begin in them at a very young age. Sexuality becomes relational if we can fully accept our children's explorations and be at ease with them as they talk about the sensations and feelings they experience.

In the following excerpt, Adi Da describes the liberating consequences of the freedom of sexual expression:

But if we are bodily confessed, then we are also inherently at peace, one with the bodily organs and functions. In that case "I" has no fear of being seen, of expressing love, of accepting help, or fear of any other form of our necessary sacrifice and voluntary death. (Love of the Two-Armed Form)

Before you read further, consider and write a response to the following consideration:

1. What occurred in your own childhood when you involved yourself in sexual exploration, with your own body or with friends? How did you feel about the incident? How did your parents or others respond? What are the signs in your own thinking, feeling, and physical adaptation to sexuality that reflect that sex-negativity is still an influence in your life? Be specific about what you tend to communicate bodily and emotionally and how this might change were you free of social conditioning in relation to sex.

2. If a seven-year-old child were to ask, "What is sex?" (referring to sex-play), what would you say? What emotional response should be present? We serve our children in and with this freedom of feeling not merely so that they will grow to their full human potential in the conventional sense. Rather, our service is an expression of our understanding of the spiritual process of incarnation that takes place via the descent of the Life-Current. Sexual taboos prevent the full descent of Life-Feeling, and we must not introduce them. The real, functional connection to the Divine as Spirit-Presence, which stabilizes as a whole-body responsibility in the fourth stage, depends upon right adaptation to this descending process. This cannot occur without an open, positive orientation to the life-functions, and particularly to the sexual function, lived in the context of an intimate culture of spiritual practitioners.

The Taboo against the Superior Man

(excerpt) (Love of the Two-Armed Form).

Adi Da: Sexual taboos and the generalized sense that anti-sexual views and habits are humanly and even cosmically obligatory and correct are passed on from generation to generation by many means. The most influential means are those of the withholding of bodily and sexual communications. We only show and tell our children what we ourselves are not afraid to be and know. The rest is hidden behind the withholding of bodily and emotional intimacy as well as the absence of positive verbal communication about the whole affair of incarnate human experience, including sexuality. The entire social and cultural game of antisexual, "spirit against flesh" education is so monstrous, so opposed to incarnate happiness and human responsibility, as well as the ultimate transcendental sacrifice of the individual body-mind through moral and spiritual processes, that it must be considered the primary social and even philosophical issue of our time. We must all awaken from our loveless one-sidedness. The deluded religious and spiritual cultists are perpetually at war with the bodily life, choosing the brain-mind as if it were the Infinite. And the equally deluded anti-religionists, salt-of-the-earth political fanatics, and worldly humanistic social mechanics or scientific technocrats are perpetually at war with the higher, psychic, and spiritual dimensions of human experience. Children of parents of the "spirit" are deprived of the energy of their incarnation, fastened to inward nonsense and the vision of a self-divided mortality that has no pleasure except away from here. And children of parents of the "flesh" are deprived of the powers of higher adaptation, fastened to cycles of endless work and reproduction, and the vision of utopian solutions that only serve those who happen to be alive when the great Future State comes. We must awaken and adapt to the conditions of the whole and entire body-mind, and to the Way of truly human existence, which is made through personal, moral, and higher mental or spiritual sacrifice, or love. Then we will not only live in Truth, but we will withhold nothing from our children, who must always be permitted a complete bodily understanding that corresponds to their level of functional awareness, and who must be included in a culture of truly human adaptation, in which not exploitation but gradual responsibility is the key to human growth.

No Praise, No Blame

(excerpts from a talk by Adi Da, 1/11/83)

The entire matter of the study of the implications of sexuality, emotional-sexual relationships, sexual identity, sexual practice, eventual marriage or intimate living with others, and casual versus formal association between the sexes are important considerations for individuals in the third stage and, to varying degrees, for children in the earlier stages of life. All this should be part of the continuous education of young people. However, it is not merely a matter of informing them about it. The Teaching itself and all of the primary attitudes associated with the disposition of a devotee tend to be communicated to children verbally, and we expect them to conform to these attitudes or demonstrate this disposition on that basis alone. Thus, the imparting of sexual understanding to young people cannot merely take the form of conversations, lectures, courses, and adult monologues about what they are supposed to be involved in or not involved in. Such communication must be made in the context of a community where people are practicing the wisdom of the sexual discipline in all of its forms—really practicing it, really demonstrating it, living it as a matter of behavior and attitude altogether. In other words, that cultural form must be there, and then communications can take place within that form.

The most useful conversations for young people are those that take place with individuals with when they have an intimate, human association. Within the context of such intimacy, conversation can include everything that is on the young person's mind, everything that bothers him, everything he does or would do secretly. There is no need for a secret life for children because we do not function on the basis of taboos that enforce a distinction between authority (or the adult world) and children (or those who are supposed to be followers or duplicators of the ideal). In a suppressive household, for instance, or in a childhood that is not truly human, a child develops a secret life, a secret mind, secret attitudes, secret talk with other children, secret sex indulgence, secret indulgences of all kinds—an essentially dissociative character. Sexual understanding must develop in relationship and therefore in the context of relatedness—not merely talking to somebody, but in the context of open, free relatedness to other people. Children who have a secret life find other people relatively unreal. Just so, a neurotic sexual life is generally based on a feeling of the unreality of other people.

Adults cannot be useful to children if adults have sex conflicts. If adults themselves are sex neurotics, it will be impossible for them to communicate a truly human disposition toward sexuality to younger people. On the contrary, they will communicate in both overt and subtle ways a feeling of "sex complication" and a need to hide certain features of their interest, or fascination, with sex. If adults are to serve young people, they must be sane, uncomplicated, and loving. Otherwise, they will be turning children into standard, middle-class neurotics. The secret of it all is to develop the lives of our children in intimate, concrete, and relational terms. We must not force them to become self-involved, self-contained, and secretive, thinking of the adult world as a kind of abstract or unreal norm that is hypocritical and unavailable to the kind of consideration that they are involved in. Do not force children into that mode. That is the mode we were all forced into. We should learn from that lesson. All of you have grown up to be sexually neurotic, and it is very important not to be sexually neurotic if you are going to practice a spiritual Way of life. You know how much time and energy you all are having to spend as adults merely straightening out your emotional problems.

It is so important to transcend neurotic sexuality because it affects not merely certain kinds of social relations but your entire being, your entire nervous system. Your lovelessness, or sexual neurosis, limits your capacity emotionally, as well as the capacity of the nervous system altogether, to participate in the spiritual process. You do not wish to force that on your children, but you are doing that even now by not fully understanding what the appropriate cultural form for their growth and their living is. In other words, you must consciously introduce principles, life structures, and relational structures into their lives. You must do this if you are going to avoid introducing other attitudes, invisibly and arbitrarily, that reinforce their separate, nonrelational quality, their Narcissism, their hiddenness.

Cultures that have a sex-suppressive orientation to children tend to be characterized by aggression, as in our society. If there is a sex-negative attitude and a vital-negative and life-negative attitude or orientation enforced upon children, they cannot adapt fully to the descending circuit from head to base, from head to foot. If the sex function is attacked with negative attitudes and punishments and all the other manipulations that arise from a suppressive orientation, then individuals do not adapt to the fully descending Life-Current. They tend to become anxious at the solar plexus, or above the vital mechanism. Thus, sex, excreting, and vital functions altogether become the subject of guilt, shame, and taboos. In this way, the child's adaptation to the Life-Current is retarded, and he or she develops a contraction in the solar plexus that is critical. When the contraction at the solar plexus or at the navel center is strong, then what emotion is magnified? The emotion of anger or aggression. It is a violent emotion. Such emotion is a sign of retarded adaptation to the Life-Current. Therefore, you must not introduce these taboos, these life-negative views. You must introduce a life-positive economy based on intelligent understanding of the life process.

Therefore, permit children to adapt to the Life-Current, but do not reinforce any tendencies toward self-indulgence because suppression and indulgence have the same effect: They do not permit children to adapt to the Living Current in its descending form. They mutilate it and develop a self-contracted or self-possessed orientation to the descending life-function. In that case, too, human beings become aggressive and their sexuality is aggressive. Therefore, we must develop an intelligent economy in our children without taboos or negative views, by establishing a very positive human association with them. Permit them to gradually adapt from infancy through the third stage of life to this descending frontal life-circuit so that the Life-Current can be fully adapted to all of the functions of the manifest personality from head to base without shame, guilt, sorrow, fear, anger, and all the rest of it becoming chronic attitudes. Those attitudes, you see, are simply the signs of contractions in the descending life-circuit. During their childhood individuals are also drawn into spiritual and religious attitudes that enable them to use the ascending life-circuit as well as the descending life-circuit. But children do not adapt to the ascending circuit and to the subtler aspects of the nervous system until later in life. They use them in some rudimentary sense, but human beings adapt progressively. Children can only adapt to the subtler aspects of the personality once they have adapted to the grosser aspects. Therefore, they adapt to this descending process first, even though they use the ascending process in some rudimentary sense. When that adaptation is complete, then individuals can adapt to the ascending half of the life-circuit, the subtler activities of the being, and the self-transcending orientation in its fullest sense altogether. It is after the third stage of life, then, during adult life, that people truly begin to adapt to the subtler aspects of the human circuitry and contact the Divine functionally—not merely in rudimentary terms, but in very sophisticated terms as real spiritual practitioners.

Summary Points

1. Imparting sexual understanding to young people cannot merely take the form of conversation but must be made in the context of a community where people are practicing the wisdom of the sexual discipline.

2. The most useful conversations for young people are those that take place with individuals with whom they have an intimate, human association. Within the context of such intimacy, conversation can include everything that is on the young person's mind, everything that bothers him, everything he does or would do secretly.

3. The secret of right sexual orientation in children is to develop the lives of our children in intimate, concrete, and relational terms. We must not force them to become self-involved, self-contained, and secretive.

4. Sexual neurosis limits your emotional capacity, as well as the capacity of the nervous system altogether, to participate in the spiritual process.

5. We must consciously introduce principles, life structures, and relational structures into our children's lives. Otherwise, we will reinforce their separate, nonrelational qualities.

6. If the sex function is attacked with negative attitudes and punishments, individuals do not adapt to the fully descending Life-Current. Guilt and shame follow with anxiety. The contraction in the solar plexus strengthens, and anger and aggression result.

Session Two

Eliminating the Sex-Negative Mind

No introduction is necessary to these practical discussions by Adi Da on serving the truly human development of sexuality in children. As you read, relax into the Adept's criticism of our sex- and life-negativity. Do not recoil upon yourself in the process of seeing your sex-negativity and how it may have influenced your children. Rather, as Adi Da Instructs us:

Have no regrets. Resort to the Divine in Truth and in the present. All that has ever been done by anyone had its logic in its time. Only God avails. Whatever is your habit in this moment is not wrong. It is simply a beginning. No habit is necessary, but it is only tending to persist, because it has not yet been replaced by further growth. Hear the Teaching of Truth, and understand what is the right, ultimate, and regenerative pattern of each function of Man. Feel free of all negative judgments about what you have done and what you tend to do. Turn with full feeling-attention to the creative affair of new adaptation in most positive Communion with the God who is Life, and who is Alive as all beings. (LOOK, pp. 111-12)

Eliminate the Sex-Negative Mind

an essay based on conversations with Adi Da

Sex-negative people bring sex-negativity to children. All adults should examine their own sex-negative notions and not pass them on to their children. It is absolutely wrong to suppress life in children, as this will only serve to create internal conflicts later in life they will tend to interpret religion as asceticism or body-negativity. They will become divided people with divided minds. People generally think like Puritans and act like whores. Everyone has a double mind, but sex is much simpler than that. It must be based on intelligence, it must be based on understanding, and we must appreciate it as a yoga of the body. At some point almost all adults have to overcome the sex-negative attitude that comes from being educated in Western society. Teachers and parents should discuss ways to artfully deal with this matter so as to best serve the culture of children.

The two important principles relative to children's sexuality are: 1) It should not be suppressed, and 2) It should be communicated about and be openly acknowledged. Sexuality should be discussed with them in positive terms. We must teach them how to explore sex and sexual feeling while at the same time socialize them. If we are socializing them, moving them beyond chronic self-involvement, then attention to sex will tend to dissolve as a chronic matter.

Adults must understand that in a sense children have a sexual life, but they are not involved in reproduction. At ages five and six there is nothing wrong with their touching themselves or playing with one another. You can discuss their sexual exploration by asking, "What does it feel like?" or "What are you doing?" If it is not discussed, it will tend to become chronic and secret and thus neurotic. Children should talk about their pleasure. This will produce natural involvement in the sexual process. We must bring children to a moral disposition, not one that is sex-negative. Sexuality should be open, acknowledged, permitted, and talked about. At the end of the first stage, at about age seven, children can begin to come to an understanding about sexual energy, about their bodies, and about how to use sexual energy. At this point disciplines must be introduced, but there should never be a prohibition or taboo. There should normally never be prohibitions about sex. The only case in which prohibition against masturbation or sexual play might serve is among children who have been brought up with profoundly sex-negative ideas or who have not been given the occasion to talk about their sexual feelings and consequently whose involvement with sex is so chronic and aberrated that it would have to be disciplined.

In the case of children who have not been rightly socialized, there my be chronic masturbation and extreme, secretive inversion. This is usually a symptom of a social problem in relationship. Wherever you see aberration and inversion in relation to the life-functions of the body, you should talk to the child, but not in the context of sex-negativity. Help them to be free to develop their energy socially in many relationships and in relationship to the Divine. In general, people want to do something about sex. They want to attack it as a problem and try to change it, either by suppressing or enhancing it. Whenever they notice any kind of aberrated pattern or sexual

desire in themselves or their children, they want to suppress it. This is in general the ineffective and unenlightened approach, the result of an emotional contraction in relationships, and especially in relationship to the Ultimate Reality. In other words, aberrated sex is a symptom of a dis-ease of the emotional being. Sex becomes normalized when dealt with intimately in relationship and when the primary relationship of the child to the Ultimate Divine Reality is restored.

During the transition to the second stage from the first stage (at about seven), there is a time of very open bodily self-exploration. The second stage, then, will lead toward an understanding of the discipline of sexuality. In general, it is a time in which children enlarge their sensitivity beyond their own bodies into Nature and aesthetics, but it should not be made into an issue if they masturbate. If they are trained properly, sex will develop naturally. It is a very artful process.

Gradual control of masturbation should develop, but it should not be prohibited. Masturbation is self-exploration, and it has no negative effect prior to puberty. At puberty, hormonal activity makes discipline appropriate because the hormones at that age that are required to strengthen the body are developing and it is appropriate for the energy of the body to be used for growth. But even then, masturbation should not be taboo. There should never be negative communications about sexuality at any stage. It is the educators' and parents' responsibility to socialize the child, to draw him into relational life, into the spiritual feeling for life and the embrace of moral habits. In the later years of the second stage, from nine upward, children should be instructed to relate to sex and the body with understanding and with the expectation of assuming the discipline of self-regulation. It is through their understanding, however, and not through prohibition or any negativity, that they choose not to exploit themselves.

Summary Points

1. All adults should examine their own sex-negativity and discuss ways to artfully deal with it so as to best serve the culture of children in the area of sexuality.

2. When children are socialized, sex naturally ceases to be an obsessive focus of attention in children.

3. Having children talk about pleasure allow them a natural involvement with the sexual process.

4. There should never be prohibitions or taboos against sex in the first two stages of life unless the child's involvement is chronic and aberrated. Serve the child to develop his energy socially in relationships and in relationship to the Divine.

5. Sex-negativity, expressed as suppression and exploitation, is the result of an emotional contraction in relationships, especially in relationship to the Divine. It is nomalized when dealt with intimately in relationship and through restoration of the child's primary relationship to the Divine.

6. Do not make negative communications about sex at any stage.

7. Instruct children after about age nine to relate to sex and the body with understanding. Only through understanding, and not through prohibition or any negativity, will children choose not to exploit themselves.

Surrender of the Body in God

(a talk by Adi Da, 8/11/80, LOOK)

Adi Da: It is very easy to introduce a sex-negative, body-negative, and self-negative attitude in children through little punishment rituals, because we have all been indoctrinated in one way or another into a sex-negative, or at least an ambivalent, view of sexuality. On the one hand sex is affirmed, on the other hand it is denied. I can remember receiving basically sex-negative signals throughout my childhood. Sex was something you were not supposed to do unless you were married, but even then it was better if you didn't! (Laughter.) In the culture of my childhood, there was no systematic development of a positive body-sense relative to all one's functions. Therefore, in order to raise our children with a positive body-sense, everyone in our community must understand how he or she tends to reinforce a body-negative and sex-negative self-image, and then they must avoid dealing with children in those ways.

Children inevitably explore their bodies and feel them in various ways. To take the position that there is something wrong with all that is foolish. Nor do you have to make children explore and feel their bodies; they will do this naturally. When you find them doing it, what will be your response? You do not want to encourage habitual masturbating, but you also do not want to slap their hands and tell them that what they are doing is nasty or dirty. Rather, you must establish a more positive and ordinary education for children in which they become directly, feelingly, and sensually related to the world altogether. When they begin to notice things about their bodies, there should be no suppressive attack on them. That exploration is just a sign that they have reached a certain stage in self-observation, and you should help them. By the time they are capable of making such observations, they are usually old enough to engage in a discussion that will lead to an understanding of the body and its sensations.

As soon as children discover their bodies as terminals of sensation, they will tend to address them as instruments of sensation, and they will develop habits like masturbation and other kinds of private games, and in this way develop a dissociative character. The discovery of one's bodily and sexual sensations is obviously a positive aspect of children's development, and when children begin to make this discovery, we must lead them to an understanding that will make it unnecessary for them to choose to exploit the terminal of sensation in their own bodies. Instead, they should relate the body to the real world through sensual and perceptual awareness. By entering into that related connection to the world, the bodily energies attain a state of natural equanimity. However, as soon as individuals start stimulating the body for the sake of sensation, they develop a habitual mode of dissociation from others and from the world. They also get the idea that there is something wrong with bodily pleasure, that it is bad. So, their self-stimulation has to become secret. Generally, children who begin to exploit themselves sexually at an early age have sexual problems well into adulthood, until they are able to break out of the mode of privacy into sensual and sexual expression that is relational.

Therefore it is important that children in the first and second stages of life come to a positive understanding of their bodily discoveries. Instruction about sexuality and about the third or brahmacharya stage of life is useful. We should not cut children off, bodily, from life. Rather, we should lead them further into bodily forms of existence and perceptual association with the world. We should help them to develop an understanding of their sexual character and the sexual mechanism, and of how their early years are an initiation into the functions of the body in relationship to all kinds of potential experience. Sexuality has a great deal of learning associated with it. However, the fact that children are discovering sex as a possibility at an early age does not mean that they are ready for it. Rather, at that point their cultural initiation must begin, and in this manner they will be prepared for the sexual yoga in their later married life.

It is helpful for children to be massaged throughout their years prior to marriage, and for them to massage others. This kind of bodily intimacy reinforces the positive sense of bodily existence. Thus, massaging, the development of unobstructed feeling, and positive bodily association with the world and with other people are all necessary aspects of character development. A lot of what becomes the adolescent crisis is based on the discovery of one's own body as a terminal of experience, and that discovery occurs during childhood prior to the full development of relational life and relational experience. The usual adolescent, who is not drawn into the culture of such relational development and real learning, becomes reactive based on the principle of self-discovery. This is the root of the kind of obnoxious independence game that adolescents begin to exploit. This adolescent game of independence is based entirely on the discovery of the body as a principle of separative, egoic experience rather than a medium of association or relationship.

STUDENT: It seems that there would be different levels of instruction for children, based on the stages of life, which would specifically address the whole range of their life and functioning at different levels of maturity. And maybe there could also be a progressive teaching about how to relate to the Life-Force. For instance, children would learn about the awakening of the Life-Force in their own body, and then learn about it in relation to others, and, at a later stage, in regard to their marriage relationship.

Adi Da: Marriage is the ultimate fulfillment of one aspect of a process of learning that should have occurred all through life up to that point. In other words, the actual exercise of one's capacity for sexual experience comes only after a long period of learning and submission of the body into all relations, into the total field of experience in God. Children and teenagers who begin to exploit potentials for pleasure based on the self-principle, the body-principle independent of the development of a relational character, are people who have dissociative problems in later life. You see, it is quite typical for teenagers and even younger children in the common world today to develop all kinds of ways of enjoying themselves through stimulation of the self-body. From early childhood and certainly from adolescence, they use intoxicants, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, and forms of sexual exploitation. And when an individual has developed a culture of self-pleasure as profoundly as adolescents tend to develop it in our society, it becomes very difficult for them later on to live a harmonious life of relational culture, which is the obligation of mature humanity. For this reason, we must prevent the creation of a self-culture in childhood and adolescence. Until a person enters into the fourth stage of life, they should always be progressing in this general process of submitting the body to the field of relations in order to learn. Therefore, sexual activity should only begin after that preparation has taken place, and marriage is the ceremony of that initiation or ultimate development.

Student: In the conventional society in which we grew up there was no sense of relationship at all. And so we turned to ourselves, our own bodies, to find pleasure. But in our spiritual culture, we live by a different principle.

Adi Da: Well, the self-body is the principle of conventional living because people are, in common society, basically dramatizing the level of development that is characteristic of the third stage of life, particularly the problematic development of that stage. Common society is basically an adolescent culture in which the self-body is the principle and everybody is, therefore, seeking some sort of self-enjoyment, self-fulfillment, and self-pleasure. The fullest dimension of their actual humanity does not have the opportunity to be expressed, because there is no culture or cultural demand for it. There is no demand for self-transcendence and submission of the body into the field of relations in God. That wisdom-culture is missing.

Thus, the self-body, rather than the surrender of the body in God and in all relationships, is the principle of conventional society. Therefore, conventional society is an adolescent, prehuman or subhuman culture. Human culture begins with the culture of the fourth stage of life. It is the culture that develops on the basis of the surrender of the whole body, or bodily surrender in God and in all relations. When the self-body itself becomes the principle of experience prior to the development of that elaborated relational culture, then the individual becomes fixed in the self mode, the Narcissistic culture of adolescence. And that is what typifies all of you! In fact, this description is characteristic of society in general. People are fixed in the principle of the self-body, and are therefore Narcissistic and dissociative and disturbed.

Student: I think that is why it is difficult even to consider bringing this kind of premarital consideration to most teenagers. Because they have learned and adapted to so little wisdom in the earlier stages, talking about the "yoga of sexual communion" with them would be just like bringing them some kind of conventional sex instruction. If the whole emotional adaptation in relationship hasn't already occurred, they are not really prepared to enter into a mature consideration of human sexuality.

Adi Da: In our community, as children progress through the stages of growth, we must, develop orderly forms of cultural experience that will make the period of life which becomes adolescence in the common world into a positive cultural epoch for each individual. This has traditionally been called the brahmacharya stage.

The third stage of life is not supposed to be adolescence! Adolescence is a crisis of reactive collapse upon the self-body and all of the problems, desires, and complications that accompany that collapse. The third stage of life, truly lived, is not expressed in the form of that adolescent crisis, but rather it is a life-positive, relation-positive period of learning and preparation for mature adult life and all of its conditions, including sexuality in marriage. But if specific and positive cultural circumstances are not provided for young people in that stage of life, they will tend to develop this adolescent crisis character, this Narcissistic orientation to the principle of the self-body.

Children are always tending to develop this Narcissistic character in one or another way throughout the first three stages of life. Therefore, you must not make their discoveries of the self-body incidents for punishment and reinforcement of negative attitudes. Rather, consider them to be moments of learning, moments of increased awareness. Then, through that sense of awareness, lead the individual into the relational field of life—to greater sensitivity, energy, and attention for real growth rather than the exploitation of self. There is a natural and positive way to use all these incidents of self-discovery and the various events of developing childhood so that you do not suppress the personality of children and ultimately force them into an adolescent, self-involved crisis. Instead, you should enable them to become more life-positive, more sensitive, more expanded, more full of understanding and mature responsibility.

Summary Points

1. We must establish a positive and ordinary education for children in which they become directly, feelingly, and sensually related to the world altogether.

2. Exploration is simply a sign that they have come to a certain stage of self-observation. Help them to make their observations by engaging them in a discussion that leads to understanding of the body and its sensations.

3. Children should learn to relate the body to the real world through sensual and perceptual awareness. This allows the bodily energies to attain a state of natural equanimity.

4. Massage is the kind of bodily intimacy that reinforces the positive sense of bodily existence.

5. Conventional adolescence is based on the discovery of the body as a principle of experience rather than as a medium of association, of relationship.

The Process of Socialization

(excerpt from a talk by Adi Da)

As soon as infants begin to become aware of their bodies, the body becomes a principal object for them. This happens very early in life, and it is the very true that infants should begin to socialize or adapt to the total environment through the bodily senses. In that case, the whole world becomes an object of interest and play to them, and obsessive attention to their own bodies will become obsolete over time. The kinds of activities that should occupy children are not those that emphasize obsession with their own self-touching and self-sense. Children should be socializing, adapting to life functionally by doing things with other children, with other people, with the natural environment. Go on a picnic! (Laughter.)

There is no need to orient children toward focusing attention on their own bodies. As a person with a body, they should simply be around others and have no special event take place as a result of that, have that be very ordinary. That ordinariness will make them point at themselves less. They will not always be sizing people up in terms of protruding bodily parts, and they will be able to adapt naturally to the fact that every individual is a vital, physical person.

It is this process of socialization that permits open sexual development. That is what I mean by sexual development. I do not mean having intercourse when you are four years old! What I mean by sexual development is that in the second stage of life, you are able to come freely alive as a vital being and in the third stage of life, you comprehend your vitality, including your sexuality, in many specific ways. In that stage you gain control with the mind over how you use your life.

Thus, at the end of the third stage, individuals can begin to court and even marry after eighteen to twenty-one. If you have matured in the third stage, that is an appropriate time to engage the process of sexuality. Prior to that time, there is no value in it. In fact, it is negative to be exploiting sexuality as a teenager. Such exploitation can only work against them, and later on they will have a great deal of difficulty being mature in the stage of life to which their age corresponds. In that case, individuals will go through life still stuck in all the earlier stages, and they will dramatize emotions that belong to seven and eight year olds. They will use sexuality as if they were ten years old because they will not have adapted to or inspected and become responsible for the functional level that is being revealed to them at their present age. The community must become a culture that understands this process and makes it possible for each of these stages to be lived in an appropriate form.

Further Summary Points on Sexuality

(by The Education Department of the Free Daist Communion)

1. Sexuality is not taboo in our Way of life. It is not to be suppressed or exploited but progressively adapted to in life-positive terms and lived as a spiritual yoga in maturity.

2. Sexual engagement must be founded on the prior achievement of full maturity in the first three stages. Ideally, sexuality begins in the fourth stage of life as the yoga of sexual communion.

3. Children should be taught how to relate to their sexuality, not how to avoid or suppress these feelings and impulses. In the third stage, they must learn its true and higher purpose; they must not view it as a means of relieving stress or merely as a reproductive function.

4. Adults must be open and freely communicative with children so that the adults can be instructive about the various developments of sexual awakening as they appear in each stage of growth.

5. The process of socialization, which is adaptation to human intimacy, permits right and open sexual development.

6. Attention stimulated by the awakening to sense-functions should be naturally directed outward into relationship so that it does not become obsession with the self-body.

7. The second stage is the time of developing a conscious relationship to the descending aspect of the Life-Force and feeling-sensitivity to the polarities of male and female.

8. We must not introduce taboos that prevent full descent of the Life-feeling. The typical reactions of adolescence and frustrated egoic adulthood—anger, shame, guilt, etc.—will be the only result.

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