Embrace Your Inner Adult

I was not to the manor born. I came up from low beginnings, as do we all, born on the valley floor, raised in the shuffling herd, so I was exactly as artificial, wrongly positioned and maladjusted as anyone. I was brought up by livestock as livestock to raise more livestock and die as livestock. I was a human child for fifteen years too long, but somewhere along the way something went right and here I am, unutterably grateful for a life less ordinary. 

That’s where you probably are right now, somewhere down on the valley floor, still a member of the herd but not too thrilled about it, somewhere in the early stages of escaping a lifelong hand-me-down pattern in the hope of discovering your own authentic and unique pattern; on the way out of the former but not yet established in the latter. That’s good. In the context of transitioning to adulthood, that’s what progress looks like. That’s how it begins, anyway. 

Soon, perhaps, if all goes well and you go forward, you’ll be grateful for the following advice: Don’t resist. Allow. Surrender. Relax into the higher whatever of the divine whatever, or whatever. There is nothing in you or about you that’s going to make transition easier, better, faster or smoother. All you can do is make things worse, so try not to. Just release control. Trust, have faith. Reason can see things your eyes can’t, but belief in the unseen helps you release the tiller and allow your unfolding to occur naturally. With a little luck, you’ll find yourself being dangled by the ankles and slapped on the ass as you’re born as a new being into a new world with a new physics package, new operating principles, and new ways of interfacing with your environment. There’s a learning curve the second time like there was the first. It takes about twelve years to get your feet under you and figure out how things work, then you have the rest of your life to research and write your own mahabharata – The Great Story of You – which will be about your expression of your unique pattern; the one function that only you can perform. 

There are many reasons we might resist this process; try to impede it or improve it, accelerate or decelerate it or otherwise meddle in it, all the doing of eyes-closed fear-based ego. Not just fear of change or fear of the unknown or reluctance to sever attachments, but a reluctance to elevate yourself above everyone you’ve ever known, or known of. That’s a big step. You will become superior in the same way that a butterfly is superior to a caterpillar, but really, the reality is that butterflies don’t feel superior to caterpillars; they never give them another thought. From the caterpillar’s perspective, that might seem pretty damn rude (and not just a little ungrateful), but all that emotional gooeyness gets left behind when we begin our adult journey. 

Unlike butterflies, we in the human game don’t totally break ties; we remain awkwardly herd-adjacent. We’re likely to find our comfort zone away from the things of man, but still within pizza delivery range. We don’t fly away and never look back, we hang around on the outskirts; in the herd but not of the herd. We naturally tend away from the things of man, but not too far. Some of those things of man are pretty damn cool – wifi, running water, electricity, bendy straws – and there’s no benefit to be enjoyed by going totally off-grid in remote Alaska or on some Pacific isle.

I’m not a spiritual counselor who can help you process the conflict you might feel as you elevate your level of perspective above that of your former fellow herdlings, so I’ll just tell you what worked for me; get over it and get away. It’s ugly, it sucks, so deal with it. As soon as you know you’re moving out of BPM-2 into BPM-3, out of the comfort and safety of herdlife and into a painful period of transition, retract your claws and grease the skids and do whatever you can to facilitate the process, which is mostly a matter of not fucking it up.

From where you sit, this is not a birth canal you’re entering; it’s a pitch black void, and you’re right to be scared. This is your go/no-go moment. Once you enter that void, you’ve passed the point of no return. This is scary shit, or so I’m told. I never slowed down at this point to count the cost or weigh my options or run the numbers; I shot through so fast and hot that I didn’t come to understand the dynamics and mechanics of passage until I looked back later. This is the spiritual eye of the needle where many arrive but few pass through; by many, I mean billions, and by few, I mean dozens.

Maybe you’ll come out the other end of your metamorphosis as something weird and wonderful, or maybe crushing pressure and hyper-toxicity will become your new reality; you never know until you know. If you got this far from desire, this is where you’ll want to stop the ride and jump off, but if you’re coming from a place where anything would be better than another day in the halflight of the sewer-dungeon, then tunneling toward daylight, even if only suspected and yet unseen, is a whole different piece of business; sunshine or bust.

The obvious truth of the matter is that adulthood is a superior state to childhood; a well-developed and fully functional adulthood, especially so. That might not sound inclusive or compassionate or in keeping with Boddhisattvic ideals, but it’s the way it is. Butterfly is a superior state to caterpillar, but there’s no question of elitism because butterflies don’t return to lord themselves over their former friends and colleagues. The only point of a caterpillar is to become a butterfly, or make more caterpillars who might make the change. Same with human children. They’re not valid entities in their own right. In the human development sense, the only point of the juvenile is to transition to adulthood, or make more who might.

What we’re talking about is your maybe soon-to-be newfound superiority, because it’s something you should get comfortable with and not feel bad about. You’re not being divisive or non-inclusive by cultivating and maintaining your own energetic environment and following your own course in life; that’s what we’re all supposed to do as we enter and emerge from our own process of metamorphosis. In a natural setting – away from the things of man – this is not a big challenge, but if you have to spend time among the valley people, you have to learn to adapt and cope, and that starts with dropping your juvenile baggage, which is just another way of saying you should sever emotional attachments, which is just another way of saying you have to switch from the emotional to the mental pole of your being. See? There’s nothing hidden or tricky about any of this; it’s all very straightforward and accessible by reason. Still, emotion is a vital component, so embracing your inner android isn’t the answer. You must embrace your inner asshole – at least for a while.

All this can be difficult because you’re a kind, good-hearted person. Stop it. Forget about compassion, tolerance, coexistence, and unconditional love. It’s okay to be stand-offish. It’s okay to stop attending normie functions, to stop dressing like one of them, to stop pretending you’re still a child, to stop impersonating a lower life-form. You’ll find yourself naturally tending away from people, so just let it happen. Reshape your environment to fit yourself. Establish yourself as erratic and undependable. Stop being a good person, stop engaging and participating. Let the energetic current carry you away. Stop living for others and start living for yourself. Stop thinking and acting like one of them. Stop hitting your marks and speaking your lines. Stop acquiring and start downsizing. Throw out half your shit, then go back and do it again, then again. Dress for comfort, eat what you want, sleep when you want, go off by yourself when you want. Walk. Burn your boats and bridges and never look back. It won’t always be like this, but during transition, it is.

The human-minus people are no longer your people. You’re becoming what they were all meant to be. They were your people before you started waking up, but now it’s time to leave them behind and not look back. You have attachments, you feel obligations and a duty to fulfill your societally mandated role, but this is the time to start cutting yourself off from your old life. Stop pumping your energy into it; let it whither and fall away. It’s a totally bogus construct animated by your fear-based emotional energy, so stop enlivening it and see what happens. It’s not as bad as it sounds, especially if you give yourself plenty of runway. Start saying authentic things in synthetic situations. Start telling the truth; you don’t have to make anything up, just speak your mind. As the initial nondual insight has revealed to you, life is just a movie, why pretend otherwise? Start doing what you want instead of what you should. Stop taking sides, stop empowering preferences and opinions. Dump your teams and your politics, your allegiances and ego-ordained beliefs and start representing your own interests. As the Great Cock teaches us, How can the chick reach outside except by pecking through the shell? 

I’m not saying you should do this, I’m saying it will happen if you continue on this void-bound trajectory. It will be less of an ordeal if you’re prepared for it and don’t cling to old ways. This isn’t about burning your heart out of your chest, it’s about cleansing your emotional space just as you cleanse your mental space (it’s all the same space). As you are subjected to repeated acid baths or furnace sessions, you’ll find yourself becoming a distinctly new and different kind of being, not in one swell foop, but once a week or more, for a prolonged period. Every step on the journey of awakening is a death and rebirth, and it doesn’t get easier until you get where you’re going. That’s why it’s best to get away from people and society for this stage of the journey.

Just as our clothes, tastes, and interests changed when we went through puberty, everything changes as we undergo the second-stage birth transition from child to adult. Nothing from childhood fits anymore and if you keep trying to squeeze into it, you’ll just make a shitty situation shittier. Let go of the old. Allow the process to unfold, merge with it, surrender to the current on which you float; it knows the way. This is no time to freeze up. Relax. Trust the overlighting intelligence running the show. You can’t make it a pleasant process, but try not to make it worse than it has to be. 

The reality is that there’s no turning back on this path. Every step is made by destroying the illusion of solid footing. We never take a step from desire, only out of desperation when we see the ground disappearing beneath us. We can’t go back because there’s nothing left. We can’t stay where we are because it’s disintegrating beneath our feet. Once the process begins, you’re committed whether you like it or not, so just forge ahead; further. Nothing is optional at this point except, maybe, the degree to which you allow or resist.

This is where the waterline metaphor comes to our aid. The landmass on which you currently reside is safe, secure and comfortable, and the ocean in your future will also be calm and comfortable, but between the two is the rocky, storm-tossed shoreline through which you must pass. There’s nothing you can do to make it better, but if you resist or interfere or distrust the process, you can definitely make it worse. This is the crashing-surf and sharp-rocks part of the journey between safe land and open sea where you can get battered and torn apart. Don’t linger, don’t dawdle, don’t fight the process. It’s a death-rebirth transition; let one thing be over and, hopefully, a new thing begin. This is where we stop playing our role and start playing ourselves.

Everyone wants the land-based ocean-going experience – dreaming they’re awake rather than waking from the dream – that lets them keep their attachments, their people, their stuff and their lifestyle, while pretending they’re out at sea making a great voyage. Few spiritual seekers ever get this far, and far fewer go further. Fortunately, we’re not talking about spirituality, we’re talking about nonduality.