In this post I will address some of the insights I’ve had along the way about how the “landscape” of Authentic Adulthood is starting to look, taste, and feel from within my own skin.
In Parts I and II, I laid out the developmental stages we go through as human beings. The prefrontal lobes of the human brain are supposed to kick in between ages 15 and 21 to propel us into full maturity as adults – beyond anything experienced in the previous stages. Unfortunately, many of us received information that interfered with this process. Growing into a fully mature adult didn’t happen for us.
One amazing synchronicity and powerful confirmation for me is that my initial vision of Homo Spiritus matches what I am discovering an Authentic, Integrated, and fully Embodied Adult is all about! What I originally intuited as the next step in human evolution, is what each of us would have naturally grown into as adults, had we finished each stage of human development without “interference.”
Authentic Adulthood involves a Human Being Divinely Enlightened by natural design – or Homo Spiritus!
Another significant insight involves the traditional role of the spiritual “seeker”. Someone who is feeling inner discontent for something “more”, and is caught up in the quest to get rid of, dissolve, transcend, integrate, etc. their “ego,” is actually acting from an unconscious need to complete these unfinished stages of development.
Had we had cultural models and been shown or taught about this inborn capacity, this design for metamorphosis/transcendence, we would have been able to grow naturally through the “ego’s” development and enter into the natural Enlightenment of Authentic Adulthood.
As Jed McKenna succinctly describes in his book “Spiritual Warfare:”
“Human Childhood is the ego-bound state. It is, in human children, a healthy and natural state. In human adults, however, it’s a hideous affliction…In fact, we should be discarding these juvenile disguises in our early teens and embarking on life journeys of such superiority that, by contrast, the ego-bound life is no life at all.” (pg.28)…”The butterfly stage of development is called imago; adulthood. That’s what we are meant to be, imago. If we lived in a society of imagos we would be well prepared for metamorphosis; it would occur when it’s supposed to and be easier by magnitudes. Not easy, but not cataclysmic either.” (pg. 58)
Another “symptom” of Authentic Adulthood I’ve been experiencing is feeling more and more that I am “growed up.” For many years, as I discovered the history of my own Arrested Development, I often felt like I was looking through the eyes of a child, or an adolescent, depending on when each particular trauma I was working through had occurred in my life.
“Trying” to be an Adult when I still felt waaaay younger inside, was always accompanied by fear - I was going to mess something up; I would not succeed; I couldn’t relate to what was required of me as an Adult. My heart wasn’t in it and I had difficulty finding the passion to emotionally and willingly engage in my life/career/relationships, etc.
This frame of reference has disappeared. For the first time in my life I feel free and clear of these childhood “eyes”. The old adage – being a “child of God” has been replaced by being an “Adult of God.”
Stepping into this stage of development – being an “Adult of God” – has transformed the way I interact with the “Universe” to manifest my life. Before this I had studied and practiced the usual litany of “Law of Attraction” approaches with infuriatingly inconsistent results. The primary feeling was a sense of “lack” that could be fulfilled in the form of more income, etc., by following the principles and practices. You know the drill. The infuriating part for me was the inconsistency of it all. When I put a lot of energy into “manifesting” something, it would often NOT happen; and then there were the times when an idle thought or intent would easily and effortlessly just “show up”. That drove me crazy!
What I finally noticed was, that when I was coming from the “Adult me,” there was a sense of easy flow and “effortless effort”, just naturally happening as my life seamlessly unfolded before me. From the “Arrested Development me,” it always stemmed from some sort of lack and a sense of incompleteness, “petitioning” the Universe/Spirit to bring to me what I thought I wanted.
Again Jed McKenna captures this well from “Spiritual Warfare” pg. 17:
“There are plenty of books about how to manifest our desires from within the segregated state of Human Childhood; to use prayer or wishcraft or affirmations or laws of attraction to get a better house, a faster car, the perfect mate and so on. What we’ll be discussing in this book is making the transition to the integrated state of Human Adulthood and developing within it, so that prayer, wishcraft, affirmations, and laws of attraction become superfluous, the way cheating becomes superfluous when you know the answers.”
My present understanding of how one lives as an Authentic Adult involves conscious participation with the unfolding of life through intent/inspiration, then total surrender to the process without resistance or judgment of how, when, or where the outcome will manifest. This entails total trust that what does happen is always for the best no matter what.
Thoreau captured this approach well:
“It is a gift to be able to paint a particular picture or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day–that is the highest of the arts.”
May you live a completed path!
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