blog030 Making Time to Grow Up

 

It is time to grow up. 

Growing up is a lifelong process of ongoing adulthood initiations. 

Modern culture prohibits its citizens from growing up, because if you grow up you reclaim the precise clarity and power required to withdraw your franchise from the ruling regime and take your authority back. (It is not actually possible to give your authority away - only to fool yourself into thinking someone else will take care of you...)

Making time to grow up begins a new world that makes the current system irrelevant.

You find ways of growing up by going to the edge of modern culture and taking further steps. By the power of your own authority you select individuals and organizations to responsibly bring you through especially the first 150 adulthood initiatory processes. 

 

(In our opinion, the Possibility Trainer Guild with its Expand The Box trainings, Possibility Labs and Trainer Labs is one such organization.) 

Before entering the path of ongoing adulthood initiatory processes, every thought, word, feeling or action you take is in relationship to your parents. Unconsciously you submit your every creation and your very life to your parents’ approval, acceptance, judgment, and criticism. Yes?

Before initiation you do not own your life because you have arranged things so that your parents own you. Even if you hate your parents they own you. Even if you love your parents they own you. Even if you do not care about your parents they still own you – until you make your growing up processes the central theme of  your life, so that initiatory processes occupy the place in you your parents once held.

Before engaging ongoing adulthood initiations you can never truly be responsible because your parents are still responsible for you. If you cannot be responsible, you have no power. That means until you engage the path of growing up you cannot choose your partner, your job, or where you will live, you cannot declare what is so or what is not so, and you cannot seriously question anything. Every commitment you make is tentative, awaiting your parents’ approval. Whether your parents are alive or dead, whether you see them frequently or never, until you are taking step after step along the path of growing up you do not dance in the flow of life but rather you stand in the shadow of your parents.

Before engaging ongoing adulthood initiations, you project your father onto every man and you project your mother onto every woman. You cannot truly see who is before you, and you cannot truly be in relationship. You use your mate as your mother or father; you use your boss as your mother or father, you even use your children as your mother or father. 

Without initiations you suffer at the effects of emotional triggers and your whole life is made up of feeble ineffective efforts entangled in the unfinished business of your childhood. Without being able to function freely and responsible as an adult you are blocked from direct access to the world, because the world operates according to the laws of adulthood responsibility.

The design of a mature adult human being is an awesome spectacle. Think about it. Where did the pattern for the adult man or woman originally come from? It came from the Earth. Like a lion or an amoeba, the adult is designed in relationship to the way the Earth works. 

This means that the declarations of an adult man or woman bend the world whereas the declarations of a child do not. Questions from an adult man or woman establish a new future whereas questions from a child do not. The world conforms to the promises and requests of an adult man or woman because there is a responsive connection between an adult human being and the world. 

An adult fits into the world like a hand fits into a glove. When the hand moves, the glove moves. We can only have a relationship like this with the world as a consequence of ongoing adulthood initiations. Nothing could be more important. 

Next cultures (e.g. archearchy) recognize the importance of ongoing adulthood initiatory processes and place the preparations for, the successful accomplishment of, and celebrations about adulthood initiatory processes at the center of their culture. The remaining aspects of next culture, such as education, food, clothing, shelter, music, economy, technology, and so on, all fall in their own natural places around ongoing adulthood initiatory processes. 

Modern western culture, with all of its technologies and conveniences, provides no guidance and no opportunity for engaging ongoing adulthood initiatory processes. It is therefore no wonder that modern culture’s political systems, military organizations, governments, businesses, and churches are typically managed by irresponsible and often psychopathic personalities who have done whatever it takes to acquire top positions in the hierarchical power structures. So-called "leaders" in modern culture remain uninitiated adolescents making uninitiated adolescent quality choices. In the modern world, almost no one has grown up. The Earth, the creatures of the Earth, the people of the Earth, you, and everyone you know are suffering as a consequence.

 

Stepping beyond the thought-limits of your birth culture to continue on a path of ongoing adulthood initiatory processes takes tremendous courage. Yet the alternative of living out the life of an uninitiated adolescent is so painful. Not opening your inner pearl, not distinguishing your bright and shadow principles, not connecting in and serving your archetypal lineage is so depressing, so confusing, so discouraging, so disrespectful of the gift of being human. In comparison, the fear of taking your future into your own hands and choosing a path of initiation even when most people around you do not understand and may not approve of what you are doing, becomes small enough to be irrelevant. Then you can feel a little bit afraid but still go ahead... 

Make, find, beg, borrow, steal the time to grow up.




Use the wisdom of the pain of your precious opportunities already lost to choose what is not on the modern culture menu.

Welcome to a wilder world.

blog028 Thumbscrews

Thumbscrews are metallic torture devices progressively tightened on your thumbs until your will is destroyed.

You are wearing thumbscrews since childhood.

If they somehow get a little loose, you tighten them back on yourself, just to keep things feeling normal.



 





With a crushed will you don't even try doing what you are capable of doing because even vaguely thinking about it brings up the fear that the screws will be tightened even more.

You have memories...

With shocking efficiency modern schooling and corporate-herded society have applied thumbscrew devices to your brain, your heart, your body and your being.






1. Screws are clamped on your brain to cripple your perceiving and thinking so you can only function within a framework of external authority. From then on, instead of ongoingly generating interesting new frameworks from within yourself, you search for the "correct" framework outside of yourself. You automatically adapt to that external authority so you know what to do and when to do it without getting in trouble. Your life curriculum is already determined. Nobody has ever asked you what you want to learn (as in the film Accepted) so you can't imagine that asking this question of yourself might be valid. Unpredictable actions never become an option.

2. Screws are clamped on your heart so that feeling numb equals feeling good. Your rocket fuel is locked away. Your squeeze-dried heart can no longer cry out what is important to you.


 



3. Screws are clamped to your body so you cannot engage in work that matters to you. Instead you merely survive.

4. And perhaps most horrifyingly, clamp-rings squeeze your being, so you cannot unfold into what you are, which means you cannot give what you have because you don't have it, and you cannot let yourself be seen because you cannot be you.

As we speak, you allow the schools and corporations to screw your children in the same way because your memories prove that, if you interfere, the pain could be applied to you again. You feel completely trapped and helpless.

After a couple decades the handicap becomes normal. Even if you suddenly recognize that present culture is suiciding the planet, you are unable to take unprescribed actions.





You are too numb and scared to leave your pitiful job.

You are too disconnected from yourself to creatively organize with like-minded people to develop a culture that you would love to live in.

You are too ashamed to admit that the slave masters have succeeded in sucking out your will. Since you think you are keeping this a secret you cannot ask for help.

You cannot stop shopping, drinking, smoking, overeating.

You cannot stop those occasional rage fits, or the depression.

You cannot turn off and discard your TV.

You cannot resist the internet sex.

You cannot wear old clothes or go without shaving your armpits or legs.

You cannot hesitate to compare yourself to the computer-enhanced magazine images of ideal product users.

And you cannot speak openly for fear of being beaten into submission again.

What sort of spineless scum have you become?

No amount of increased awareness can get you to change behavior because your will has been snuffed. Any resistance must be nonviolent for fear the pain will return.

























You are a prisoner of memories of childhood nightmares. What is the use of trying to get out? You may as well keep putting on the smiley face and pretending everything is just fine.

Sure it hurts to keep the thumb screws on.

But it probably hurts even more to loosen the screws and feel your lifeblood start circulating into unexpected capacities. Is that even possible? Could unrecognized beneficial talents still come to life?

That is an edgework question.

Who put the thumbscrews on, actually?

What was their original purpose?

Are conditions still the same around you?

Have you learned anything in the meantime that could make a different solution possible for you now?

What if you discovered there were small secret teams all over the world helping each other loosen the thumbscrews on all four bodies? Slowly, carefully, and thoroughly. Without permission. Taking extraordinary actions by the power of their own authority.