ADULT
HOOD
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ADULT
HOOD
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Adulthood is re-inventing itself...
The kind of adulthood needed now is not achieved through ritual or ceremony.
It is not achieved through bowing down to tradition.
If you submit yourself to tradition, then the tradition has authority. That kind of adulthood worked when the tradition was intelligently noble and the circumstances remained stable. We have neither of these conditions now. The time of relying on what worked for the ancestors is over. Facing into and owning current reality NOW, moment by moment, requires a new kind of adulthood with new ways of initiating awarenesses and responsibilities in us.
Nobody already knows how to do this. Initiated adults around the world are working together to figure this out now. We need your help. You are an important part of the equation. You are the vanguard, the first, the edgeworker, concerned about giving birth to a new kind of human adulthood, beyond the traditional male and female roles, beyond the capitalist patriarchal empire's morality and values.
This new kind of adulthood is never fully achieved. It is transformational and has no top end. You are forever at risk. It is authentically inclusive of everything that has previously happened and everything that is coming. Yes, a lot is coming...
Next culture adulthood continuously unfolds, step by step, as new surprises appear whenever you have prepared yourself capable of holding the distinctions and consequences of the next initiation process. Each new quality is born through the Death and Resurrection Show, The Phoenix Process, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, aliveness for the rest of your life.
Are you in?
What does adulthood mean?
Questions only exist when you earnestly ask them.
Google the term 'adulthood.' Look at the images.
You will not find an agreed upon object or image.
Adulthood is not like 'house' or 'car', 'death' or 'birth', 'having a job' or 'getting married'.
The images we are given for adulthood arrive by TV sitcom shows or magazine advertisements for buying sunglasses, smart phones, fast cars, brand-name clothes, or amplifying your alcohol and tobacco addictions.
Where, then, are you supposed to find role models for adulthood?
What is the pathway to adulthood?
If you even ask these questions you find yourself outcast, thrown into a quandry, a stinking quagmire.
Losing the way to adulthood turns out to be a wretched local and global problem with disastrous consequences.
And, you... you are the cause of it.
You cause the emptiness of adulthood because you have not reinvented adulthood yet.
You may not have chosen to follow in your parents' footsteps, but have you established pathways to a new adulthood yet?
If you have, please tell us about it. Not the rituals. Not the ceremonies. What are the transformational initiatory processes to authentic adulthood that you deliver? Please give us your website link so that we can tell others about you at initiations.org.
The biggest threat to the future of humanity on Earth is that you don't know that you don't know about adulthood, and then you give up trying to find out. You make the assumptions that what you see around you is all that is possible.
It is not all that is possible. Not by a long shot.
Yes, these are huge assumptions on my part. Please prove me wrong.
Keep in mind that there is a big difference between 'making me wrong' in the inner exclamations of your own mind, and 'proving me wrong in the world' by delivering adult-level results that dignify the honor of being given a human life through serving something greater than yourself.
Adulthood is defined by different cultures at different times.
The photo above of the young men was taken in Rwanda around 2012. At that time, and probably still today, a man is not considered adult until he builds himself a house, attracts a woman and gets her pregnant. The average daily wage for working in a field or construction site all day is 200 Rwandan Francs, equivalent to about 0.47 Euros, the same price as one roof tile, or one hot meal at a street-food stall. Do you want to eat after working hard all day, or have one more of the 3,000 roof tiles you need for your house?
A Rwandan woman is not considered an adult until she lives in one of these self-made houses with a man and has given birth to children. (This data and the photo come from a book written by Marc Sommers called Stuck.)
In western countries we are equally stuck. Adulthood is assumed to suddenly occur when you turn 18 years old, because then you are of legal age in the eyes of the law and you can be sentenced by a state or federal court and locked into a corporate-owned prison. In what ways does modern culture prepare you to be an adult at 18 years old after keeping you confined and controlled in a depressive school system for 14 of those 18 precious first years? At 18 the western world gives you the right to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, drive, and vote in the corporate-controlled political system.
At 18 years old you enter the Western version of the Rwandan Linear Life Plan where you should get a college degree, find a job (JOB stands for Just Over Broke...), buy a car, find a partner, get a different job, buy a house, have kids, start your own business, send your kids to college, sell your business, retire, write your memoirs, go to an old people's home, and die. Do you know anyone out there living the Linear Life Plan?
This website is part of the StartOver.xyz massively-multiplayer online-and-offline personal-transformation game. Here you are challenged to re-think your life and reinvent yourself in preparation to enter a different kind of adulthood: an 'archearchal' adulthood - meaning, adulthood in the culture of archiarchy, the culture that naturally emerges after matriarchy and patriarchy have run their course.
There Is A Phase 1 And A Phase 2 Of Entering Adulthood
"I won't work to try to enter Phase 2 Adulthood until after you have succeeded in accomplishing Phase 1 Adulthood."
Adults Are Made By Other Adults... By Adultmakers.
Where are the adultmakers?
Adulthood In Archiarchy?
Questions only exist when you earnestly become them.
In archearchal cultures, adulthood cannot be known.
How could it be known? If adulthood was known it would be predictable, controllable, and limited to the tiny linear dimensions of your intellectual mind.
Authentic archearchal adulthood is ecstatic in 5 Bodies.
Adulthood is not a finished product.
Adulthood is not a state that can be achieved.
Adulthood is an evolutionary path of engaging an endless series of authentic adulthood initiatory processes.
Where are you in on your path?
Have you started? Yes. Even if this moment is your start, you have started.
Have you finished? No, never. Is compassion finished? Is love finished? Is discovery finished? Is ecstasy finished?
Next-culture adulthood is obviously an investigation.
We move forward in this investigation together through experimenting.
Each experiment is an initiation.
An initiation is any experience after which you are more aware and take more responsibility.
Responsibility is applied consciousness.
In the culture in which you were born and raised - the capitalist patriarchal empire - responsibility is a swear word. Responsibility includes giving up the delusional goal of making a 'profit' in a closed ecology by externalizing real costs to the environment, society at large, third world countries, or future generations.
Where are the adults?
What can you do NOW to become more adult?
Upgrade Your Thoughtware About The Meaning Of The Word 'RESPONSIBILITY'
Experiment ADULTHOO.01:
For this next week use the word 'RESPONSIBILITY' three times each day in conversations. Each time you say the word 'RESPONSIBILITY', also say, "I mean the upgraded thoughtware version of the word 'RESPONSIBILITY' which means... " and then from memory, explain the archiarchy version of the word shown in the Map of Responsibility. Notice what questions people have when you explain this. Answer their questions with curiosity, as an ally for their quest to become more adult. Compare and contrast the old and new meanings of the word 'RESPONSIBILITY'.
Realize That Modern Culture Is Centered On Child Level Responsibility
Experiment ADULTHOO.03
Realize That New Results Depend On New Context
Experiment ADULTHOO.05
Find What It Means That Adulthood is the Gateway to the Archetypal
Decontaminate your Adult Ego State from your:
- Parent Ego State
- Child Ego State
- Gremlin Ego State.
EXPERIMENT Center your daily life and interactions in the Adult Ego State.
EXPERIMENT Meet with someone else who has centered their daily life in their Adult Ego State and go on a 5 Body Intimacy Journey with them to explore Archetypal Domains. Bring back the treasures of what you discover there for your people.
Ongoing Self Re-Invention
What can you do next to become more adult?
Commit Before You Know How
Experiment ADULTHOO.06:
Commitment is an energetic action because commitment is done with your energetic body, not with your mind. Commitment is a transformational action because an authentic commitment changes the shape of your Being. Since the Universe interacts with you according to the shape of your Being, by changing the shape of your Being you force the Universe to interact with you differently than before. After you make the commitment you are a different person: you are a person who is already committed. The Universe conserves know-how. It does not give know-how to someone who is not already committed. Would you? This means that a powerful skill for making things happen (such as building new gameworlds that make the existing gameworlds irrelevant...) is to be able to commit to something before you know how to do it. Most people give the excuse, "I cannot commit because I don't know how to do it." (You also do not know 'how to commit before you know how to do something' before you start committing before you know how to do something!) (Experiment: Choose something relatively harmless and commit to doing it with a deadline before you know how, now, that is, before you know how to commit before you know how.) After you are committed, the Universe (ECCO - Earth Coincidence Control Office) can move coincidental meetings, hidden resources, favorable accidents, and beneficial circumstances into your circle knowing these resources will not be wasted because you are already committed. Adults commit before they know how. It makes their life more interesting.
Be the Space through which your Bright Principles can do their work in the world.
Experiment ADULTHOO.07:
Distill your Bright Principles. Go to the Bright Principles website and follow the procedure to distill your Bright Principles out of your life. That is a separate EXPERIMENT. After getting your Bright Principles checked by a qualified Possibility Manager and after Choosing to serve your Bright Principles, which are two additional EXPERIMENTS, please return here to the ADULTHOOD website and do this experiment:
Choose someone with whom you have previously given your Center away, or someone you consider to be a strong ally of yours, and interact with them as your Bright Principles. Let your Bright Principles do the feeling, the thinking, and the talking as a way of serving the person you are talking with, while you occupy yourself being the grounded, centered, bubbled space through which your Bright Principles do their work in the world.
Establish your Gremlin at your side as an ally and a resource of nonlinear possibility.
Experiment ADULTHOO.08
Go to initiations.org and Commence your Pathway of Ongoing Authentic Adulthood Initiatory Processes
Experiment ADULTHOO.10
Prepare to Jack-In to Your Archetypal Lineage
Experiment ADULTHOO.11:
Privately design and perform a personal signal to your 5 Bodies that you are on the adulthood initiatory path, for real.
Select and Wear 'Forever' a Talisman that can Serve You as a Gateway to Your Archetypal Lineage
Experiment ADULTHOO.12:
It needs to be sturdy enough, and to be without symbols, language, figures, or meaning. This usually means made of metals, stone, wood, horn, or bone.
Go to the Spaceport and Choose 3 New Website Destinations to Explore
Experiment ADULTHOO.13
Buy a copy of Radiant Joy Brilliant Love and do not put it away until you have read it cover to cover. Especially focus on the pages regarding Extraordinary (adult level) Responsibility and Archetypal Responsibility. Read these at your Study Group.
Experiment ADULTHOO.14
Watch the film John Carter and notice what changes in him and in his life while he shifts from Adolescent Responsibility to Adult Level Responsibility.
Matrix Code: MOVIE145.00
Watch the film Willow and notice how the characters of Willow, and Mad Mardigan, and the evil Queen's daughter evolve as they build matrix for holding more and more Adult Responsibility.
Matrix Code: MOVIE195.00
Adults... find them and use them,
while you still can...
Adulthood begins by taking a stand for what you have taken a stand for.
Any mature person can take a stand... but then what. You advertise that you have taken a stand. But how are you implementing your stand?
How does your stand change your day-to-day behavior?
How does your life bow-down to the stand you have taken?
Below are some adults, people who take a stand for the stand they have taken. It has changed their lives. It has changed who they are. They live in service to their stand, and to anyone who authentically needs that service.
No one can tap into the practical magic of these adultmakers for you.
More interestingly, no one can stop you from connecting with them for yourself.
The protocol for making use of what they have to offer is your authentic necessity.
Figure out how to create authentic necessity and great treasures will flow in your general direction.
One day you too might take a stand for what you have taken a stand for.
Elsemaryke Koster
To connect with Elsemaryke Koster, please follow the directions given on this SHEET.
Responsibility
Excerpted from the book Building Love That Lasts by Clinton Callahan
We have all had experiences in Extraordinary Human Relationship. These are moments when love seems to work. Our mind is empty of busy-ness and full of quiet respect, our heart overflows with joy, our body vibrates with passion, and our being is inspired with electric aliveness. We bathe in an abundant love that cannot be described, only felt, and it feels so right. Perhaps you have only dreamed about a love that hits on all four cylinders and hums smoothly and long, but I suspect it has been an actual experience for you – possibly long ago, perhaps only for a few moments. Still. I think that you already know deep in your bones that Extraordinary Human Relationship exists and that you want to get back there . . . often.
There is no secret. Extraordinary Human Relationship is an automatic side effect of responsible Adult actions. For the most part, however, we have a fuzzy idea about what is meant by responsible Adult actions. That is no fault of our own. Our lack of understanding and experience in Adult responsibility is also a characteristic of our general culture.
The tendency of our culture to avoid Adult responsibility creates a virtual boundary that we will have to approach and eventually step through if we want to enter and explore Extraordinary Human Relationship. The virtual boundary restricts our perceptions, our thinking, our feeling, and our actions, and remains an effective barrier until we are ready to take responsibility for breaking the rules. Taking the situation into our own hands and finding our way to the other side of the “normal” barrier is a prerequisite for entering Extraordinary Human Relationship.
Gaining competencies for creating Extraordinary Human Relationship is the equivalent of a university graduate degree program. Your success will come from committing to acquire Extraordinary Human Relationship skills at that same level of discipline and professionalism that you would commit to obtaining an advanced degree. Along the way, large chunks of past understanding about reality and how the world works will fall away in the face of experiential clarifications about what it is to create and maintain Extraordinary Human Relationship. This chapter opens possibility after possibility for finding your way into the domain of Adult responsibility. Because of how quickly the game can slide from Extraordinary back to Ordinary again there is no time when your efforts are not important, even if in the moment they appear to have no success.
RESPONSIBILITY AND PRACTICE
Our education about responsibility has been thorough. We have been trained to avoid taking responsibility. We have been trained to be irresponsible about responsibility.
Instead of learning the ways of gripping responsibility cell by cell and nerve by nerve, so that the universe moves when we move and responds when we speak, we have learned the ways of cheating and getting away with the most for the least. If we can receive a benefit and avoid paying the full price we call this profit. The game has become: Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins! Avoiding responsibility is the life plan we have inherited from our modern culture.
As children we innocently admitted full responsibility for anything we did. But then we found out that if we broke a vase and took responsibility we might get scolded. If we started a fight with our brother and admitted our motives we might get spanked. If we were late for school and revealed that we chose to come late because catching frogs in the stream was far more interesting than sitting in class there would be serious consequences to contend with. We rapidly learned that creating excuses, blaming circumstances, finding scapegoats, lying and cheating were far less painful than taking responsibility. Over the years we perfected our techniques, until now; evading responsibility has become an automatic response that may form the basis of our relationship to life.
We avoid responsibility because we have learned that:
• Responsibility has painful consequences.
• Responsibility makes us guilty.
• Responsibility means it is our fault.
• Responsibility means we are to blame.
• Responsibility means we are the one to get punished.
• Responsibility is a burden difficult to carry, even more difficult to put down.There appears to be nothing attractive about responsibility.
What we have not been shown is the cost of living life as a game of “Responsibility Dodge Ball.” The price tag is so high because we live in a responsible, cause-and-consequence universe.
A responsible universe works like this: if you decide to do an experiment and walk through the woods and pick up litter, even if you hate picking up litter, even if you know that your picking up this litter is a theatrical act, if after the walk you have picked up litter then the litter has actually been picked up.
Avoiding responsibility brings us out of relationship with our fellow human beings, with nature, and with the practical realities of the universe.
The opposite of maneuvering to avoid responsibility is taking responsibility for responsibility. Taking responsibility for responsibility means:• Being at source for.
• Being the cause of.
• Being the creator of.
• Being in relationship with.
• Being the originator of.
• Owning.
• Taking care of.
• Managing.
• Representing.
• Speaking for.
• Taking a stand for.
• Declaring.
• Having the consequences of. . . and so on.Taking responsibility is a delightful and honorable expression of caring for yourself, for others, and for the world. Responsibility is Extraordinary Human Love in action. Entering the domain of Extraordinary Human Relationship will depend on establishing a passionate relationship between yourself and responsibility.
Inquire about this: Is winning the lottery high up on your wish list? If yes, why? Why do we want to win the lottery? From the perspective of responsibility, winning the lottery is how we can cheat the world out of having to be responsible. Western culture teaches that the game of life is won by cheating. If we somehow feel left out or disappointed for having never won the lottery, this could only occur because we lack skills and practical experience in how the technology of responsibility works.
True responsibility is not a burden, despite what the culture tells us. It is a joy and a privilege. Responsibility is intimate participation in a dance with the moment-to-moment causes and needs of the universe. Through responsibility, your creative spirit exuberantly lives and expresses its passions in the world.
The process of establishing reciprocity with responsibility includes both internal and external changes. New parts of the Box get born, a few parts get ejected, and some parts get reengineered. Entering responsibility could be likened to being swallowed whole by a giant, and proceeding through his digestive system with no way out until the stinking end, at which time you have become useful to something greater than yourself. Being digested by a new relationship to responsibility occurs over time and through efforts. Efforts involve both starting new behaviors and diverting yourself from repeating other behaviors. Many experiments for developing responsibility-muscles are outlined in this book.
For starters, begin tracking the little ways that you habitually avoid responsibility in your day-to-day life. At the office, on the street, at home with the family, at parties, in private, wherever you go, whatever you do, simply notice the details. How are you trying to get away with things? Who do you specifically not listen to? What do you avoid noticing? Where do you make little messes without any consideration about cleaning them up? How do you avoid seeing the long-range picture? How do you numb yourself to feeling the consequences of what you do or don’t do? Where do you leave responsibilities to someone unknown to you? Start keeping an Irresponsibility Journal; list whatever you discover. The exercise is not to blame yourself, but rather is meant to encourage you to be accountable and to discover how responsibility is avoided. The more precise your personal examples are, the more clearly you will grasp exactly how your Box works.ANTE UP
The most important ingredient in creating Extraordinary Human Relationship is practice. You don’t get practice by reading a book. Practice you get only when you practice.
You can practice alone. You can practice in the company of others. You can practice in trainings, in workshops, in weekly meetings, in men’s or women’s groups, and in many other different circumstances. Intellectual understanding is valuable and interesting, of course. But regardless of what you understand, long-term changes occur only through consistent practice.
We could have learned many of the skills related to creating Extraordinary Human Relationship as children, but our culture did not provide these skills for us. If we want these skills now, it is within our power to search for them wherever they exist, and start regularly practicing them ourselves. When we speak differently or process our thoughts and feelings differently, the improved quality of our relationships will naturally radiate. Each more responsible behavior improves our relationships over time.
Establishing responsible Adult attitudes and actions in our repertoire of behaviors is like paying the ante to get into a poker game. If we don’t pay the ante we can’t even start to play the game. Of course, paying the ante does not guarantee that we will win – it just gets us into the game. But if we don’t pay the ante there’s no chance at all of winning. The way to pay the ante in Extraordinary Human Relationship is to practice relationship according to certain clear distinctions. The rest of this chapter is devoted to establishing those distinctions. It will present far more than you can reasonably be expected to absorb all at once. An individual can only manage to effectively advance one or two change initiatives at any one time. Otherwise it is easy to feel overwhelmed and then to stop all efforts. If you stop all efforts, the Box wins. Overwhelm is one of the Box’s favorite self-defense mechanisms.THOUGHTMAP OF OVERWHELM
Overwhelm is one of the Box’s favorite self-defense mechanisms:
STEP 1: Take on too much.
STEP 2: Feel overwhelmed.
STEP 3: Stop practicing.
STEP 4: Go back to normal.
Voilà! The Box wins. Very clever, Mr. Box.
Pace yourself. What this means will be different for each person. Perhaps you can best pace yourself by first reading all the way through this chapter while making notes about what most interests you. Then you can go back to those items and start working with them. Or perhaps while reading you will find one or two practices that inspire you to take immediate action. In that case, start experimenting with only those few things, but on a regular basis. Whatever your approach, make the decision now to take persistent baby steps. In terms of change, stable results are more likely to blossom through micro-experiments repeatedly practiced over the long run with consistency, rather than through dramatic but sporadic sudden moves.
Radical Responsibility
Adult Level responsibility is fair and reasonable. People should keep their agreements and do their share. They should clean up the messes that they make.
Adult level responsibility establishes a foundation for excellent communications and collaborations. Life could hardly seem better than this.
And...
Once you stabilize in adult level responsibility, the Adult Ego State, uncontaminated by Child Ego State, Parent Ego State, Gremlin Ego State, or Demon Ego States... you start to notice a doorway opening up over behind your left shoulder. If you take Radical Responsibility for that doorway existing, meaning that it is no one else's fault that nobody ever told you about this before, just your own delusional self-induced blindness, then you may find how to go through that doorway into to Archetypal Domains. You learn how to let go of fairness, reasonableness, and you do a twist, a gentle rotation of your energetic body, your Being, ninety degrees out of phase with three-dimensional reality, and you slide smoothly sideways through the 9 Gaps into the Archetypal Domains where Archetypal Intimacies can occur and where you can navigate 5-Body Intimacy Journeys.
We wish you the best of luck.
- NOTE: This website is a Bubble in the Bubble Map of the free-to-play massively-multiplayer online-and-offline thoughtware-upgrade matrix-building personal-transformation real-life adventure-game called StartOver.xyz. It is a doorway to experiments that upgrade your thoughtware so you can relocate your point of origin and create more possibility. Your knowledge is what you think about. Your thoughtware is what you use to think with. When you change your thoughtware, you go through a liquid state as your mind reorganizes itself. Liquid states can bring up transformational feelings and emotions. By upgrading your thoughtware you build matrix to hold more consciousness and leave behind a low drama life of reactivity. No one can upgrade your thoughtware for you. More interestingly, no one can stop you from upgrading your thoughtware. Our theory is that when we collectively build 1,000,000 new Matrix Points we will change the morphogenetic field of the human race for the better. Please choose responsibly to read this website. Reading this whole website is worth 1 Matrix Point. Doing any of the experiments earns you additional Matrix Points. Please use Matrix Code ADULTHOO.00 to log your Matrix Point for reading this website on StartOver.xyz. Thank you for playing full out!