Human Development Stages: From Physical to Mental Growth
Fundamentally, it's only about being able to move - just seven years focused solely on that. If someone were to observe all the energies, looking at a child from birth to seven or ten years old, and if one continued to develop with that same rapidity and intensity, with the entire being focused only on physical development, by fifty years old they would be thirty meters tall - an impossible situation. So in that first period, all attention is focused solely on creating a physical body capable of relating to the external world. After that come another ten years or so - seven to ten years - to create an emotional body, an emotional aspect. This is when the great emotions develop, but then it also becomes refined with different feelings, discovering the various sentimental nuances that one can experience. Finally, after around twenty years, a mental body develops properly. One forms an idea - a more coherent idea of the world, even a philosophical idea. One has learned various things, has built up knowledge. In the end, after about thirty years, they are a complete person. A personality has developed - someone capable of doing their work. Remember that this "I" incarnated in a certain historical period, in a certain situation, solely to allow us to do work - that is, to learn some fundamental things. We don't repeat the same thing every day forever - we repeat it until one has learned, has grasped the essence of that thing, and then many other things. This is our conscious personality. But in reality, there's another world in between - the unconscious, subconscious. Because it's not just that one might say, "Well, all in all, my personality isn't bad - I've studied, I've done things, I've trained myself, I've done emotional work and I'm fine." No, that's the conscious part. Then there's the subconscious world, which is immense, for better and for worse. We have physical realities, physiological ones like the liver - even if you don't know what it does, it functions. Even two hundred years ago, people didn't know how the liver worked, but everyone had one and it worked perfectly fine without problems. So everything is regulated unconsciously - the heart, breathing. Breathing is also a key through which you can act consciously to enter this other world, this other environment, because you can act upon it. But all the other physiological processes - the intestines, all of these - operate unconsciously. Not only that, but there are all the mechanisms that through training you teach the body. For example, driving a car - when you drive, if you're a person talking in the car, it's assumed that your consciousness is directed toward that conversation, not toward changing gears or turning the steering wheel. You're concentrated on the conversation with the person next to you, but if a cat runs across the road, you brake. So there's a subconscious world that's very much awake and doing its job. If I spend a bit more time training something - for example, speaking - I don't consciously direct how to position my tongue when speaking. I trained that when I was a year and a half or two years old. Then, practically, there's no longer any need for the "I's" participation to do that particular work. For example, there are many artists - dancers or figure skaters - who must repeat, repeat, repeat to exhaustion every minute detail of the physical body, so that it has learned. They start the performance and there's no longer interference from the "I" - it's mechanical. Unless they're exceptional, the real champions - then there's also the "I's" participation, but with full presence to themselves. They must simply be present, but the body is completely trained. The same applies emotionally - there are mechanisms that we create over the years, a way of feeling. We see a person and create a mechanism of being happy, sad, reactive, or developing complexes. Or there are traumas in our life. Since the personality couldn't survive with that trauma, the "I" is removed and a complex is created. So when for some reason the "I" approaches that zone - an event similar to what happened - one feels anxiety, pressure, anger. Anxiety and fear are signals that the unconscious gives to the "I" to say "No, stay away." One could even have complexes from previous incarnations. I know people who at three years old are afraid of water - a phobia with no reason to exist in that incarnation, so it goes back to a previous incarnation. Then there's the mind - you train yourself to think. For example, if I give a conference in Portuguese, I don't stop to choose words in Portuguese. Automatically, I want to say certain things, I have an idea, I've trained my mental body, my mind, to select the language, and it organizes according to that language. Now in Italian, I don't choose - I don't remind my "I" every time to "speak in Italian" - no, I'm here and I go into Italian. So you've created a mechanism here too.