The fourth stage of life
Adi Da Love Ananda:
“The fourth stage of life and beyond really doesn’t have much significance in the common world. It’s not desirable. It has no use. And this is why it’s so subject to taboos. It’s why any of the stages of life higher than the third are so subject to taboos because they don’t have any use in this common world which depends on everybody’s participation to guarantee, in some kind of way guarantee, survival, you see.”
"The fourth stage, and all the later stages, cannot be conceived within fixed periods of time. The duration of the higher stages of life depends entirely upon the individual’s qualities and his or her spiritual practice of self-transcendence."
“Without this Divine Impulse to Realize, this impulse to Samadhi, religious life becomes rather conventional and socially oriented. It is organized around the first three stages of life.”
