offspring. For to the parents belongs,
once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane of
consciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first four
poles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane of
consciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers.
All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What
sex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents.

But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallow
their children before the children can get out of their clutches. And
even if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--to
school or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been done
before. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole community
forcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, and
particularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of the
warm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist on
rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in the
child-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works in
this one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that work
most effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh of
love, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child is
entangled.

So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of its
childhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking now
to a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful new
dynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatally
bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But there
is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the
dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already
established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in
the further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure as
if you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what it
is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your
child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man,
woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, your
cherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You have
established between your child and yourself the bond of further
sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacred
love. The parents establish between t