Life has an inner pattern, it is good to understand it. Every seven years physiologists say the body and mind go through a crisis and a change. Every seven years all the cells of the body change, are completely renewed. In fact, if you live seventy years – the average limit – your body dies ten times. Each seventh year everything changes. It is just like changing seasons. In seventy years the circle is complete. The line that moves from birth comes to death. The circle is complete in seventy years. It has ten divisions.

In fact, man's life should not be divided into childhood, youth, old age. That is not very scientific because every seven years a new age, a new step is taken.

For the first seven years a child is self-centered, as if he is the center of the whole world. The whole family moves around him. Whatever his needs are, they are to be fulfilled immediately. Otherwise he will go into a tantrum, anger, rage. He lives like an emperor, a real emperor. His mother, his father, are all servants, and the whole family exists just for him. And of course he thinks the same is true for the wider world. The moon rises for him, the sun rises for him, the seasons change for him. A child remains absolutely egoistic, self-centered for seven years. If you ask psychologists, they will say a child remains masturbatory for seven years, satisfied with himself. He does not need anything, anybody. He feels complete.

After seven years – a breakthrough. The child is no longer self-centered, he becomes eccentric, literally. Eccentric, the word means going out of the center. He moves toward others. The other becomes the important phenomenon. Friends, gangs… Now he is not so interested in himself, he is interested in the other, the bigger world. He enters an adventure to know who this “other” is. Inquiry starts.

After the seventh year, the child becomes a great questioner. He questions everything. He becomes a great skeptic because there is inquiry: he asks millions of questions. He bores the parents to death, he becomes a nuisance. He is interested in the other, and everything of the world is of interest. Why are the trees green? Why did God create the world? Why is this so? He starts becoming more and more philosophic, inquiry, skepticism. He insists on going into things.
He kills a butterfly to see what is inside, destroys a toy just to see how it ticks, throws a clock just to look into it, how it goes on ticking and chiming, what is the matter inside? He becomes interested in the other, but the other remains of the same sex. He is not interested in girls. If other boys are interested in girls, he will think they are sissy. Girls are not interested in boys. If some girl is interested in boys, and plays with them, she is a tomboy, not normal, average; something is wrong. Psychoanalysts and psychologists will say this second stage is homosexual.
After the fourteenth year, a third door opens. He is no longer interested in boys, girls are no longer interested in girls. They are polite, but not interested. That's why any friendship that happens between the seventh year and the fourteenth is the deepest because the mind is homosexual, and no longer in life will such friendship happen again. Those friends remain friends forever, it was such a deep tie. You will become friendly with people, but it will remain an acquaintance, not that deep phenomenon that happened between the seventh and the fourteenth year.

After the fourteenth year, a boy is not interested in boys. If everything goes normal, if he is not stuck somewhere, he will be interested in girls. Now he is becoming heterosexual. Not only interested in the others, but really the other. Because when a boy is interested in boys, the boy may be other, but he is still a boy just like himself, not exactly the other. When a boy becomes interested in a girl, now he is really interested in the opposite, the real other. When a girl becomes interested in a boy, now the world enters.

The fourteenth year is a great revolutionary year. Sex becomes mature, one starts thinking in terms of sex. Sex fantasies become prominent in the dreams. The boy becomes a great Don Juan, starts courting. Poetry arises, romance. He is entering the world.