Come to Me as a Child
A child is born with a clear, pure awareness. Not an awareness of this or that or an awareness accompanied by interpretations, commentary, judgments, or preferences. A simple clear awareness is experienced without labels and filled with a natural wonder, awe and curiosity. And that miracle of beingness is experienced, but at the time unknown to the infant.
We use the same terms – empty awareness, pure awareness, choiceless awareness, and timeless awareness – for both this natural foundational awareness of childhood and the re-discovered beingness touched later in life, if fortunate, by the spiritual seeker. Thus, the often-quoted words from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning ......
What happens that causes us to forget what we subsequently spend years and great effort trying to re-capture? The answer … Human life! That’s what happens. Human existence. To successfully navigate through the stages of human life we begin to collect skills, experiences, knowledge, preferences, patterns, perspectives, and protectiveness. We develop a personal self, an ego structure. And this mentally constructed ego self separates and disconnects from its source … natural presence, and that is the fundamental cause of human confusion and suffering.
If you are raising a child you can watch the necessary but poignant loss of the pristine self in service to the development of this functional ego and the capacity to live as an adult in culture. Years ago, I recall writing a letter to my young grandchild with the intention that it be delivered decades later by her parents. I wanted the letter to serve as a reminder to my granddaughter of her pure vital essence which I witnessed in her infancy but would soon be forgotten in the rush to “mature” into adult life.
All we really need from a personal self is the simple capacity to carry out the functions of human life – basic memory, work and relational skills, intellectual capacity, and so on. We don’t need the troublesome, but more complex aspects of the personal self. We don’t need excess individualism and its disconnectedness, self-cherishing and self-centeredness, protectiveness and defensiveness, the contortions required for social standing or accomplishment, or the loss of our simple natural self. These excesses turn a simple and carefree functional personal self into a complex seemingly separate self that makes our true nature increasingly inaccessible.
The spiritual journey is not about the reduction of stress and reactivity, although quieting the active mind is a valuable pre-requisite. It enhances the probability of re-discovering the joy of our natural self. The spiritual journey is much as Eliot informs us, returning home to our foundational simple presence and being and knowing it for the first time. To know our essence as an adult, which is impossible for the infant, is to desire, cherish, and devote oneself to living from the heart center of our being – from essence, spaciousness, infinite possibilities, joy, and yes, love.
Of course, our core self never leaves us, it is ever present although obscured by our complex lives. How do we begin the recovery process? First, there must first be a strong and natural desire to return to who we are and let go of who we are not. T.S. Eliot states it this way:
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
What we are not now is presence, beingness, the natural self. In order to reveal this natural state, we must begin with what and where we are now – taken over and run by an out-of-control and endlessly busy personal “I.” We must turn that energy towards the journey home.
As mentioned before, we can begin with one of many quieting techniques (mindfulness, mantra recitation, guided imagery and so on) to quiet the course noise of our usual mind. However, there comes a time, early on, when we must cease utilizing quieting techniques and let go of meditation. It is then that we allow the natural stilling capacity of mind and body to bring us back home without effort.
Like the silt that natural settles to the bottom of an aquarium, sensory and mental activity left alone, that is not given attention, settle by themselves into the emptiness and presence of natural awareness. A word here about leaving mental activity alone. To use a Buddhist metaphor, we allow mental activity to enter the front door of the mind and exit the back door without serving it tea! No effort required. No interest shown.
Allowing the mind to naturally settle, we slowly experience, once again, the presence we lived so naturally in childhood. The more time we practice allowing our mind to naturally settle, in formal practice and during ordinary activities, the less importance we will attribute to the impermanent movements of the ordinary mind, and they will naturally dissipate and dissolve into the ever present background of still, clear, and simple awareness.
And then we shall once again reveal our home, joy, peace, and freedom. “Truly,” the bible says, “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”