The Secret Spiritual World of Children: The Breakthrough Discovery that Profoundly Alters Our Conventional View of Children's Mystical Experiences
312
The Secret Spiritual World of Children: The Breakthrough Discovery that Profoundly Alters Our Conventional View of Children's Mystical Experiences
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781577318590 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 920,600 |
| File size: | 375 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Secret Spiritual World of Children
By Tobin Hart
New World Library
Copyright © 2003 Tobin HartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57731-859-0
CHAPTER 1
Listening for Wisdom
In the information age, sacred texts, great ideas, and valuable information of all sorts is readily available. God is in the bookstore and on the Web. We no longer need permission, professor, or priest to gain access to the mysteries. But while we can buy an insightful book or find good advice about living, we cannot purchase wisdom. Wisdom is not an object, accumulated like possessions. Instead, it is an activity — a way of knowing and being that emerges through an opening of mind and heart. In wisdom we see into the heart of something or see it from a greater perspective.
We might assume that wisdom comes only with a great deal of experience, reserved for the elders or for a rare few. However, in spite of their naïveté in the ways of the world, they often show a remarkable capacity for cutting to the heart of a matter. While children may not have the language or thinking capacity of an adult, they have the capacity to open to the deep currents of consciousness. Through that opening may come a still, small voice, a pearl of insight, or maybe an angel.
Divine Homework
It had been several years since my introduction to Haley's angel. This whole relationship was unexpected enough for her mother and me, but one afternoon we were further surprised when her angel offered some unusual help with a fourth-grade homework assignment.
My wife and I had been very careful not to make too much of Haley's angel in front of her or to lead the conversation about it in any way. Generally, we had simply listened and asked questions whenever she mentioned it. Deep into one Sunday afternoon Haley, nine at the time, had a report to write for her class on a significant black figure in history. She had chosen Mahalia Jackson, the great gospel singer who had been a powerful voice for civil rights during her lifetime. Over the previous two weeks, Haley had found a book and downloaded a couple of brief one-page articles from the Internet on the singer's life. She was now finishing typing this report. However, she was not much of a typist, and so this was a slow and sometimes painful process.
As I walked into the room where she was working, it was easy to feel the tension and imagine her teeth grinding away. She had worked pretty hard on the paper and done a respectable job so far. Most importantly, she seemed to have learned a few things about Mahalia's life and about writing a paper. But as time and patience were running out, it had reached the point that the goal was simply to finish the thing, which was due the next morning. Frustration was setting in, and she was still in need of a conclusion and desperately in need of a shift in mood.
While she was walking out of the room to take a short break, I spontaneously asked if she wanted to try an experiment. As she began to climb the stairs to her bedroom, I suggested that she lie down on her bed and ask her angel if she knew anything about Mahalia Jackson. I had never suggested anything even remotely like this before, and I am not quite sure where my suggestion came from. Haley, more than ready for any distraction from her typing, agreed.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, she hopped downstairs. "How ya' doing?" I asked. She said, "Good — I just saw Mahalia." "You did?" I said, not being sure what to expect. "I was kinda' surprised that I actually saw her and how easy it was to find her," she announced. She then started to tell me about what Mahalia had said to her. I stopped her in midsentence and quickly grabbed pen and paper so I could take dictation. She then proceeded to tell me a wide range of very subtle and personal information about Mahalia Jackson that I could not find in the materials she had read — I checked.
After nearly ten minutes of relaying this rich material, Haley said that Mahalia wanted to tell her a "main thing" about her life. "Mahalia said that her life was filled with three things: joy, happiness, and fear. She felt joy that black people and white people were giving her a lot of attention. She felt happy that she was able to do just what she wanted to do: sing her [gospel] music and sing about love and God. She also said that she was afraid — afraid because she was getting so popular and helping black people and white people to come together that some people would not like it and might try to hurt her." These specific ideas were not at all explicit in the materials she had read. But they seemed to capture Mahalia Jackson's life with riveting clarity and directness.
After I finished taking dictation, Haley added some of this information as a conclusion to her report. She suddenly had a new sense of intimacy and excitement for this woman and for her research paper. Because of her very personal "chat," she now felt like she really knew Mahalia firsthand. This was a very different sensation than she had had just thirty minutes earlier. A project that had been sliding toward drudgery now became one of inspiration, especially fitting for the nature of Mahalia Jackson's life, whose voice and presence inspired so many.
I asked Haley how she'd gotten in touch with Mahalia. She said, "It was easy; I just got relaxed on my bed and asked my angel for help. Then, in my mind, I went to www.mahaliajackson.com, and there she was standing right in front of me. We talked and she told me about her life."
Did Haley meet with the consciousness of Mahalia Jackson? Does she really see an angel? Great sages and mystics have recognized the possibility for hearing deep guidance, just like Haley does. Abraham, Moses, Mohammed, and Mary all claimed to tap a deep source of wisdom. So, too, did Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, George Washington Carver, and Winston Churchill. Socrates called his inner voice Daimon, which means divine. In first-century China, individuals called the wu received guidance from inner voices. Medieval Jewish rabbis conversed with disincarnate teachers known as the Maggidim. Christian mystics attributed their inner guidance to the Holy Ghost, deceased saints, and angels. The ancients used the word genius, which meant a guardian spirit and is the origin for the word genie. In the Middle Ages, the genius came to be known as a guardian angel.
In addition to thinking of wisdom as connecting with a source outside us, like an angel, the mystics and sages also talk about the source as emanating from deep within. Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystical poet, offers an image:
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It's fluid,
and it doesn't move from the outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
The second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
Would it be more accurate to think of Haley's angel as part of herself, "a fountainhead from within"? The source of guidance and knowledge, like Haley's, may indeed be thought of as on the inside — an inner fountainhead — or on the outside — the muses of the ancient Greeks or maybe a guardian angel. What is most significant is not the concept we use to describe this knowing, but the fact that, by whatever name, it is available. Its value is measured by the quality of what is heard and how it impacts a life. Haley is able to tap a source of insight, loving comfort, and guidance. Children open to these depths of consciousness naturally and regularly. But most contemporary maps of child (and adult) psychology underestimate the complexity of the human being's spiritual self. We need to rehabilitate the idea of our larger nature. The point is that it may be hard to recognize the inner wisdom, and especially to appreciate it, in children if we do not acknowledge its existence.
A Flowing Stream
Many traditions describe two main aspects of the human: what we might call the "Big Self" and the "small self." The small self is understood as the ego in Western psychology; in Buddhism this is called the "lesser self." We all have this self and it develops over time. But in the sacred traditions, the lesser self is not mistaken for our whole being. Rather than being directed by its fluctuations, worry, and grasping, we are told that we must learn to use this small self instead of being used by it.
As a source of wise guidance and insight, Sri Aurobindo, the Indian sage, called the Big Self the "inner teacher." Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century Dominican priest, referred to the "inner man." Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of the "oversoul." Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli wrote about various dimensions of this Big Self as the "higher self," "transpersonal self," and the "universal self."
Around the end of the nineteenth century, American psychologist and philosopher William James likened consciousness to a flowing stream. Through the Big Self, in some moments children are able to tap the deeper currents in the stream. A simple map of this stream may be useful before we go further.
The surface of our being is the small self, or ego. The small self helps us operate in the world — it assesses danger, worries about the past, and thinks about the future. The small self generates the internal dialogue that occupies so much of our daily existence: Do I like this? Why did I just say that? It also sees itself as separate from others and therefore often seeks fulfillment at the expense of others.
Beneath this surface lies the subconscious mind. Actions, thoughts, and feelings of the ego both influence and are influenced by the subconscious. If part of us makes a directive, the subconscious can follow. For example, we can drive a car without thinking of every arm motion necessary to turn the wheel; we brush our teeth without having to think through every step. The subconscious not only responds to the ego, it also affects it. We may have personal traits that are "hardwired" from birth or we may have internalized the voices of a parent or the media, and these may shape our actions, feelings, and thoughts. Maybe these are the expectations of our family or the media about who we should be, what we should look like, and so forth.
Dipping deeper into the subconscious, we could also think of perinatal experiences, for example a difficult birth, or karma, as Hindu tradition maintains, as expressing its influence through the subconscious. We are generally not fully aware of these, but they form a kind of programming that automatically influences our responses, for better or worse. A challenging situation may activate the programmed response in a child, such as "I can do this; I'm competent." Or, on the other hand, "I'm no good; I can't handle this." Most approaches to psychotherapy are attempts at overcoming or recognizing this programming.
The realm of the subconscious is not only individual — mine or yours — but it is also ours. The stream meets other streams. Individual subconscious currents intermingle and form a shared region of the subconscious. Haley can find Mahalia Jackson because her consciousness exists in this collective mind. You and I may have a feeling about a relative or close friend at a distance and then have our intuition confirmed. Insight from this level is often personal and personalized. For example, Mahalia spoke about her life specifically.
Descending slightly further in the stream, the collective region also contains universal patterns or archetypes, as Carl Jung described. These "first patterns" may be thought of as deep structures of human consciousness that form the internal architecture of the mind. Hints of this come in common images or concepts that emerge across cultures and time, such as the image of a circle representing wholeness or universal notions of roles like warrior or healer, which form a kind of template of human personality. Subconscious currents intermingle to form a shared subconscious. Streams flow, mingle, and merge.
There is still more to who we are. Deeper into the stream is what we will call the superconscious. When our awareness opens to this level we may experience inspiration and universal insight, or feel wholeness and unity. This is deep into the Big Self, which is not neatly contained within an individual. The particularities of the subconscious often serve as a filter between the self and the super- conscious, personalizing or coconstructing the forms or patterns that are recognized as safe friends. As you will see later in the chapter, two-year-old Alissa says a dolphin tells her things, Diana feels the presence of her deceased father.
We might recognize and describe the deepest currents and our most expanded awareness as Christ Consciousness, Buddha nature, Tao, oneness, God, void, cosmic consciousness, and so forth. John Steinbeck described this recognition of unity in his work The Grapes of Wrath: "Maybe a fella ain't got a soul of his own, but on'y a piece of a big soul — the one big soul that belongs to ever'body." And physicist Erwin Schrodinger concluded, "Mind by its very nature is a singularte tantum. I should say: the overall number of minds is just one."
The task of spiritual development is regularly described as expanding our awareness in order to meet more of who we really are. The Christian Gnostic Gospels refer to this as revealing what truly exists. The Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjeiff called this "waking up." We might say that "wisdom is the process by which we come to know that the limited thing we thought was our whole being is not." This implies that we grow in wisdom as we recognize, accept, and live from more of ourselves — recognizing our whole being and even the unity of all life — not just a limited ego. I should note that this is not just about accepting our higher angels, but also about facing and integrating our shadows, all those aspects that we have not owned; we grow as we face our fears and limitations as well as our inspirations.
This simple map gives an image of the depths of our inner nature and how we are simultaneously both separate and interconnected, as the sacred traditions often point out. While there may be different currents in a stream, ultimately the currents are all stream, all made of the same stuff, an undivided unity of consciousness.
Life Is about Love
"Life is about love," my five-year-old pronounced one day on a bookmark-shaped slip of paper. There had been no religious training, no prior discussion, just this private note that she wrote when she was playing by herself. We have kept it on the refrigerator for years because it serves as such a pure and wise reminder about what is important. Wisdom is distinguished from bare intellect especially by the integration of the heart.
Leslie described an opening to insight that took place when she was eight years old. "I was in church thinking about praying," she related. "Suddenly, in a flash, I understood that I should be praying for love and wisdom. I suddenly 'got' that this was the way to use prayer. This was never suggested to me or even really talked about; but this insight came to be my regular way of praying. Whenever I prayed, I prayed for love and wisdom. This sounds simple, but it provided an incredible focus for me. This was my special secret. Even up until this moment, I have never told anyone about it. Up until my late twenties, I continued this style of prayer. Around the time of my marriage, it changed somewhat. I started to pray to have my heart opened. ... This seems like a different version of the same theme.
"I think that at some point I was expecting transcendence or something from my prayers, and it wasn't until later that I realized that what I was getting were small glimpses, a direction, an insight, or an attitude about handling situations. I didn't have the maturity to realize until later that wisdom involves acting on what we know — walking it out in the world. I had to take those glimpses and live them in order to learn from them."
Wisdom is not just about what we know, but especially about how we live, how we embody knowledge and compassion in our life and, as the great essayist and poet Emerson said, blend a sense of what is true with what is right. While this is often the daily challenge played out over the course of our lives, some children seem to have it all together remarkably well.
An eleven-year-old boy named Mattie Stepanek seems to have a remarkable embodied wisdom. He is wise like an old guru, but with the funniness and liveliness of a child. The clarity and simplicity of his being and his single-minded mission to "spread peace in the world" are amazing. Mattie has multiple sclerosis and for many years has been precariously poised between life and death. His three older siblings have already died of the disease. Mattie had three wishes for his life: (1) to get his book of poetry published; (2) to meet his hero, former president Jimmy Carter; and (3) to be on Oprah Winfrey's talk show so he could "spread peace."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Secret Spiritual World of Children by Tobin Hart. Copyright © 2003 Tobin Hart. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Foreword by Joseph Chilton Pearce,
Introduction,
Part 1: A Secret World,
Chapter 1: Listening for Wisdom,
Chapter 2: Wonder,
Chapter 3: Between You and Me,
Chapter 4: Wondering,
Chapter 5: Seeing the Invisible,
Part 2: Balancing Heaven and Earth,
Chapter 6: Spiritual Parenting,
Chapter 7: A Spiritual Curriculum: Ten Sources of Power and Perspective,
Chapter 8: Difficulties and Discernment,
Chapter 9: And a Child Shall Lead Us,
Afterword: Lifting a Veil,
Notes,
About ChildSpirit Institute,