A Childlike Reality

Children often bring a smile to our lips. Their worldview unfettered by outside influence and devoid of any political pressure often provides us with laughter and sometimes remarkably powerful but simple insights into our complex world.

I have played more than my part in terms of aiding this phenomenom having fathered four children to date and each and everyone of them has taught me something valuable or brought a smile to my face in terms of what they did or said. All kids are different too right from the very beginning. Having watched my twin boys grow up I can say that… different from the very first second of life outside the womb. Obviously, it is my youngest child that now alone has this childlike ability to point out glitches in the matrix as my three sons are now all grown and have lost their childlike innocence.

Just the day before yesterday, as we drove to the store, I was moaning about the lack of sales for my books and explaining that I would really like to have one of my books (if not all) sell in the thousands or tens of thousands and not just the hundreds. Deni told me that I should write about something different like Lions or Tigers and if not that then about my life. I explained that my life really isn’t of much interest to other people and that I doubted that book would sell. Deni’s response – “it will if you put pictures of me in it!”

This childlike confidence might not seem like very much but if you think about it, if thoughts have the power to create reality, then why do we not get what we want? The answer to that question is because no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that we are thinking positively and believing completely, we also know that we are not. As adults, we have been told so many times that we can’t or we shouldn’t that it has become an inbuilt mechanism to ensure our failure and the failure of the becoming reality of our thoughts. I start out all positive and confident that my thoughts are of best selling books or a vacation in Mexico. I am sure that this will happen if I just keep picturing it, believing in it and seeing it. a couple of hours later though, it starts. “Don’t be bloody daft,” says that initial passing doubting thought. To be followed by internal bickering no doubt and ultimately failure. The child though has yet to be programed for failure. The child still knows how to believe without self-doubt. The child ought to be able to really create their own reality. It’s a shame Deni can’t help me create mine.

I hear resonance of this when I think of the words by Jesus about entering heaven. He says that whoever wants to enter heaven must first convert and then become as little children. I would see heaven as the state that Humans should aspire to and conversion would be to understand this. To become as little children would restore our inner confidence and ability to believe.

To become childlike has a meaning to me that involves cutting away the baggage that has been placed upon me and being truly what I was meant to be. A similar analogy is the Fool and to be foolish. In essence being childlike and being foolish share some key characteristics in that our ego is as yet under developed and our outlook unfettered by the jaundiced views of life’s experience. To the point where, many years ago, one of my sons walked out of the bathroom and across the house past numerous assembled visitors with his trousers round his ankles to ask Dad “Can you wipe my bum please?”