One of my friends once remarked that I had better give up the big quest for enlightenment, right then, because, she said, she could see me being a bitter old man, at the end of my days. I’m here to report that I’m old enough now, and I’m happy; and I’m glad that I didn’t give up that quest. Imagine going to your death unprepared for meeting true nature, unprepared to meet reality intimately, no-face to no-face. Death is the big wake up.
It is tragic really, that we are in a trance about what’s going on, here, and we don’t encourage inquiry into ‘This.’ So that when our children ask the big questions, they get nonsense in reply; or, at least, nothing straight. Reports that I get from people, in private conversation, show that children are often left feeling that there must be something wrong with them, for not knowing how it really is – this seeing, thinking, smelling, tasting, touching, walking, running, laughing, spewing, crying, and turning somersaults. Exactly what is this? Few are the occasions when a child’s questions about what matters – the ultimate questions – are met with the respect that they deserve. It’s now acknowledged by some researchers, in the Integral Psychology and Integral Spirituality field at least, that children can have transcendent experiences, though they don’t have the conceptual development to integrate them. They slip into the shadows, to await a crisis in adulthood.
As a result of the consensus trance, we have a majority of people die confused. In the spiritual line of development, they don’t ever grow up. I’ll go as far as to say that, they haven’t discovered the only thing worth discovering. (”The only game on the block,” as I heard Peter Fenner say.) So, my childhood question – “Is there anything?” – is a question that has spurred my efforts to be clear in myself about what’s real and what’s not. I’m glad that this has been my life-long koan, because – when rightly handled – it has made my life really alive. It’s certainly not a “habit, like saccharine.”
My father told me (when I was about 26 years old) that when I was a child (younger than five), I would ask him “Who am I?” He said that I wouldn’t take any answer that they gave me. However, there he was sitting telling me this, and he added that he thought that I wasn’t right in the head. Their help, of course, amounted to identifying me with my body, and with the roles of son and brother; and telling that I had a name. So, who wasn’t right in the head? The one who had come upon the enigma of the immediacy of perception; or the ones who had learned, in their childhood, to identify with their narratives?
That was my father’s most repeated message to me throughout his life, that I wasn’t right in the head. No wonder that my entry into formlessness, Buddhist meditative state, was by seeing that I have no head. (Refer to the Heart Sutra for some help with this, and the work of Douglas Harding.) Not having a culture like Tibetan culture – where (before the Communist cultural destruction) if a child asked these questions she was recognised as having a gift – means that a lot of intelligent, sensitive children are not given the support they need.
Of course, I’m all up for an explanation of my childhood doubt which includes the possibility – nay, the certainty – that my ego-development suffered some blows, and that, as a result, I was confused about who I was. There’s something to learn from that perspective. However, it lacks a thoroughness of explanatory power, because it doesn’t include a depth of understanding of the fundamental luminous ground of awareness. How come, when the usual narratives are suspended, in child or adult, consciousness is non-local? Explanations in terms of neurosis don’t let the conventional society off the hook. They don’t get that the childhood questions around identity have a valid basis in existential realities, and that it’s a gormless world that Western children are born and trained into.
This all makes me reflect on the etymology of ‘education.’ It has a Latin origin: from educere. “To educe,” which in this context means to develop something from a latent state. So the meaning is to ‘draw out.’ You would think that a good idea would be to draw out the wisdom within the child, instead of instilling rigid patterns. Parents are, alas, far more often, agents of the culture, inducting their children into the consensus trance.
In case you are interesting in reading a stark description, in terms of trance induction, how our parents bring us into the consensus trance, then the rest of this article is about that, in the form of extensive quotes from Charles Tart, formerly a researcher at the University of Stanford. They’re chilling. I extracted them from his book, Waking Up: The Obstacles to Human Potential.
In the last paragraph of the chapter, he writes: “But,” you might well say, “I don’t feel like I’m in a trance!” Of course not. We think of trance as something unusual, and our ordinary state as usual. We only realize we are in a trance state by reasoning about it, as we have done in this chapter, and/or by experiencing what it is like to be out of trance, to be awake.
Think of it as like being in a dream. You can sometimes reason in your dream – that is, question your experience in the dream – and as a result, realise that you are dreaming. (That’s why the Tibetans encourage dream yoga – not to get mentally healthy, exactly, but to train for the states of consciousness between lives.)