There’s an old Biblical saying that goes something like “only children will enter the kingdom of heaven”.  Much objective truth can be distilled from these very simple words.

Let’s begin by turning back the life clock to when you were born. You were born a unique individual with an inbuilt programme that was yours alone. You expressed yourself freely and uniquely. You did what made you feel happy. You held within you a life of untapped potential.

At the ages of 3 – 4 years old your development and mental processes were quite undeveloped and so much of your experience about life was limited to how you were feeling in the moment. You felt happy, you felt sad, you felt excited, you felt pain, you felt pleasure….This was your truth.

There would have been minimal self-talk because you wouldn’t have yet acquired the mental ability to linguistically translate experiential feelings into understanding knowledge and to store that as memory.

Consequently your ability to store information as memories would have been limited to visual queues and also your ability to make projections about the future would similarly have been limited.

You’re attention would have been predominantly focussed on what was occurring in the moment. Either that made you happy or it didn’t. There was no interpretative story based around the feelings.

Children of that age live from moment to moment and when they do something it takes all their attention. They immerse themselves in what they are doing 100% and are object orientated.

These children are spontaneously authentic. This is their “Reality”. Sounds like Heaven to me!

As children develop physiologically and develop mental acuity everything begins to change. The socialisation process kicks in and interpretations about experiences are made and stored in the subconscious warehouse of the mind. Habitual behaviours are generated from these interpretations.

Such interpretations are quite subjective and more importantly are learned from others.

Gradually as a child moves through the various developmental stages spontenaety and authenticity are lost through the creation and assimilation of a default virtual reality that the child has had little input into.

As an adult that same child starts to feel that something is missing and can spend the rest of his/her life trying to find him/herself again!

Your life is no longer your own. Is there any wonder we feel a consuming emptiness inside. As adults we try to distract ourselves from this empty feeling by filling up on short term fixes – consumerism, entertainment, over eating, drugs, alcohol etc.

We no longer live from within our true selves we live outside ourselves in a make believe reality that has been created for us.

The search for meaning and purpose has begun.

Sound familiar? If we have gotten so far off track how do we get back on track?

The good news is that our personal TRUTH can still be found within and is accessible to us when we can become more childlike and embrace that core-centred  part of ourselves that watches everything.

Just stop all that “jibba jabba” as Mr T would say and practice aware mindfulness. Which paradoxically means “no mind”. Develop a practice of doing everything with meditative focus. Here in the gap you find your true self – peace, happiness, love.

Re-discover the child within.

Namaste.