Reawakening to the innocence, wonder, and awe of childhood.

The Spiritual Life, Topic Eight, Reclaiming the innocence, wonder, and awe of childhood

The Spiritual Life - Topic Eight

Reclaiming the innocence, wonder, and awe of childhood.

Whenever you understand that you have missed life, the first principle to be brought back is innocence. 

Drop your knowledge, forget your scriptures, forget your religions, your theologies, your philosophies. Be born again, become innocent—and it is in your hands. Clean your mind of all that is not known by you, of all that is borrowed, all that has come from tradition, convention. All that has been given to you by others—parents, teachers, universities—just get rid of it. 

Once again be simple, once again be a child. And this miracle is possible by meditation.

Meditation is simply a strange surgical method that cuts you away from all that is not yours and saves only that which is your authentic being. It burns everything else and leaves you standing naked, alone under the sun, in the wind. It is as if you are the first man who has descended onto earth—who knows nothing, who has to discover everything, who has to be a seeker, who has to go on a pilgrimage. p.xii

This “being brought back to innocence” of which Osho speaks is the idea of being “twice born” which is a common concept in all mystical traditions of the world religions. Jesus teaches that “unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” It is this reclamation of our innate innocence that Jesus is talking about.

And how is this reclamation of innocence to be done? There are many ways. The first is to give up our attachment to the idols on the path of the ego recognizing that they will never give us permanent happiness. Whatever happiness they may seem to give is temporary, effervescent, never seems to live up to our expectations and never lasts long enough.

When we are disappointed that the things we thought would make us happy don’t make us happy, we experience disillusionment which triggers anger, confusion, fear, and depression. These feelings of dysphoria lead to an awareness that there must be more to life. This hitting bottom and wondering where we have gone wrong is called “the dawning.” It dawns on us that there must be a better way.

It is when it dawns on us that there must be a better way that we begin our search for what that better way might be. This search does not take us outward to external things but inward to the peace of “no-thing.” This activity of shedding all our false beliefs and conditioning, Osho, calls “meditation.” Meditation is the clearing of the mind of all thoughts so we enter into a vast, clear sky of pure consciousness. At first this experience is fleeting and momentary, but with practice we are able to extend this sense of being one with All for what seem to be longer periods of time on the earth plane, but on the path of the Spirit is timeless.

When we are able to drop our egos and become one with the All and experience cosmic consciousness we have reclaimed the innocence, awe, and wonder of childhood.

Awakening to what Love would have me do.

The Spiritual Life - Awakening to what Love would have me do.

The Spiritual Life - Topic Seven

What would Love have me do?

From Maturity: The Responsibility For Being Oneself by Osho

In the second birth he is going to gain what was available in the first birth, but the society, the parents, the people surrounding him crushed it, destroyed it. Every child is being stuffed with knowledge. His simplicity has to be somehow removed, because simplicity is not going to help him in this competitive world. His simplicity will look to the world as if he is a simpleton; his innocence will be exploited in every possible way. Afraid of the society, afraid of the world we ourselves have created, we try to make every child be clever, cunning, knowledgeable—to be in the category of the powerful, not in the category of the oppressed and the powerless. xii

This is the original sin, the socialization by society. It is necessary for human functioning, but it destroys innocence. Socialization obliterates any memory of the Divine essence from which we have come.

The irony is that we don’t even know that we have forgotten our natural inheritance. It is this lack of memory and experience of our natural inheritance which the mystical traditions call “sleep.” The mystics teach that people need to be awakened from this sleep, this dream world that their socialization and conditioning has encumbered them with.

Plato’s allegory of the cave explains the idea well.

Waking up from this lack of memory and awareness can be gradual or sudden. It can be episodic or less likely continuous. Waking up takes us to the sixth stage of spiritual development in Fowler’s model which is cosmic consciousness.

Osho teaches that the way to this awakening is meditation. The first step in this awakening is just knowing what you don’t know and remembering that the socialization and conditioning on the ego plane is not real. It is illusory, impermanent, and will never provide the peace and bliss that we humans yearn for.

In twelve step programs in the third step, a practitioner is encouraged  to “make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.” This third step is the willingness and decision to surrender our ego and enter onto the path of the Spirit. It is a willingness and decision than can transform our lives. This practice is as simple as asking ourselves 100 times a day, “What would Love have me do?”

Everyday words of Fowler's stages of faith development.

The Spiritual Life - Topic six, Every day words for Fowler's stages of faith development.

The Spiritual Life - Topic Six

Every day words for Fowler’s stages of faith development.

People do not proceed through the stages of faith development in linear step by step fashion. There is some back and forth and oscillation in the pattern of growth and development. However, a person, using this framework, can usually determine the stage that they are in predominantly at any given point in their life.

Fowler uses academic abstract terminology to name his six stages. In this article, names will be given to these stages that are more colloquial and hopefully more understandable and  memorable.

Stage one which usually occurs in ages 3-7 Fowler names “intuitive-projective” and which can also be called the “Fairy tale stage.” God is imagined as a fanciful figure like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny who cares about good and bad behavior and rewards or punishes accordingly.

Stage two which usually occurs between 8 and 12 Fowler names “mythic literal” and which can also be called the “heroic stage” wherein  the person believes in avatar figures who can be athletes, celebrities of all sorts, or mythic characters like the Power Rangers, the Ninja Turtles, or other heroic figures who are idealized. God is imagined the biggest heroic figure of all with superior powers of all sorts.

Stage three which usually occurs in adolescence Fowler names “synthetic-conventional” and which can also be called the “moral code stage” wherein good guys win and bad guys are caught and punished. God is thought of as the judge, jury, and enforcer of moral and social order.

Stage four which usually occurs from early twenties to late thirties, Fowler names “individuative - reflective” and which can also be called the “questioning stage” in which what the person was taught earlier about God and their religion now doesn’t seem to make total sense and it dawns on the person that there must be a better way to make sense of one’s life and experience. God is no longer thought to be a dependable and/or understandable concept, and people, at this stage, often are seen to be losing or having lost their faith.

Stage five which usually occurs at mid life, Fowler calls “conjunctive” and which can also be called the “searching stage” in which the person is aware of paradox, mystery, and that logic and rational thought does not help them name their deep longing for the comfort of a foundational experience of truth. God becomes a symbolic term for something which is perceived as being transcendent and mysterious.

Stage six which usually occurs later in one’s life, but can occur at any time, Fowler calls “Universalizing” and which can also be called the cosmic consciousness stage which is the non dualistic apprehension of Oneness. The person in this stage puts the rational mind aside and rests in the experience of being one with All. Another word often used for this stage is “enlightenment.”

Most people who read this blog and are following this series of topics on The Spiritual Life would be at stage four and above. It would seem likely that most people would be at stage five.

The Spiritual Life - Fowler's stages of faith development