Learning as a little child.

 

Whether you read the watered down version in an "official" Bible, or St. Thomas' richer, more complete version, you likely have come across Jesus' teaching that one needs to learn as a little child in order to enter The Kingdom. I have never found a better description of the correct approach to true learning.

As you become aware of your mind, become aware of the filters mind sees existence through, and notice that this is the way your mind has added errors to mistakes by making inappropriate associations and building on them. It becomes clear that most of the data on which your decisions are based on is highly suspect. Most of the stuff you "know" is just information associated with other information, all of it associated with being clever - none of it based on experience. When this becomes apparent, it's time to junk the old database and start on a new one.

Hence, learning as a little child. Little. Before the most important things in its life are how to gain reward and avoid punishment. Long before all that. Consider a really small child, still in the womb. The foot goes into the mouth. Now, the baby doesn't know "foot", doesn't know "mouth". It just wiggles the toes, feels sensation through the skin of it's feet, the lining of it's mouth. All without "knowing" what these bits and pieces of it's body are. By this method, without "trying", or following a curriculum, the baby makes a start at learning it's place in existence.

Learning begins there. Mystics and Masters have insisted for a long time now that our awareness,our right attention to our senses is underdeveloped. Jesus again: "He who has ears, let him hear, He who has eyes, let him see." If we notice, from human development, that many capabilities are only developed if the right behaviours are experienced. Reading and writing skills can be severely impaired in children that haven't had sufficient crawling (like from being kept upright in a walking ring). Therapists now know to make children with these problems crawl. And it helps. The point I want to make is: Intervention in a child's natural learning prevents the easy development of some human capabilities. To develop these capabilities, even to know what they are, it is necessary to go back to what I'm calling "natural learning".

Everything you learned out of a fear of punishment, or a greed for reward was not natural learning. Once your mind developed an association with punishment and pain, pleasure and reward, it started operating on the basis that reward IS pleasure and punishment IS pain. All learning built on this foundation was not natural. There is absolutely no reward or punishment in nature. There is pain, pleasure, action and result, observation and response and much else besides, but no punishment. No reward.

A small child (ok, beyond infant now) is too young for punishment. No one expects him yet to be sophisticated enough to want reward. In Jesus day, children grew up with extended family, and there were children like this - already walking, some talking and no sense beaten into them yet. A child like that learns in a real way, learns things that books can't teach. A mind that grows up experiencing the constancy of change in existence can learn to respond creatively to change. A mind that relates to existence as it is knows that every situation is new, and past information gathered is at best a rough guide, and at worst is plain wrong. The new is the new and must be responded to with intelligence (INtelligence!). A child ruled by reward and punishment reduces his/her exploration of the new, and concentrates more on how to manipulate for reward and how to avoid punishment. This results in us clever adults who know the ways of our culture, but not the ways of truth, consciousness, bliss. Who know little of the soul and less of Truth.

So we have to heal. Discard the past and learn anew. Refuse the fake, the mind's associations. Insist on the real. Prefer "not knowing yet" and getting on with real learning to the "known facts".

Explore the way a child does - a child can even approach a fire and if you can get off your own childhood associations. If you can ignore your own training for a bit, watch…
The child approaches, feels the warmth, the pleasure of it and advances. This is generally where parents freak out, but we're not going to. We're going to watch.
The child advances a little further, stops and recoils - INTENSE EXPERIENCE!! No crying though. Just a long thoughtful look into the fire, then a cautious advance, feeling it out, testing reality.

Even our awareness and control of our own bodies is deeply affected by the culture's training. Few women of my acquaintance feel their ovulations as they occur. Few men consciously control their ejaculation comfortably. Few people raise and lower blood pressure at will, stop a wound bleeding without a tourniquet or feel and direct their etheric energies. These are all possible, and not at all hard when you drop your past learning. Dropping the past learning – now that's the hard part!

Sometimes it's helpful to notice that the training you've had, through reward and punishment, was not an elegant or refined thing. Training of children in English culture for example has traditionally been as crude as their dog training, just less compassionate. It's not hard to catch the bad associations, to purge the bad data and programming once you get going. We aren't dogs and we can overcome what training has been done because we can become aware of it. We don't need to be told. We mostly just need to drop what we've been told.