The Power Of Innocence
As a child, hopefully, we had the opportunity to play without self-consciousness. As we became adolescents and, for many of us, self-consciousness, our ability to play became restricted as we became subject to the internal master of "should" and "must". How can we as adults live with the freedom of a child that is not self-conscious and overcome any sense of lack that has to be fulfilled through some object? How can we combine the gifts and intelligence of maturity with the open-hearted innocence of being a happy and free child? Starting from realising that the self we experience is happy (complete) as it is (and feeling that), we can arrange our life to support this feeling of resilient wholeness.
In this situation, we see that our lives can be shaped in alignment with this fundamental happiness. This still requires us to think and act, but there is an essential unity to these actions as they are all driven by the experience of feeling happy. Most of us and many others still live life the other way around. We seek happiness in experiences, things and relationships from a position of feeling unhappy. This strains those experiences and doesn't solve our hearts' fundamental sense of lack and fear. There is a lurking sense that our happiness could be taken away from us. We may seek to ensure it is not by acquiring more of the experience we feel we need to show up our fundamental sense we are unworthy of happiness. When we get what we think we need to make us happy, we may confuse the emotional relief of having it with happiness and become addicted to the experience (even if that experience is negative thinking!) On the contrary, actions based on happiness become playful, loving, creative, explorative, honest, and always driven by enthusiasm with no attachment to their outcome.
If we become overly psychologically attached to their outcome, we will get stuck, and our happiness doesn't like to be stuck. It wants to flow ever on. Then, as we create our lives, they naturally follow our love, sense of beauty and honest reflection of truth. This is not something we need to think about obsessively, for as we focus on and establish ourselves in the experience of our innate happiness, life unfolds naturally in a unified manner without thinking about every detail. The alternative is to try and control life in some way based on emotional insecurity. We may or may not appear to do the same things in both instances, but the underlying spirit and result will differ. Emotion, outside the context of our innate happiness, drives impatience and cuts corners, and settles for only superficial perfection.
In our minds, we may say that we can only be happy when this or that occurs. We are making our happiness subtly dependent on the circumstances that look good. It will be like going to a palace with lots of beautiful objects but an empty feeling. We may be tempted to waste resources of time and energy and money. On the other hand, if we recognise our true nature of universal happiness, we feel whole and are not driven by fear. We can take the time to decide what is right with intelligence. We can listen to the quiet inner voice that gives us fascinating next steps on our journey. We can experiment to find out how well our experiences express our happiness. We do not need to clutter or compromise our lives with things and people that make us unhappy out of need. We can find our very unique way of expressing our happiness through whatever gifts we may have. We all have specific talents, likes, dislikes, and what makes our body-mind feel comfortable. We can be free to find these and not be pushed around by externally driven ideas or methods that our otherwise anxious mind says we should and must have to do. We can be free to play in whatever way uniquely our body and mind can do.
If we fall out of freedom ever, back into a fearful sense of separation, we can see this experience still as part of the overall picture. It is like having a specific resource we have learned to use. It's not very pleasant; it is an outdated resource, but it still happens sometimes, and we do not need to worry if it does, as this will only compound our already fearful feeling. As we go along, however, having realised and established ourselves in our innate happiness, this "resource" of separateness may find less and less use. The point to understanding is this is not a personal choice, for there is no separate person to make this choice. It is all part of the natural flow regarding whether we choose oneness or separation. The teacher of Vedanta, Francis Lucille (a scientist), compares this to the collapse of the wave function in particle physics, a metaphor I like. e.g. the photon "chooses" which slit to go through in the double slit experiment. This doesn't mean the photon sits there thinking, "I went through slit 1 last time, so I'll go through 2 this time". It just happens. Initially, there is freedom – it can go through either slit. Then the wave function collapses, and this appears as "choice". The same with thoughts arising from the belief to be separate can be expressed as a "choice" made by universal awareness.
Tossing a coin could be another example. Before it is tossed it, it has the freedom to come up with heads or tails. After it lands, a “choice” has been made. The “choice” wasn't made by the one tossing or by the coin. It just happened. This is also true of how life unfolds at a fundamental level and of which we really have no control, though we believe we are separate and may think we do. Letting go of that, we can live freely in the "not knowing", with the innocence of a child. This understanding is nothing new. It is thought by many to be the key to the change in society that can bring about very positive developments as we move from a controlling attitude to an open attitude of admitting we do not know and trusting that. A book that touches on this is "The Journey of Not Knowing: How 21st Century Leaders Can Chart a Course Where There Is None" by Julie Benezet.
