The Childishness of Saints
Meditation restores our childishness because probably we are expected to “grow”. It has been seen time and time again that saints and prophets have done certain things which have hardly been tolerated by the masses.
Let us dive a little deeper as to how to ‘explore’ this childishness and how it has transformed mankind. We can begin our practice with a very prominent form formally known as Vipassana. Vipassana simply means, observing the flow of our breathing. Now one thing is to happen for sure if we haven’t been habitual of sitting with ourselves alone, i.e.; restlessness on the physical body, and since the Mind and body are interconnected, the same effects will be thus witnessed in the Mind. Mind is also distorted because of our sheer involvement in the material world, society, media, politics, who is flirting with whom, what is the colour of the tile of the bathroom of our known who lives a hundred miles away and all types of worldly nonsense. Whenever we get distorted unwillingly by the Mind, we have to bring it back to breathing, the practice takes at least 21 days to actually, I mean experience restfulness and mindfulness.
But the question is, how does this relate to the childishness that we are here to read? childishness non-seriousness and the decline of impulsiveness, and all types of events stated in our history and theology books have been committed in non-seriousness because essentially our seriousness boils down to something trivial, that we got fired from our job, a breakup, somebody criticized us that we will not do anything meaningful in life etc. which are of course distractions only to keep us intact with the worthless social norms.
If we observe life we would find that children have the utmost energy with a lack of understanding. Ever notice a child running in curiosity after butterflies? But we will not be able to do this because, well, the reader would say, enough of this now, we have seen a lot. Our curiosity and non-seriousness have been murdered by social conditioning. The ways to harness the same energy that we had in our childhood are Meditation and Yoga. My whole effort is going to be the same, to restore that childishness that we have, but is lost somewhere amidst the “civilizational developments”. Sigmund Freud has quoted in his book ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ about the conflict between the desire for individuality and the expectations of society,
‘It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.’
By default, childishness is our instinct, which has been long lost by delusions. And life has to be led by instincts because life does not know our thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations. It simply is. Life works by its intelligence, as Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher quoted, in a flux. There have rarely been any personalities that were able to we are able to decrease the impulsiveness and attain blissfulness, any Buddha, any Socrates, any Guru Nanak, any Jesus. Friedrich Nietzsche, I love the man, for his dareness to take the suffering of mankind upon his shoulders, quoted in his book ‘Will to Power’ about the ‘childishness’ of Jesus, towards which he was certainly against,
The “fig tree”: Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered. And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever.” And presently the fig tree withered away.
Now probably this is completely unexpected from someone, it is like a child that bumps into a table nearby, the child slaps the table and says, “you idiot, I dare if you stop me again from advancing further.” Such is the behaviour of a child, it has to be restored, even if it is to be the point of absurdity, plus towards more joy, affection, compassion, and these ideals can only be harnessed by Meditation, of which primarily I would be writing further.
