This morning greeted me with a quote of Jack Kornfeld’s, “Many people have their first spiritual experience in childhood, that of an innate and natural connection with what is sacred and holy.”
After reading it, my thoughts took me back to a time, early in my childhood, that I haven’t visited in years, and reminded me of what it felt like when my life was infused with that magical quality one experiences before the weight of the world takes hold and drowns it out.
When I was new to this world, my consciousness was infused with a sense of purity and wholesomeness that enabled a connection with my “child within.” To merely say “enabled,” however, fails to fully describe what that was like. A more accurate description would be to say my inner child embodied me so completely there was no room for anything else to enter and spoil its serenity.
I’ve always been in touch with my conscience; its guidance has ever proven true and especially so when telling me things I didn’t want to hear at the time. In my childhood, my conscience was unblemished, and accordingly, my perspective was unblemished too. My thoughts as a child were free of any of the associated sorrows that accompany regrets, the stains that color one’s awareness after having failed to live up to one’s guiding principles. There were no dark clouds hovering overhead threatening to overwhelm should one stray too far from the path. In that regard, I was, unknowingly, free of both the past and the future and totally immersed in the present.
It was in that state and from that point of reference that I would view the behavior of the adults in my world, often with bemusement, but always with the sure understanding that they were incapable of understanding the world I and my childhood friends inhabited. The behavior of the grownups always displayed a quality that indicated they just didn’t get it! When it came to understanding that which was crystal clear to my friends and me about what was important and what was not, it was clear that what we found funny, interesting, worthwhile, or, conversely, what to us seemed tedious, vexing or oppressive about any given situation was vastly different from how the grownups viewed things.
The other kids in my circle all innately understood the parameters of the world we shared with each other and the sensibilities associated with it. From that perspective, the adult world at times seemed foolish, undoubtedly alien and certainly not a place we had any interest in inhabiting at the cost of losing touch with our child-natures.
I would puzzle over witnessing the adults, time after time, failing to grasp the significance of a given encounter or being able to see it through my eyes. Each succeeding encounter would reaffirm my conviction that my parents and their friends had somehow lost touch with the common understanding my friends and I shared about what it felt like to be a child.
On more than one occasion, I remember swearing never to allow myself to drift so far from my childhood understanding as to cost me that sense of wonder my parents had lost touch with; it seemed so fundamental to my notions at the time that losing that connection seemed inconceivable.
And then, one day, I realized that connection had become broken.
I hadn’t seen it coming. I hadn’t been aware a change had been taking place at the time and I don’t know when it occurred; I only realized after the fact that the part of me I swore I’d never lose touch with had somehow given me the slip when I wasn’t watching. I had now, in the parlance of childhood, become an “adult.”
***
In looking back, one particular event stands out as relevant to my attempt to tease apart the threads that might explain how it came to pass that I lost that understanding that had formerly bridged the gap between the two different worlds inhabited by grownups and children.
In the times in which I grew into my teenage years, two things appeared in my still-forming mind as essential to understanding what constituted being an “adult”—cigarettes and alcohol. Such notions as responsibility were mostly foreign to me back then. At the time, it seemed everyone smoked tobacco in some form or another, even the president, and alcohol was ubiquitous. My mother smoked cigarettes, my father a pipe and an occasional cigar, and the town we lived in had more taverns than churches. Since my parents were fond of popping into a bar for a few drinks on a Saturday night, and bringing me along with them, I knew most of the bartenders and innkeepers by their first names.
As a result, I started smoking cigarettes when I was 16 and continued until I turned 29, and the lure of alcohol began attracting me about the same time. In addition to concealing my newfound “vices” from my parents, I also had to devise means of circumventing the laws prohibiting minors from partaking of such things, both of which required a certain level of dishonesty on my part.
I now view these little deceits as incremental steps in the gradual erosion of the clear conscience that I had enjoyed in my early years.
But one seminal moment stands out in my long, slow descent into the corruption of spirit that helped facilitate my fall from grace.
The liquor laws made it difficult for teens such as me and my friend to obtain alcohol and often required devious means of coming by it. One such means was thievery. I had been raised never to steal for any reason, the lesson being deeply embedded in my psyche; yet necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Desperate measures lead to fertile ground in which justifications pop up like seedlings on warm spring afternoons—justifications designed to ameliorate whatever misgivings one might have about violating taboos. That settled, a plan took form.
The idea was to “lift” a quart of scotch whiskey from a downtown drugstore. The problem was, I lacked the courage to shoplift, persuading a boy one year my junior to pull of the heist in my stead. Why I chose scotch is an enduring mystery! The taste of it sickens me to this day. Maybe the attractive shape of the bottle is what lured me, but such was the plan, and my accomplice pulled it off without a hitch.
The success of our venture was, for me, short lived, as it was accompanied by a heavy inner sense of darkness, of gloom that unrelentingly permeated my thoughts. Up until that moment, my connection with my child nature had remained secure and clear as it had always been. I remember being aware just following the caper that something about that connection felt different. My conscience was no longer clear, and the threads that had connected my child-mind to my evolving adult awareness had been severed. Try as I might to trace the threads so I could re-establish that connection, I was no longer able to do so. I fell into depression, I felt unclean, unworthy. I began leading a secret life in which I was one step removed from full participation in my surroundings. If people only knew, I secretly thought, what a bad person I was, they would no longer want to associate with me. I felt ashamed of what I’d done and fearful that my parents might find out and be disappointed in me, which actually happened because of what followed, but that is a story for another day.
The upshot of all this is that I continued to be plagued by thoughts of unworthiness for decades afterward. And my connection with my child-mind has never been re-established, except on occasion under certain circumstances, and then only for periods of short duration.
A lot of things have transpired since that time, both in my inner world and in the world at large: Neither bears much resemblance to the state of things extant when I was a child. A quote from a Grateful Dead tune sums it up succinctly “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”
As I said, it’s been years since I’ve visited these recollections of a mind-space that once seemed so essential to my very existence.
The rest of Kornfeld’s quote goes, “The playfulness, joy and curiosity of our childhood can become a foundation for the delighted rediscovery of this spirit in our practice.” That might just be the key to re-establishing that connection.
As Paramahansa Yogananda once said, “Everything the Lord has created is to try us, to bring out the buried soul immortality within us. That is the adventure . . the one true purpose of life. And everyone’s adventure is different, unique.”
Different, yet I suspect in other ways universal, common and shared by all: Only the details differ.
Tim Konrad
2020.05.15
sonora2sonoma 