“Cause only a fool lean upon his own misunderstanding. What has been hidden from the wise and the prudent, been revealed to the babe and the suckling.”
Bob Marley
The partner of mother is father. The child has no opposite. In the child, father and mother are one.
Mother
The somatic template of the feeling connection to our inner mother is sourced in the spectrum of qualities and contractions alive in our own physical mother at the time of pregnancy and in infancy. While conventional schools of psychology will rarely admit that pre-lingual and pre-natal experience affects the psyche, in Nondual Therapy, these early vibrations in awareness are found to be formational. These are the essential atmospheres of home, the moods and attitudes that form states, seemingly inseparable from all experience.
As these primal vibrations are both the background and soil to all other experiences, they play a formational role through each contraction. While we can penetrate them at any moment, it is through the liberation of the Nondual Quality of pure, unentangled awareness that they emerge to the foreground. When these subtle mists are realized as non-absolute, there can be a liberation of many contractions.
The formation of the psyche in utero is based on patterns of stress, harmony and dissonance. These patterns are identified as ‘reality’ by the unborn child. The mother is not separate, but she is the gateway to the physical life and in this, her energy and atmosphere defines the physical universe.
Father
While the mother is the connection to the Source, universe; or final relaxation, opening and receptivity, the father is the active principle: he represents ‘the world’. He is the visible template for activity, manifestation, authority, law and for ‘reality’ itself. Out of unity with the mother, the father is the first significant ‘other’. He stands for safety and protection and is often the bottom-line for the physical survival of the family unit.
The father’s patterns of judgement can seem to be absolute and can form beliefs around the nature of God the father (the fearful one, the absent one). These beliefs can be somatic, emasculating the son and robbing the daughter of her natural movement through time and space. Contractions around the Nondual Quality of authority express through the duality of conformity and rebellion through every movement into the ‘outer’ world as well as in patterns of intimate relating.
This contraction affects the flow of expression and by default the ability to receive. To say it simply, contractions around fatherhood directly affects our ability to manifest, to take form, and to dance in the world of duality. While the Mother Wound spirals around the horror of separation, Father Wounds typically resonate around the pain of condemnation.
Child: Nondual Quality
The Nondual Quality of the child has been reframed in current conditioning to the point of abuse. Dominant forms of conditioning rest on the premise that the child is a kind of untrained mammal, whose brain is inherently hollow. Left untamed, this mind will lead to bestiality – unbridled sexuality, violence, untold social offenses, and destruction. Similar misconceptions surround the Nondual Quality of the child as we infuse our concepts around freedom. These misconceptions rest on the premise that our True Nature is intrinsically cruel. Yet the child is the pinnacle of our evolution, where Nondual Qualities shine naked, infiltered by the legacy of trauma. Children are our teachers and are living gateways to Source. There is nothing ‘childish’ about the child.
The mind of the child is akin to what Zen Buddhism has called ‘Beginner’s Mind’. Unfettered by the conditioning of past, present and future; free of the agenda of perception that distorts consciousness with expectation, the child’s senses open directly on the world with a freshness that is beyond selectivity. The child does not seek to make sense of what he or she sees. Rather, the child is the sensing itself.
Form is the child and the child is form.
We have touched on some of the afflictions connected to the male and female aspects of ourselves, as reflected through the father and the mother. These afflictions play out through limitations on movement through the world of duality. For example: they can block the cycle of receptivity and expression; they can create filters of atmospheric states of consciousness itself (such as an attitude of negativity). At a very fundamental level, the suffering between male and female aspects of ourselves blocks our naturalness: meaning our freedom to ‘be’ whatever we are at any moment.
These core colorings and patterns of the psyche can feel heavy, yet the child is not residing in them. In childhood, these patterns of loneliness and intimacy, abandonment and possession, strangeness and familiarity are surface textures to a universe filled with Nondual Quality. For the child, the storyline caught in time is mostly an abstraction. The habits of time, story, expectation, history, agenda and excuses are learned later. The child resides as the undivided, spatial, Nondual Quality of pure awareness. Within this awareness there are patterns of dissonance: rejection, stress, loss and discomfort. Yet this dissonance is relating to the world of form, a form of the psyche that is hardly developed and is not yet taken as absolute. The personality of the child is still a play-ground, just as even his or her name is a label that needs to be learned. The child is natural, open and free.
The perspective of the child is often one that brings shame. To call someone ‘childish’ is to insult them. It seems we live in a culture where maturity is often determined by the degree of contraction and separation from the Source of ourselves as well as from each other.
The reunion with the inner child as a resource and guide is an important part of every process of freedom from contraction. The child within cannot be bypassed. The popular focus on childhood trauma is incomplete without resourcing and honoring the inner child as a spiritual master, experientially alive with pure nondual quality. The child is not only an object that needs to be healed, it is a vital resource at the formational basis of the psyche. Every stage of development or liberation includes the Nondual Quality of the child. Alive as the perfect blend between male and female aspects, the Nondual Quality of the child can be the key that unlocks freedom of form through releasing the dualities of push & pull, male & female, creation & destruction at a Source level. Unfiltered perception as experienced by the inner child is our first and last resource in the human life cycle. We would do well to rest in it.
When the mind and heart are clear from all we have learned, we begin to see. Here, the child, an open channel from the world outside to the universe within. In the child, mother and father are one as perfect clarity allows all-seeing and all falling away into the eternal joy of each passing moment.
Alive now and alive as you, the child offers the essential wisdom of all that which is unfolding through you, as you. Let the child show you how to be, being here in the spontaneous arising of the vital senses within the miracle of life.
Here, I am always, already the Child
Nondual affirmation
