My nephew, Noah, turns seven next week. Hence, the following words took on special significance as I was reading last night about the care and feeding of subtle perception in a culture that too often discounts it:
If you know any small children, you will have observed their efforts to adjust to the perceptual consensus. By the age of seven, most kids grasp the difference between "real" and "imaginary" and are busy sorting everything they encounter into these two categories. A friend that other people can't see is an "imaginary friend." An ache in the physical body is real, while an ache in the subtle body is "psychosomatic" (ie, imaginary). When adults agree that a perception is real, they will tell the child the name for it. They may also interpret it by analogy to something already familiar to the child. Without this interpretive help, kids can't make much sense of their subtle perceptions and eventually come to ignore them.
This is not to imply that adults are to blame for the loss of subtle perceptions, for it happens to children even in cultures where adult clairvoyance is widespread and taken for granted. No matter how they are raised, children over six or seven exhibit a strong preference for the physical senses. During the time when we are learning to survive in the physical world, the physical senses must necessarily predominate. The renewed stirring of subtle perception in adolescence contributes to the awkwardness of our teen years. We feel crazy when we sense things that we've never learned the names for.
Think of brain-based cognition as a filing system. New items of information are filed with similar items to facilitate later retrieval. Where no similar items exist, the brain tends to discard the information rather than making a new file.
Okay, first, this is a bit of a bummer because some of my favorite Noah stories are of the times he exhibited a gift for something akin to clairvoyance. I hate to think those are going to trickle off for the next five years or so.
On the upside, I am comforted to know that Noah attends a school that values and actively cultivates imagination. Imagination extends the mental filing system, so fewer things of worth get discarded. This should be a fundamental aspect of every child's education. And of course, there are other sideways measures for keeping the back-burnered pot stirred until it comes forward again.
But what happens at adolescence? What's there to welcome and nourish the return of subtle perception? As it happens, I currently have three women friends whose sons have just hit adolescence and all of them are lamenting the "loss" of their boys. It's that most predictable of shifts: although they were always close before, suddenly these young guys want nothing to do with Mom. In two of these cases, the fathers are swamped by career demands and finding it hard to give their sons the extra Dad time they require now. How much more "conducive" indigenous cultures are for what these boys must crave, when a community of men take responsibility for initiating the boy into manhood... where wise elders can encourage and affirm their re-opening perceptions.
It's a tall order for most American Dads - to create the sacred space these adolescent boys require in order to grow into whole-seeing men. Why, this gap alone probably goes a long way toward explaining what ails... gee, where to start... every place where not-exactly-grown men and "power" (what passes for it) meet.
Oh for the want of more subtle awareness... and fewer lost boys... and girls.
