Part 2 (episode 2): The Intimate and Magical Life of Childhood
We can all observe, perhaps even personally remember, that children are insatiably inquisitive only stopping when the some inborn urge calls them to sleep. They are always doing things and experimenting with their surroundings to the point of self-danger and have to be constantly watched. They are highly motivated by absence of experience and absence of knowledge and therefore absence of predictive ability. As a consequence they are full of surprise and delight at what things can do.
A child is human by its designated template (model: genus homo-sapiens) and is not called to be anything other. For a child the leading edge of its template of developing reason is not therefore to be but the urgency to know by finding things out for themselves such as: that’s soft, that’s hard, that’s warm, that’s hot (!), that’s unusual (?), that’s interesting and the like.
The natural approach of a child is to experiment with the world to see what things do. All this enquiring activity then only later fostering the deeper question ‘Why’.
[See episode 1 ‘Finding oneself in and Intelligent Universe’ for the larger context to the template of developing reason]
A child needs no training or reason for this kind of inquiring activity. Just like sleep it is in-born. It is design intelligence led from the start in which there is the instinctive urgency to do anything in order to know something and observing this activity from the outside is what grown-ups would call play.
A child is not yet familiar with the world and they examine everything but the existential question to be is not yet given to the task of reason. For a child, to be is simply to be able to do and thus to be able to know; to be able that is…to see, to hear, to feel, to pick up, to put down, to react, to try things out and eventually to question.
The activity of a child demonstrates that within the instinctive urgency to know the World there is a special kind of absence which generates a resolving sequence: seeking, finding and holding. We may characterize such a triadic sequence as learning. But because it is design intelligence led from the start it is not yet the kind of educated learning that is directly related to becoming a deciding person in an already grown-up world.
To try and give some sense of what is being suggested by this other kind of learning two examples are offered below. They are necessarily taken from the writers’ own childhood although the reader may recognise something in their own experience that may be similar but nevertheless unique to them.
These two examples will be referred to in the third person because ‘the child’ is not yet a substantial first person identity in the way that a person is going to have to become in the world and, therefore, the holding of what a child seeks and finds does not carry the same kind of personal investment that we do as adults in what we hold about what we feel we know.
What a child instinctively seeks is, in one respect, even more deeply personal and strangely magical.
Example 1) A child may be at home one day in an ordinary family setting and for no reason that is obvious at the time, half-knowingly, begin to write their address…the living room, the house, the street, the town, the country, the earth, and then to something else that must be Greater for which the child may not have the word — say ‘Universe’ — but can somehow see or imagine that it must be there…but then, having been caused by this activity to occupy an ever expanding world to which the child feels itself to be the absolute centre, suddenly the expansion runs out of space and comes to a dead stop…and losing all sense of any familiarity with its immediate family surroundings to be held in a frozen moment of the wonder of not being able to go any further, and then, imagining a green door at the end of the universe that must lead somewhere go to open it only to find there is not ‘nothing’ exactly but something quite distinct — a profound sense of absence — a perfect stillness that overwhelms the expectation that there must be something…to only then be brought back into a more familiar sense of home and the family living room the radio gently playing Sunday afternoon family favourites, leaving the question of absence (?) somehow held in suspension and without resolution.
Example 2) Or, in another moment of similar play, to be alone rummaging around in a disused quarry and find a piece of old ceramic and suddenly come to a surprising realization and know for real that there were other people present at other times, not just characters in story books, that actually existed before the present moment; the present moment of the child being the confinement of time awareness that, until that moment of new awakening to the knowing of a past time, had pre-occupied the child at play.
Whilst perhaps not of obvious importance at the time these kinds of intimate experiences are moments of special consciousness for any child. They seem out of place because they are different to the accumulated expectation of a familiar world to which the child is being habituated; the world of story books and front room family favourites.
An adult person can look upon those early experiences and decide that the above two examples refer to childish assumptions about space and time for which science now gives a ‘grown-up’ answers.
Nevertheless they are waking moments for a child. We forget them of course, perhaps forever, but if they are later re-awakened and brought back into consciousness we may remember them in all there sensory detail and be caused to wonder at their essential nature. Why is it, for example, that the presence of such moments would have such fidelity of recall of the intimate feeling of the moment whilst other parts of childhood fade and become general?
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As a child we naturally seek experience not yet knowing what we are looking for but when we find it in this awakening way, even if we forget and move on, the nature of the design intelligence of being human absorbs the potency of impression of that moment, holding it in a state where it might later be nurtured.
Having searched and found, the design intelligence holds it because these waking moments can indicate momentary glimpses of something of a significantly different nature than the commonly taught product knowledge of standard education, even perhaps more real, and yet unfinished. They are perhaps a clue, an access point or unique personal keyway into the third stratum shown in the diagram given in episode 1: the Creation Continuum, Yet-to-Be and the Unknown.
These glimpses activate and impress upon the imagination and cannot therefore be described in terms of an end-product system of knowledge by which we ordinarily navigate the world of adult experience. They are perhaps best described as knowing moments even though, as a child, we know very little. Knowing little, these kinds of knowing moments, special ‘luminosities’ they could be called, have to rely upon the innate holding power of the design intelligence for the sanctuary of their keeping.
As a child we may be held in such moments of play and these knowings can become axioms of spiritual logic in a questioning life, if this italicized phrase can be used without too much explanation at the moment.
As a person however we accumulate knowledge and the freedom to act upon that knowledge is what gives each one of us the power to be a deciding person in an adult world. With the power of decision making comes the possibility to then learn what it means to act within the limitations of the world as agency. What then do we become?
In the meantime, as we grow up, the ‘child within’ and the developing person come to occupy the same space. Almost before we realise it the design intelligence that gave guidance to the child is gradually lost to the person and at this point the questioning triad, the template of developing reason, begins to change its emphasis, the leading edge of need transposing from knowing to being.
And it does need to change because whilst design intelligence is always active as a developing potential in seeking, finding and holding, the person, in one way or another, is faced with the task of choosing what they are going to be in the world.
The eternal question that parental guardians always ask of the child: What are you going to be when you grow up? Or worse, we have always wanted you to be a (?) just like your father.
But following on from the two examples of the child at play the argument being presented in these first two episodes is that design intelligence is not something confined just to a biological form whose intelligence has been fashioned over billions of years. The claim is that its roots lie deeper in which the intelligence of the Organic Order is a significant pointer, a bridge even, towards realising the unfinished business of a Cosmological Order.
With the (9) spirit potentials being presented as a 3 x 3 matrix what is being proposed is that design intelligence, whilst being configured in domain within the context of a biological directive (4:1), in the greater possibility of the nine potentials it is also being nurtured to fulfill a spiritual directive (3:2).
These claims about specific inner configurations of spirit potential (5) expressed here as directives (4:1) and (3:2) will be explored at length in the coming commentaries. The immediate task in the rest of Part 2 and then in Part 3 is to explore further the co-relational potential of design intelligence and person intelligence.
To be human is to be born already equipped to engage with the world from our very first breath and yet absent of the reason why and therefore to be already natured by design intelligence but with the person intelligence yet to be nurtured.
Being two parts of the one life perhaps this co-dependent relation of design intelligence and person intelligence could be likened to two sides of the same coin; the former ancient and time-tested by the fact of its being developed over billions of years of evolution and the latter an unknown field of yet-to-be reasoned and yet-to-be realised space.
Or perhaps a more fitting image of this dual aspected intelligence is that of a double helix; as two strands of our being human that are bonded together and yet not bound by the same kinds of permissions and limitations.
There is, I believe, an innate intelligence within each child that is our duty to nurture and not indoctrinate. They are an open book but in the world as it is, this task is becoming more and more complex to manage not to say impossible to fulfill.
Thank you for taking the time to read episode 2.
