The Mode of Child Awareness

I came upon a picture of a futuristic park in midjourney, and it reminded me of a dream that I had forgotten long ago. I remembered with my body. There is a bodily feeling that goes with the imagery, like the feeling a child gets when anticipating the arrival of something very good. I remembered that I have had this bodily sensation many times, but have always dismissed it as a quirky and peripheral experience instead recognising it as a core experience.

I was reminded of the obvious: you can’t participate in a groovy reality without grooving yourself. You must resonate with it to stay in it. It isn’t about understanding or believing; it’s about grooving.

Heaven isn’t for those who have earned the right to be there, it is for those who say yes to it. I have been researching the topic of saying ‘yes’ for years, and have discovered that it has so many nooks and crannies, it requires so much presence of mind and clarity of intent — it is essentially its own religion.

Wow. As I write this, I can really feel it like a drug event. Life circumstances that seemed to me shabby only an hour ago, seem now to be a dream I would have actually wanted as a child. I would have loved to have access to its opportunities and to have the adult wherewithal to deal with its challenges. I am on a much wanted side-quest. If I only said yes to it.

This experience has also reminded me of another obvious thing: childlike awareness is a mode of awareness, not a phase. In waking life, one progresses from child awareness to adult awareness in a more or less straight line — usually less — and that’s it. Reaching adulthood is the final achievement. The advantage of adulthood is that adults are experts in managing things that are going wrong, or about to go wrong. The problem of adulthood is that adults are experts in managing things that are going wrong, or about to go wrong.

In the psychedelic world, there are good trips and there are bad trips, admittedly, but there are only good trips for people who are in awe of the very phenomenon of tripping.

Similarly, in the dreaming world, one needs to be in awe of dreaming. What it means to be in awe is to know that you’re dreaming, to marvel at the richness of detail. There is only one way to reach trippy dreamscapes; it is to say yes to them. What is outside the human zone of dreaming, and yet is accessible to us, is safe to marvel at. By definition.

People often think that being lucid in dreams means being able to make better decisions, to “control the dream.” If you’re grooving, there is nothing to control.

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In The Salt Island Diaries, Clara dreams repeatedly of a beautiful dreamscape she calls heaven. It is not the biblical heaven — as she points out: no one is angry. The denizens of Clara’s heaven are nice to each other, because “there is nothing else to do here.” No one is industrious, responsible, or moralistic. As a rather moralistic person, Clara indeed has difficult accepting heaven. She continually wakes up from it. Over the course of the story, she slowly realises that heaven does not exist as a place. Heavens are the result of building what you want and sharing what you have. Hells are the result of destroying what you don’t what and bemoaning what you don’t have. It is from this perspective that she begins to re-evaluate her life on Earth.