In my new job, I get to hang out with babies quite a bit, which is brilliant.
Because babies are awesome. Literally.
Their innocent ignorance of the world is the most refreshing, awe-inspiring thing a ‘grown-up’ could ever hope to witness.
Present to life, unencumbered by all the conditioned nonsense we’re carrying around in our cluttered old Thought Systems 📦 they live in a world of curiosity, discovery and insight.
As grown-ups, it’s easy to forget (or we may not know) that babies’ untrained perceptual systems mean that they experience a very different reality from ours. It’s so different, they may as well be a different species with their very own Umwelt!
I remember when I was a new parent, and I had all sorts of questions – questions based on my understanding of the world, not my newborn’s, like:
- “Why can’t I catch her attention?”
- “Why’s she doing that?!”
- “She’s snoozed, she’s fed and she’s changed, so why’s she so upset?!”
- “Why does she never, ever tire of peekaboo?”
- “Does she know who I am? How?”
- “Why does my voice go up an octave as soon as I start talking to her?!” 😂
All innocent, grown-up questions, based on the illusion that we all inhabit an objective reality that babies just ‘don’t get… yet’.
But that’s not how ‘reality’ works – there's nothing about it that's objective, and babies are the ultimate demonstration of this weird and wonderful fact.
Baby reality
Babies still operate in a world that's governed by the principles behind Innate Health, but the thought-perception element can be a bit baffling to our conditioned minds. For instance:
- Everything's complete mush to them, beyond about 12 inches – nothing but a blur.
- Even weirder is the fact they can't see in 3-dimensions until about 3 months, nor even in colour for a few weeks! They live in a flat, black & white reality, which is only in focus very close-by… helping to explain why you waving to them from the other side of the room doesn't register.
- Babies start off with better hearing than us! Studies have shown that they're attuned to linguistic subtleties from languages all around the world that, by around 10 months, have been pruned. It's like they come into the world with their aperture wide open, and if something's not used, it narrows—irreversibly—over time. (“Use it or lose it” is a thing!)
- You probably know this: they have no object permanence. This means that peekaboo isn't just fun, it's a total freaking miracle to an infant 🤯 You cease to exist, then are re-created all over again – right there in front of them!
- Babies experience emotions, just like us, but they don't attach meaning to them like we do – that's learned, and comes much later. And it's the same with a sense of self: it's not innate, it's almost a skill that gets learned over time: ‘selfing’, if you like. (A double-edged sword, that one 😉)
Big person reality
It's easy to be a bit blasé about these weird and wonderful differences, but if you look closely you'll see that the whole experience being had—by you, now—is subjective.
We're not experiencing some objective ‘reality’ directly – it's being created on the fly, moment by moment, like some never-ending film show, playing out in our perceptions. This separate reality is yours and yours alone – no one else can experience it.
Syd Banks described it simply in his book, The Enlightened Gardener, when he said:
“Take that rose bush, for example. We are all looking at the same plant, but our perception of it varies according to the way we each think and see.
One person may see a vigorous rose, another may see a rose that could benefit from a little pruning, and a third may see a mess that no amount of attention would save.
The rose bush isn't changing; it's the way we personally perceive it that differs, the way each of us thinks that colours our perception.”
And as I heard another Innate Health practitioner say at a conference recently,
“I’m always surprised—every time!—to learn that nobody is living in my reality with me! And nobody ever can.”
Which takes a bit of the pressure off, doesn't it? Because the next time you're having a disagreement with someone, you can rest easy that there's no need to prove who's ‘right’ and who's ‘wrong’, it's just two differently conditioned Thought Systems, piecing together reality in two different ways.
Both experiences are equally valid, both are equally ‘made up’, and crucially:
“Everyone is doing the best they can, given the thinking that looks real to them.” ~ Syd Banks
They say children are the best teachers, and the more time I spend in the presence of these awe-inspiring babies and toddlers, the more obvious this becomes.
💖
Giles
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Giles P Croft
This whole “seeing things differently” malarkey goes much deeper than you'd imagine