We imagine that a strange animal might be a monster, because on a deeply implicate level, this animal might indeed be a predator. We imagine we might be watched by ghosts, because on an equally implicate level, we recognize that our ancestors do have feelings about what we do and say.

We inherit our sense of tribal betrayal. The sense that we should not strike our brother, or betray our sisters trust. Children almost immediately begin to imagine and act out, in pretend scenarios, these “family” values. Do they have to be taught how to do this?

No. They see it around them. They even identify other children who show a stronger tendency toward paternal behaviour, the fatherly or motherly spirit, and they show little concern for the literal particulars of what gender that child is. A little girl is freely called upon to play the role of “daddy”, and a boy is just as readily identified in these games of pretend as an object of the care givers attention as they are as being a competent service provider. “You be the mailman!” “You be the bus driver!” And these roles are valued neither more nor less than the role of the child, unless the child has been taught to believe otherwise.

Does this extend, even if in a very small measure, as far as the folk saying that, “We are born into our politics and our religion”? It does, in that we are born imagining things that adults would call gods, but children just as readily call super heroes or fairies, and we also imagine how people should perhaps form groups and work together. Often imagining that one or more people should “be in charge.” But how often, in those imaginations, do those rules involve negating the identity of the other children?

It doesn’t. Children seem more inclusive. They are more inclusive because they are more instinctive. They identify with a world that allows identity. It’s one we consider to be dreamy or imaginative or fantasy, but as adults we tend to reject all this, which shows up in a specific way.

Please, if you are willing, tell me if you experience this, or have witnessed it in others, because as adults we have rejected our imaginations. We have rejected our feelings and imaginative/creative drives to one degree or another. We take any other persons motivation, any other circumstance or situation, and over state it, exaggerate and twist it into a sort of perverse mockery of whatever it might have been intended to be, make of the situation a “bad joke” and without really deliberately or consciously doing so. Do other peoples intentions ever seem naturally innocent to you now? Is anything just naturally acceptable? If not, why not?

Someone told us she could stop time and I thought, yeah right, but my friend believed her and wanted to know all about it, and it turned out to be an interesting discussion. I would have been close minded to it, but my friend generally seems naturally innocent.

The reason we cannot see the space between self and experience is we cannot see the innocence. The reason we dramatize and twist the social structure we share as adults is we, in our heart of hearts, seek a return to innocence. The reason you would practice re-framing experience is to rediscover that innocence in yourself, in the world around you. Every time we see the experience of being brought about by powers somehow beyond our imagination, we invoke that primal monster, and want to run and hide under our beds, or kick and spit and throw a tantrum, because every fibre of our beings tells us that the situation is not fair, that there is no room to be ourselves or meet our real needs in that situation.

“Why me? Why me?”

We are like brain injured monkeys trained to punish ourselves whenever one of the rules has been broken. Where is healing or a genuine life to be found in that? You don’t have to play the mocking game. Whenever a situation just seems sick, whenever someones reasons for a behaviour just seem petty, as beneath contempt as that whole situation may seem, there is really only you, passionately mocking yourself.

I guess we do it to avoid feeling the pain it’s caused us? Yes, even brain deadened, blind and deaf existence is better than the hell on earth of that pain, but it is not the only option available to us. For every situation, there is a possible recovery.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~