Where Have We Hidden Our Inner Child?

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Young children often show a simplicity, a truth, that adults seem to have lost. Where does this inner child go into hiding, somewhere between the innocence of the cradle and adulthood? This piece explores that shift, and what can still be found again.

A question comes up often in the conversations I have with people on a spiritual search, and I realized there was no existing text that truly answered it: How can we explain that young children so often show simplicity, truth, when adults seem to have lost their innocence? Or, put another way: What happens as human beings grow up?

That is why I wrote this piece. There is good reason to ask the question, given the state of the world as it appears through the news on our screens. So what is the cause of this difference between young children and adults?

Where does the innocence, the simplicity, the kindness, the tenderness, the love that exists in a person as a child go, once they grow up? Does this beautiful cast of mind simply vanish with time?

No; I know it does not, because there are countless adults who have kept this kindness, this simplicity, this love, this generosity. It is true that we do not talk about it much, and that it does not always show on someone's face. It is also true that life teaches us to hide our better nature, for fear it might desert us.

I look within myself and I see that love, kindness, generosity, and simplicity are still present, and I am an adult. I know that, at first glance, this is not obvious... perhaps life taught me to hide it, but out of fear, or out of modesty? I would lean toward modesty. And I conclude that this must be true for many other people, perhaps even for most people.

Peace and love are universal, because they come from a source that different traditions name in many ways; some speak of the breath of life, of the Spirit, of the active force of God. So the underlying simplicity, love, and kindness of childhood does not actually disappear in the adult. So what does happen, then, as a person grows up?

The Bliss of Our Origins

When the soul first becomes incarnate, it is still bathed in a kind of original bliss; a peace with no apparent cause, which nearly everyone has sensed at least once, in a moment of grace whose source we cannot always name.

Each tradition has tried, in its own way, to name this original state. Jesus spoke of the "Kingdom"; that is the word I borrow here, in the phrase "the innocence of the Kingdom." Lao Tzu, for his part, spoke of the "Tao."

In both cases, this is not some separate place, but God Himself; or, for those the word "God" does not sit well with, the Whole, the infinite Unity. This bliss is the essential happiness that comes from being conscious of the Whole's fundamental harmony.

The soul comes from this Kingdom to become incarnate in the child a mother carries within her. When the child is born, it is still bathed in this bliss. One need only watch the smiles that newborns so often wear in their sleep to glimpse what I mean here. Then the child grows.

As the child grows, its senses develop: hearing first, then sight, then touch, alongside a steadily improving ability to explore its surroundings through control of its body, its movements, its ability to get around. The more the senses and mobility develop, the more curiosity draws the child out toward the world around it.

And so the child grows, month by month, year by year, increasingly drawn toward the outside, and less and less toward the inside. Peace, love, the simplicity of the soul, all reside within us; that is where we must go to find them. If we lean toward the outside, our senses turned outward, we lose awareness of that inner world.

From About Six or Seven Years Old

Up until around six years old, or seven, a child still keeps this peace, this simplicity. A baby lives in the present moment. The more the child grows, the more it enters a world of senses turned outward, the more it takes on a full schedule; school, the calendar, school holidays, weekends; and the further it drifts from the present moment.

It begins projecting itself outward, and later: "When I grow up!"; drifting still further from the present moment. Yet the truth of life lies in the present, and the further we move from it, the less we actually live it.

The child grows up, goes to school, where they learn words, how to turn them into sentences, and knowledge that is taught to them. Along with intellectual knowledge come concepts, opinions we form about things and people, vanity, and everything else we believe we know.

The more the child grows, the more they become an adult. I myself struggled to become an adult, and I am not entirely sure I ever fully managed it.

The underlying nature of the soul always remains peace, simplicity, and love. But as we grow up, we lose our taste for the present moment. And so we end up identifying with our personality, with the knowledge we have learned, with concepts, with conditioning, with family patterns, with our thoughts. This is how the awareness of peace, love, and simplicity is lost.

Finding it again calls for inner work that few people undertake. This work begins with questioning our own certainties, and with asking ourselves the right questions, such as: "Who am I, really?" "What is the purpose of life?" "What actually matters?" "Does the soul exist? Does God?" This is the beginning of a search for truth.

From the age of reason, around seven years old, the child drifts away from innocence, from this bliss, from the present moment. So much gets piled on top of their deeper identity that, eventually, in their own eyes, what once made them a "little child," as Jesus put it, disappears.

This is what happens as a person grows up; and this, in turn, is also what an inner path can help us find again.

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