{"id":92601,"date":"2017-10-21T16:06:47","date_gmt":"2017-10-21T20:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=92601"},"modified":"2017-10-21T17:50:45","modified_gmt":"2017-10-21T21:50:45","slug":"on-not-putting-away-childish-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/on-not-putting-away-childish-things\/","title":{"rendered":"On Not Putting Away Childish Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"antique<\/a><\/strong>I want to share some thoughts about the real importance of childhood as an ongoing source of integration and inspiration.<\/p>\n

My title means to contradict the advice offered by 1 Corinthians 13:11 to let the past fall away like an obsolete cocoon. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as if your past is something you have to repent of. The closest I can get to that is what Jung says about the need to consolidate one\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Ego, then to move on to transcend it, as a kind of launch pad, to embark on the development into the Self. But what is it to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153put away childish things\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p>\n

C.S. Lewis took it pretty literally. At a certain point, having graduated from school and getting ready for employment, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Jack\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and his brother decided to gather up their once-prized childhood toys, stuff them into a metal box and bury them on the hillside in the countryside. Well, you will never catch me committing such a crime against myself. My childhood Teddy Bear sits atop the bedpost. My action figure collection has, over the years, expanded like the Blob. In fact everything I have ever loved has remained a part of me. Comic books, monster movies: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all there, like a sequence of tree rings. Put them away? Why? Why would I do that? They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve made me what I am.<\/p>\n

Okay, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have\u00c2\u00a0no reason to worry if I had never acquired wider interests, but I did. Early on, I developed a great interest in history, ancient and modern. I had always been fascinated with Greek and Norse mythology, and when I embraced fundamentalist Christianity at age 10, it was a natural progression along the same trajectory. It did not take long for me to realize this, when one afternoon, while taking a walk in the neighborhood, it occurred to me to ask how I knew that the biblical Jehovah was any more real than Zeus. It took me many years before I could accept that he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n

And after that, after I exited fundamentalism, I eventually figured I needed to reconcile myself to my rejected religious past. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just cut off that part of myself. I needed to find a way to reincorporate it. I reached the point where I could recall with fondness the friendships and the good clean fun of those years. And of course I never dropped the Bible. Its fascination continued, more fervently than ever. My curiosity to understand the text had eventually led to my loss of religious faith. Only now I stopped calling my questions \u00e2\u20ac\u0153doubts\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and set about finding answers. I found them in biblical criticism.<\/p>\n

And the more thoroughly I understood the Bible and Christianity as monuments of ancient mythology and religion, the more I found myself appreciating religious symbolism and rituals. I found that I loved these things all the more for not having to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153believe\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in them. Seems like a paradox, but it really isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.<\/p>\n

Rene Guenon once said that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u009d includes all my world of experience. Sounds right. I think of a scene in Star Trek IV<\/em> when the touchy-feely Vulcan guru Sybok (Spock\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s half-brother) offered to leech Kirk\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s emotional pain from him. Kirk refused: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Dammit! I need<\/em> my pain!\u00e2\u20ac\u009dYour experiences are component parts of you, and it is dangerous to suppress or to amputate them.<\/p>\n

What does \u00e2\u20ac\u0153integrity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mean? In Seventies-speak, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153having it all together.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Like a Rubik\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Cube with all the pieces in correct alignment. If you want to have integrity, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to work if you pry out some of the pieces and toss them away.<\/p>\n

\"heart<\/a>What particular function do your \u00e2\u20ac\u0153childish things\u00e2\u20ac\u009d have in the bigger picture? I recall quite\u00c2\u00a0clearly how, in my Junior High years, as I was reading the flood of fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks featuring Conan, Doc Savage, John Carter, Bilbo, etc., I was keenly aware as it was happening that this reading was stretching and expanding my imagination. I could almost feel it! And in the decades that followed, I found that all this \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sense of wonder\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (an old and apt SF slogan) served me well. It installed a horizon of transcendence in my head that, I believe, forever prevented my ossifying into a mundane adult zombie, the danger Wordsworth described so well:<\/p>\n

THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, <\/em>
\nThe earth, and every common sight, <\/em>
\nTo me did seem <\/em>
\nApparell’d in celestial light, <\/em>
\nThe glory and the freshness of a dream. <\/em>
\nIt is not now as it hath been of yore;\u00e2\u20ac\u201d <\/em>
\nTurn wheresoe’er I may, <\/em>
\nBy night or day, <\/em>
\nThe things which I have seen I now can see no more. <\/em><\/p>\n

The rainbow comes and goes, <\/em>
\nAnd lovely is the rose; <\/em>
\nThe moon doth with delight <\/em>
\nLook round her when the heavens are bare; <\/em>
\nWaters on a starry night <\/em>
\nAre beautiful and fair; <\/em>
\nThe sunshine is a glorious birth; <\/em>
\nBut yet I know, where’er I go, <\/em>
\nThat there hath<\/em> pass’d away a glory from the earth.<\/em><\/p>\n

***<\/em><\/p>\n

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? <\/em>
\nWhere is it now, the glory and the dream? <\/em><\/p>\n

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: <\/em>
\nThe Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, <\/em>
\nHath had elsewhere its setting, <\/em>
\nAnd cometh from afar: <\/em>
\nNot in entire forgetfulness, <\/em>
\nAnd not in utter nakedness, <\/em>
\nBut trailing clouds of glory do we come <\/em>
\nFrom God, who is our home: <\/em>
\nHeaven lies about us in our infancy! <\/em>
\nShades of the prison-house begin to close <\/em>
\nUpon the growing Boy, <\/em>
\nBut he beholds the light, and whence it flows, <\/em>
\nHe sees it in his joy; <\/em>
\nThe Youth, who daily farther from the east<\/em>
\nMust travel, still is Nature’s priest, <\/em>
\nAnd by the vision splendid <\/em>
\nIs on his way attended; <\/em>
\nAt length the Man perceives it die away, <\/em>
\nAnd fade into the light of common day.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In a much-interpreted gospel passage we read that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Who knows what the author meant? But what I see in it is that it takes the open eye of the child who is ready to see anything and who hopes reality is wider than what tired adults tell him it is. We need a more expansive world than the daily grind offers us, even if it is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153only\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the expanding cosmos inside our heads. This is a childish thing we need to retain. This is a childish thing that will keep us young in heart and mind and spirit. That way, the calendar notwithstanding, the real glory of youth will never expire.<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.\"bob's<\/a><\/p>\n

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I want to share some thoughts about the real importance of childhood as an ongoing source of integration and inspiration. My title means to contradict the advice offered by 1 Corinthians 13:11 to let the past fall away like an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}