1 result for (book:tps6 AND heading:"delet session decemb 15 1981" AND stemmed:child)
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From their parents they learn to pare down the dimensions of their own practically accepted personhood. To that extent they cut themselves off from large portions of their own subjectivity. The “us-ness” of a single identity is experienced less and less. It exists, nevertheless. (Long pause.) I told you that at certain levels contradictions would certainly seem to appear, but the us-ness of the self represents an important psychic characteristic. The child’s explorations of its environment are in a fashion quite different from its later adolescent explorations of the world. A child’s curiosity goes out in all directions. In a fashion it psychologically multiplies itself as it goes. Its consciousness spreads out to include all that it perceives, while still retaining a sense of its own singularity.
(9:13.) A child may think “We will go to sleep now”—meaning quite happily that (pause) its own single consciousness also participates in the conscious life and activities of everything else in its environment, so it and the creatures of the night, say, sleep together, and waken together to greet the dawn. In such a way the child actively participates in the consciousness of nature—and I am not speaking of an imaginative or symbolic participation alone, but of an awareness of the multiplicity within itself and of other creatures.
To some extent, particularly at certain levels, that participation brings about a far greater sense of sympathy and power than adults ever realize, particularly in your cultural times. The child does not have to cry out or address or search for a particular kind of God, because it understands through such subjective behavior that its own precious singularity is also a part of the greater us-ness of all other creatures, and that its singularity is automatically assured, as is its own us-ness within that larger context.
The child understands that it is itself, and yet that it is simultaneously a portion of its parents, alive within their lives (intently), as well as within its own. In calling out to them, the child calls out to a quality of its own us-ness. The child expects the parents to come to its support in the same way that it expects its own fingers and toes to support its various positions and decisions. The child understands that in a certain fashion (underlined) the parents are an extension of its own identity. At the same time it knows that the parents are equally independent, and that its own identity is a part of extensions that are the parents’.
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