Soy Sauce

Second Childhood

This great experiment through which you all are passing is basically to achieve your lost childhood again. “Your lost childhood,” means your innocence, your eyes full of wonder, knowing nothing, having nothing, but yet feeling yourself at the top of the world. Those golden moments of wonder, joy, no tension, no worry, no anxiety, have to be regained, rediscovered. The sage is nothing but the circle that started in your birth coming full way, complete, back to the same point.

Of course the second childhood is far more valuable and significant than the first. In the first the innocence was there because of ignorance, so it was not pure and clear and in your possession; it was just a natural thing that happens to every childhood. The second childhood is your greatest achievement – it does not happen to all. The second childhood makes you innocent without ignorance, the second childhood comes through all kinds of experiences. It is mature, centered, ripe.

Man has much to learn from children, but who cares about children? Everybody is trying to teach them without ever thinking about a simple thing: they are coming out of life’s source, fresh. They must be carrying something which we have forgotten. If you go backward and remember, you cannot go further back than your fourth year, or the most your third year. Suddenly there comes a wall; your memory cannot penetrate further back. What happened? You lived those four years and in fact, those four years were the happiest that you had known.

But your experience somehow has been blocked by the society. It is dangerous for the society that people should be so innocent, like children. Your parents, your teachers, your leaders “with all the good intentions in their hearts” are doing immense harm. They repress the child in you, and the child in you is closer to God than anything else. This is why so many mystics have insisted; “Unless you are born again, unless you become childlike again, you will not know the truth and you will not know the beauty and you will not know the mystery of existence.”

Everybody forgets, but somewhere deep down in the unconscious, the experience of those days goes on echoing. It is this echoing of those experiences that sends you in search, because you cannot accept your miserable life “full of anxiety and tension and psychological sickness” as the meaning of your being here. Vaguely, somewhere, you know that there have been golden moments also. You cannot exactly remember, but an undercurrent in your unconscious goes on creating a longing in you to find those lost moments again.

Religion is basically the search for childhood: the same innocence, the same joy in things, the same fearlessness those magical eyes, that heart which was able to dance with the trees, the heart that was enchanted with the moon and the stars. That space in which existence is nothing but sheer glory, pure splendor.