Why is it that children ask the pertinent questions?

Why is it that children ask the pertinent questions? I mean, why is it that children are OK about asking questions that really are, when it comes down to, OK to ask?

A child will ask "where did I come from?", in fact I can clearly remember asking that myself - just as they'll happily ask any question of anybody about any thing.

What destroys this kind of questioning? It can only be fear in others, can't it? I can remember as a child asking questions and being suddenly attacked for doing so. How many adults do this kind of thing to their children? They crush the natural inquisitiveness in that developing human being, purely because of their own fears and unresoved conflicts. In that respect, so many people condemn their children to the same life sentence they've lived themselves.

And so, the deep, meaningful questions about reality get shoved under the carpet, and subjects like sex and love and death get avoided at all costs.

Yet what are we here for, if not to learn? Why should any subject, no matter how painful to look at, be avoided?

I mean, it's not as though at the end of this life we aren't going to have to all face the same things, whatever they may be. We'll have to face the questions about existence, regardless of whether we've bothered to look at them earlier on in life or not.

Both my parents have a morbid fear of death. I grew up with having to witness it, and the terrible vacuum it creates in life. They'd both been through world war two, of course: my dad had served in the army in Holland and Germany, and my mother had lived through The Blitz. I guess they'd witnessed their share of death, and the fear of death. Living through that kind of thing so constantly must be a terrible thing.

But I think that often what happens is that the grief can be passed down a generation, or maybe two.

I grew up with the knowledge of my uncle's death in 1942. As I've mentioned earlier in this blog, I was named after him, and I think I inherited somthing of his spirit or purpose or something. There was some waste, I suppose you could say, in his existence being thrown away in a war in that way, and I think that my existence has been in part to make up for that waste, if that makes any sense.

And, having grown up with the fear of death all around me, perhaps it's been my own spirit's life lesson to reject that fear, somehow.

I recently learned that my mother has obsessed all her life over the death of her father. It's like she's held on to the loss of him all her life, and not been able to move on. Yet I can't help asking "where does she think he is?" I mean, why do people think that death is an end, and not just a transition? I think it's the locking away of a person into the heart that hurts so much more than anything else, whether we've lost that person from death, or from a relationship that's ended for some other reason.

My father was the same. As a child, I found a letter that my grandfather had written before he'd died, telling my father what he felt and such. It was touching, but my father had guarded it so carefully. Why? Why treasure something, when the spirit of his father is there to be enjoyed, spoken to, listened to, at any time?

I've always talked to the dead. I used to wander around the local cemetary quite regularly, up until I left London. I'd talk to my grandparents, my dead uncle, a boy who punched me once, who later died aged 23. So much can be learned from talking to the dead, just as talking to the living, and perhaps more, if they're more up for listening when dead than when alive. I'd talk to my old teacher from primary school, Mr. Norton, who in life used to make his bottom lip come up over his top when he was thinking. I'd talk to people who'd died young, too. They often had the most to say about living life fully while you can.

Of course, it did mean getting a bit emotional, doing it. I mean, you can't stand over a grave and start talking to someone without some tears coming up, and maybe a bit of a wail or two, but I figure, would anyone who loved want anything less than someone getting something out of their death? I know I certainly would.

Because at the end of the day we're all dead people in waiting, aren't we? So why all the fuss about something we're all going to go through? I can't help thinking that so many of the wars and death in the world are caused be the fear of the very thing that causes them, if that makes any sense.

But I digress...

Children ask the pertinent questions, I think, because they don't have that self consciousness, and they don't have those fears. Children are far more accepting. They only learn non acceptance, by having that inquisitive nature and search for real truth beaten out of them, either physically or mentally or emotionally.

I feel certain that most children are happy to talk to spirits. In fact, I'm certain they do. What we call an "active imagination" is only that children are closer to The Source - that is, the spirit world. They've clearer memories of it, that's all, because they haven't been obscured by the fears and lies of common, traumatic living.

And we're drawn to the light of children precisely for that reason: that on some level we recognise that lost innocence in ourselves. We become reminded of who we really were, once. And then we love those children, for providing us with that connection to the divine again.

But in a sense, it's wrong to draw on children in the way we do. That's when we crush that divine nature, I think, by becoming spiritual burdens to them. That's why we need to have our own spiritual connection, I believe. And that, in turn, means that we, as adults, need to keep asking the pertinent questions, too.

All that makes us die, spiritually, is that we become slaves to fear and hatred. That's the first death, I believe, and the one that leads to the second, "real" death.

Only by remaining connected to the inquistive, healthy, questioning mind do we stay alive, and do we stay young. And that means being who we are, regarless of what demands others make on us or expect of us.

Provided we do no harm to others, what on Earth could be wrong with that?

And that is my first pertinent question.