When my first son was five years old, I was deep in the midst of an intellectual-spiritual search, reading such works as theologian Paul Tillich’s monumental Systematics, devouring Søren Kierkegaard, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Alfred North Whitehead, Carl Jung, poet William Blake, and so on. The problem of the relation of God and man had seized me completely. My dreams and inner experiences reflected this absorption and I had been in a pitch of intellectual excitement and spiritual bewilderment for several years. I had an exceptional rapport with my son and, as I was dressing for my class one morning, he came in with a detached look on his face.
“You know, Joe,” he said, sitting down on the edge of the bed, at which point he launched into some twenty minutes of unbroken, publishable speech; structured sentences of perfection followed without pause, without groping or emotional coloring. He delivered to me the most perfect articulation of the relation of God and man I had ever heard or hoped to hear. He used long, involved theological terms, and the overall pattern that emerged staggered me. Immense, vastly beyond my dilettante dabbles, he was telling me everything there was to know.
As I listened, and began to grasp the impossibility of what I was hearing, the hair rose on the back of my head, ripples of goose bumps spread over me, and tears began to fill my eyes. I was in the presence of the uncanny; something numinous and unaccountable was taking place.
He finished, his car pool honked outside to take him to kindergarten, and he left. I remained there for some time, confused and stunned. I tried to recapitulate what he had told me, but it was too enormous; his account exceeded my grasp of mind. I could only stand there and feel that revelation washing away from me, back into whatever state from which it had arisen. I was late to my class that morning, came home early, and paced about waiting for my son to come home at noon. When he rushed in, in his usual exuberance to hop on the piano stool for a romp with Bartok and Bach (which always preceded lunch), I interrupted him and tentatively approached the subject of his morning talk with me. He had no idea what I was talking about, nor did he ever recall the experience. All I had as verification of the event was his mother’s observation that he had talked with me at length that morning.
The child psychiatrist Gerald Jampolsky related how four- and five-year-old children were brought to him by disturbed parents because the children reported experiences we would call extrasensory. Eloise Shields reports that many children show telepathic and clairvoyant capacities at age four but that such potential usually disappears around age seven. Similarly, a colleague of mine did her doctorate in musicology and found that virtually all normally hearing four-year-old children had perfect pitch, but almost all lost it at around age seven. The reason for the loss seems to be lack of development and stabilization of such intuitive ability during its specific time for development. If no model is given to stimulate and stabilize the capacity, it atrophies. The loss seems to occur at age seven as the child’s locus of awareness shifts away from the primary brain system in order to develop the new brain and mind. If intuition has not been developed by then, through proper modeling and guidance, the possibility for such action generally atrophies, as the weight of attention shifts to the new blueprint.
In his book Never Cry Wolf,1 biologist Farley Mowatt described how an Eskimo “minor shaman” placed his five-year-old son with a family of wolves for twenty-four hours. When he returned, the child was playing happily with the wolf cubs, the adult wolves casually watching the antics of the children. Later, it was this son who could interpret the calls wolves use to signal from pack to pack over long distances, informing each other of the whereabouts and movements of the herds of caribou. This was vital information to the Eskimo, too, and was available through the boy, who had in some way been plugged into the wolf communication network at the appropriate time.
This is a cultural phenomenon unique to the Eskimo, of course. The father knew precisely what the maneuver was for and how to go about it. That was part of his calling as a shaman, his legacy and heritage. He did not prime the child with a set of expectancies, prerequisites, or instructions. He simply placed the child with the wolves, and the child spontaneously played with the cubs. The issue was not a matter of intellect but an affair of the heart—the heart of the life system that moves for the well-being of all. Of course, at five years of age, human and animal have much in common.
My five-year-old son provided for me an archetypal link which was equally a cultural phenomenon. He gave the particular delivery he did because of the particular passion that had moved me for so long. He was in the middle of his intuitive period, and I was his primary background and criterion. (I must make clear that my son’s mother did not share my spiritual enthusiasms and I never mentioned my pursuits around my family, for this offended her. So my son was not echoing oft-heard sentiments on my part, or giving me a glorified synthesis feedback of my own rhetoric. Not until after the death of his mother, when I was left as the sole parent of our rather large brood, did I begin to talk with them of my interests.)
For upward of thirty to forty thousand years, Australian aborigines operated out of a mind-set they called Dream Time. By shifting back and forth from the present moment into Dream Time, the aborgine had at his disposal information “closed to our senses five,” as William Blake would say. This capacity was a development of that very intuition that opens around age four and disappears for most of us at about age seven through lack of such cosmologies as Dream Time and aborigine models. By means of Dream Time, the aborigine knew the location and direction of travel of those animals he was allowed to kill in his particular clan, though those animals might be miles away. He knew the closest and most economical point of interception to take his quota of the proper food, and while cutting across the desert sand he knew the location of water, not by some acute ground reading of exterior cues alone, but by shifting into Dream Time, an eminently practical function.
My favorite story of the aborigine is of an English research group investigating the aboriginal ability to track and ground read.2 The aborigine, like the American Indian, considers the earth sacred and so fosters its ecology. He leaves little trace of his movements because he believes the earth was laid down in Dream Time and one must honor the precepts of Dream Time. Being a hunter-gatherer, he is always on the move: Wherever he is, is home; and he does not foul his nest. Yet, going across a wilderness area, a tracker would point to an area and remark that his kinsmen, the so-and-so group, were there so many days ago; so many were in the group, they did such and such, and went off in such a direction. The research party could detect nothing at all, and were impressed at this ability to detect such subtle signs and read so much from them.
As an experiment, the English had one member of their group walk a pre-selected, one-hundred-mile course, carefully mapped out, that would encompass every type of terrain: desert, rocky areas, swamp, ocean beach, and so on. Care was taken to leave no more visible sign than possible. One year later, when all signs of this walk would almost surely have been obliterated, they asked a famous tracker if he would undertake to follow such a trail if they took him to the beginning of it. He agreed only if they would give him an article of clothing worn by the man who left the trail. Holding the article of clothing, the tracker went into Dream Time. Then, in his economical fashion, he ran, following the trail unerringly. Never could the research people detect him stopping to search for a sign.
The researchers came up with their theories and then the aborigine gave his own explanation: “Holding the article belonging to the man, I go into Dream Time where that man leaving the trail is a permanent event. I simply translate that aspect of Dream Time into now. But I am not following a trail. The man and I are leaving that trail together.” In our logical split, we demand either-or; we can’t tolerate the paradox the aborigine presents. Paradox, I have been taught, is the threshold to truth, the breakpoint between logical sets. At paradox we must shift logic. The person who tries to carry one logic into the set of another logic loses the best of both worlds.
The aborigine was bonded with the earth. He maintained a state of unity between earth and self, or unity between his three brain systems. He provided his children with models that stimulated and nurtured this intuitive function at the appropriate time. The aborigine believed that every man, woman, animal, blade of grass, water hole, or tree had a counterpart, a subtle or dream image. The plan of the world is laid out in this dream form and enacted now, in the physical world. A perfect coordination and cooperation with Dream Time assures man a perfect relation with the form which shapes our world, with creation itself.
Dream Time refers to the general blueprint out of which life springs. Intuition is our innate capacity for becoming aware of this subtle energy as needed for our biological well-being. The optimum period for the development of this possibility is from age four to seven, and every facet of aboriginal life acts as the model, guide, and ongoing stimulus for the function to develop in the child. Yet the aborigine does not introduce the concept of Dream Time, with its elaborate rules and regulations, until a rite of passage at puberty. On the other hand, Dream Time is not developed at puberty; the capacity itself has been developed in the pre-logical years. The rite of passage that introduces the young person to the concepts of Dream Time takes place at the unfolding of the intellectual process around puberty. The rites encode the earlier development into a systematized, formalized, intellectual (and arbitrary) cosmology unique and perhaps indigenous to the aborigine. The function forming naturally within the child is made conscious as an intellectual structure at puberty, when abstract, intellectual capacity naturally unfolds. Through the rites, the natural, largely unconscious development taking place in the pre-logical years is incorporated into an abstract system of meaning, purpose, and design totally beyond the grasp of a five-year-old. The five-year-old’s job is to lay the functional groundwork on which the later abstract principles can be built. By fully living the stage of Dream Time as itself, the state is made available to a fully conscious analysis later.
Rites of passage, observed in many different ways in different cultures, serve a double purpose. The natural developments taking place around age seven and again around age eleven separate the ego from its state of pre-logical unity. The child’s awareness must be split off from his world structure in order to develop the kind of intellect that can create and grasp cosmologies of an abstract sort—the very cosmologies through which the ego is reintegrated. So rites of passage are movements forward into maturity; they reunite processes previously separated by integrating them into a higher structure.
The grounds for this reintegration are laid from age four to seven, before the periods of separation begin. This takes place through the development of intuition, which is again a way of relating the energy of the three brains. As the old brain is a physical energy system, the mid-brain is a subtle energy system.3 It would be analogous to say that the mid-brain is a waveform energy where the old brain is a particle-form system. In physics, wave forms are less restricted and more powerful than particle forms, and thus from the beginning, we find the fluid images of the mid-brain acting on and shaping the more restricted images of the old brain. Now at age four the new brain enters the scene as a third and equal center of child awareness and the focus of new development. The imagery of the new brain is abstract and far more fluid and powerful than that of either of the animal brains. From this new position of power, intelligence can use the supportive mid-brain to give information concerning the physical world which is not available through that old brain’s physical sensory system. This subtle sensing of physical relations is called intuition. All the higher animals develop some aspect of this mode of sensing, though they have only a minimal amount of that gray matter we call the new brain. With this huge new brain, and an elaborate extension of the animal brains, we have available a wide range of subtle capacities, though they must, as usual, be developed, and can be developed only through models of such capacity given at the appropriate stage.
The careful organization of nature’s plan can be seen in the late appearance and the long, slow growth of the corpus callosum. From the beginning of life, both hemispheres register and imprint the input from the two primary brains, but the left hemisphere, with its sparse connections, has a reduced role in these interactions. Once the corpus callosum begins its growth, the left hemisphere imprints from the mid-brain as usual but increasingly through its connections with the right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere has an ongoing and increasing access to the unified interactions of all three brains taking place in that unifying right hemisphere. With its weaker imprinting and reduced interplay with the primary brains, the left hemisphere is less committed, so to speak, less involved in that concrete construction of the early years, except as that action is translated through the unifying and supportive right hemisphere.
The right hemisphere maintains intact, throughout our life, all those imprints and interactions with the primary brains we made from our beginning. It maintains the perfect unity and functional rapport all three brains achieved in the first seven years. The right hemisphere preserves, unchanged, its earliest imprintings of that concrete language of body movements begun in utero; the emotional language of the late infant; the named-thing language; the analogical language of imagery transference; and the function of intuition developed during that same period from four to seven. This single, synchronous intelligence maintains the unity and well-being of the play of consciousness unfolding in the child. And all of this unifying action should be available to the left hemisphere as needed, after the shift of ego’s locus at age seven. Then the blueprint of the left hemisphere and mind can unfold for the development of operational logic—the logic of separation—and all previous systems will act as support for this next, higher integration.
Any left hemisphere specialty, such as abstract language, requires a continual feedback and cross-indexing with the right hemisphere, and the right hemisphere requires feedback and cross-indexing with the rest of the brain. The abstract language of the late child, unfolding fully at about age eleven, is one set apart from this unified system. Without the left hemisphere and mind separations, the materials of that holistic right hemisphere would become circular and repetitive; while without those materials to draw on selectively, the operational possibilities of the mind would have nothing to work with, nothing from which to build an abstract language or logic.
So we do well to reconsider our talk about a failure to develop right-hemisphere thinking in our schools; the development of the right hemisphere may not be an academic proposition. Its classroom is the living earth, its teaching material matter itself and models of intuition. The curriculum for this development is built within us, and has an explosive, universal longing for expression. And its expression is through play, storytelling, and “Let’s pretend”; its “prime time” is the first seven years, with a secondary time from age seven to eleven. Our problem is not that we have over-emphasized the left hemisphere and starved the right, it is that we have hardly touched on the capacities of the new brain. Things will not change until we allow each modality to develop as designed in those pre-logical years, and we rediscover the post-biological blueprint and its development, wherein, alone, the new brain is fully utilized.
At each shift of blueprint the brain apparently undergoes a “growth spurt” that prepares the brain for new learning (as we found happening right before birth).4 The capacity for new learning parallels the growth spurt and is followed by a plateau period in which new learning is not only inappropriate, but difficult, since the previous learning must now be practiced and varied to be completed. The brain/mind cannot undertake new learning in the practice and variation period, since the entrainment of brains is tied up in the incomplete structures of knowledge awaiting their completion by repetition and variation.
There is a brain growth spurt around three or four and another around age seven. The learning appropriate to the four-year-old is connected with bringing the new locus of awareness in the new brain into synchrony with the rest of the system. This is the practice-and-variation stage discussed above. During this time, particularly during the fifth and sixth years, new learning, other than practice and variation, is highly inappropriate and difficult. From all standpoints we find that this period, from ages four to seven, is designed for that one purpose to which the child is compulsively driven—play.5
Over the past forty years, however, this is the age at which we have insisted on putting the child into a school desk, restricting his movement (and we know learning takes place only through movement at this age), and forcing that dreamer into abstract pursuits suitable to pre-adolescence at best. Combined with the effects of hospital delivery, day-care, television, the collapse of family, and so on, the collapse of childhood itself has been accelerating. Since in each case the general area of damage has been the midbrain where all bonding, including social bonding, takes place, the collapse of society is a logical counterpart of this pattern of damage.
We must face the fact that damage to mid-brain development is damage to species survival and personal survival. When the mid-brain breaks down in its bonding, the right hemisphere breaks down in its unifying job and cannot support the left hemisphere’s movement into logical abstraction. The left hemisphere leads to independence of mind, and mind alone leads to Self. And Self, the goal of all development, is the only possible realm of integration, the final maturation of ego. So we must rediscover the truth that the teacher of the child is the earth and nature, whose language is first concrete, then emotional, then analogic and intuitive, long before word is split from its thingness to give a semantic language. And we must learn again that nature’s didactic method is play, the re-creative play of childhood that alone leads to the divine creative play of maturity.
We will discover this not by turning backward intellectually and trying to patch up our adult system with that same fractured intellect. We will discover the road to the divine play of maturity only through those teachers, those models, who have gone that road themselves. Only through contact with such models will our blueprint for that divine play leap up to us for its unfolding.