=1 "Mother and child"

Mother and child

The mother, from the moment of conception, times, harmonizes, evokes, calls into play the different elements of the child’s being. She is the servant of the composer, and at first the only one on earth who can read his score. She sings the whole. Like a star song she responds to a universal vibration of oneness and love. Hers is a lunacy of love. By her song, by her dreams, by her thinking, by constant modification of her inner chemistry she calls him forth into orchestral becoming.

The newborn lives by this input; it is his only way of growing. He imitates, copies, echoes and absorbs all his mother’s movements of consciousness or of inconscience and, through her, those of his surroundings. Because everything is she, he is part of her. She is his environment, she is his whole universe.

So much is this true that at the end of this first year of imprint, if his mother is Chinese, he is a little Chinese; if his mother is a lioness, he is a little lion. If is mother is a coward, he is a little coward, and if his mother is a yogini he is a little yogi.

The core of his happy and victorious expansion is this oneness with his mother. If she is conscious, her simplest gestures will transmute all the acts of daily life into an immense net of happiness which relates everything to everything.

In order to keep in tune with the universe, the child needs a close physical contact with his mother, skin against skin. In this contact there is also an element of fundamental tenderness through which the oneness diffracts into peace, knowledge and joy.

It is not because of superstition that mothers in primitive societies never leave their children during the first two or three years. This closeness protects the baby not only from the trauma of a separation, which would literally dissolve his feeling of oneness, but also from undesirable influences. The constant caress of body against body feeds his becoming, builds up his sociability and familiarizes him with the world around him.

His first lesson is a lesson of caresses. With her tactile genius the mother wins him as a friend of matter. His body becomes an intimate of his soul. She creates for him a whole yoga of caresses. This yoga of caresses finds its natural extension in the yoga of fire.

Now the moment has come to go forth to adventure together in the forest of life. She will explain to him:
“Here is a forest, and the garden where the princess plays with her golden ball. And here is the fox, the golden bird, and the giant,” or: “Here is the great curve, the little curve and the anticurve,” or:
“Here is the continuum and the discontinuum…”

Everything that has been archetype in him now receives slowly both name and form and becomes precise in the play of manifestation. Every true culture, whether realist or abstract, magic or scientific, is above all a mythology which permits man to personify, classify, put in order, manipulate and finally to conquer the subconscient and the unknown. That is why so-called fairy stories play an important role in the psychological emergence of the child into a universe which is all psychology.

In order to maintain her child in the oneness, the mother must not forbid him anything. Otherwise he will feel himself at fault, hide himself from her and from the truth of his being. He will lose the sense of his origin and of his destiny. She will take care to fulfill her protecting, helping and guiding role without prohibitions, restrictions or negative statements.

To make this possible it is indispensable that they remain relatively isolated. He will not only be protected from the microbes of cholera or the virus of a grippe, but, equally important, his environment will ensure a sustained vital and mental hygiene. He can then consecrate all his energies to growing and unfolding instead of fighting against hostile forces.

For months after his birth he needs the total presence of his mother in order to become an avatar: a being in whom nothing has been spoiled, a pure jewel of truth and of life.

A oneness which does not know itself does not belong to itself either. The men of ancient times spoke of this decisive confrontation with oneself as a baptism of fire. Without a mother who possesses the infinite dimension of oneness a child cannot become really himself and thus truly great. She has to hold him in that inner truth-flame until he awakens to his immortality, to his infinity. Awakened he becomes the hero, that being whom the peoples of antiquity declared to be half way between man and the gods. Only then is he ready to confront the world.

What the guru is for the disciple — the whole, the unique — the mother is for her child. Equally, the child for his mother. This reciprocal adoration gives her the power to lead him into the realization of oneness. What is burned away in that identification, in that light, is the feeling of birth as separation, as a natal division.

Only a mother herself serenely secure in the oneness can prevent the formation in her child of that lie of the seed-ego — the feeling of being small, buffeted, limited in time and space and destined eventually to die.

Only a child who has passed through baptism by this fire will live a life without fear. He alone among all the neurotics of time and space around him will be normal, for he has annulled his date of birth in favour of an adventure of eternal becoming.