32. Early Happy, Innocent Childhood

This is our Early Happy Childman stage, the time when the intellect becomes sufficiently able to understand cause and effect to begin actively experimenting—‘playing’—with the conscious power to self-adjust.

The species: the early australopithecines including Australopithecus afarensis—5 to 3 million years ago

The individual: 4, 5 and 6 years old

Drawing by Jeremy Griffith © 2006-2013 Fedmex Pty Ltd

While infancy is all about receiving love, childhood is predominantly about beginning to outwardly express our emerging intellectual ability to experiment in self-management. Page 142 of
PDF Version Early happy, innocent childhood is when the power of free will is innocently played with. It is when experiments begin with the awesome ability that consciousness provides of managing events to your own desired ends. We called it ‘play’ in recognition of the naivety at this stage of awareness of the problems associated with having free will, in particular unawareness of the conflict it leads to with the instincts. In this stage we are still, as it were, holding onto our mother’s apron strings, our instinctive orientations, with one hand, while carrying out short experiments in conscious self-management with the other. We are still depending on our established instinctive responses, namely our nurtured orientation to love, for the overall management of our life, but are also beginning to actively experiment in managing our life from a basis of understanding. The first demonstrative displays of the emerging ability to consciously manage cause and effect appear in this stage. In the case of humans today, it is the ‘look at me Daddy, I can jump puddles’ stage where reinforcing admiration from parents of the emerging conscious ability to manage events is so important.