Imagine The World We Could Create

Human babies are born with their full capacity to see, but they are unable to focus or move their eyes in a coordinated way. Their visual world is therefore blurry and gray. Babies must learn to see, much in the way they will later learn to walk and talk.

The way sight works is that particles of light, photons, alter the receptors in our retinas. Our bodies then convert that into electricity, which becomes information. We must then assemble this information into what we've come to understand as the visual world. In other words, our minds must learn to create what we see, which means, in a very real sense, that babies are born seeing the world as it actually is without the intervention of the human mind and must then, over the course of the next several years, learn how to not just passively see like a camera might, but to actively make the world.

It's amazing to think about and even more so when we consider that this is the process involved with all our senses: our minds must learn to convert abstract sensations into what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch, and this is a process that is carried out during most of our preschool years. We are literally learning to create the world. Is it any wonder that scientists working for NASA found that a full 98 percent of four and five years olds they tested fell into the category of "creative genius," while only two percent of adults do. 

As adults, reality is a kind of settled science in the sense that we long ago learned how to assemble the information provided by the particles and waves of the universe into what we perceive to be real. Young children are still in the process of learning to create, their brains making form from formlessness, sense from senselessness, and concreteness from abstraction. It is a mind-boggling process, work that can only be done by a creative genius.

This is what we interrupt when we insist upon inflicting our agendas on young children, foisting mere memorization and ciphering upon them, insisting that they "learn" whatever it is we've decided they must learn, succumbing to a reality that is not of their own creation. This is the reason that the first five years must remain sacred, a time when we allow these creative geniuses the time, space, and freedom to do what they are designed to do, which is learn to create reality. And if we could succeed at this, if we could, say, allow one single generation this sacred time in which to genuinely play as they are designed to do, perhaps more than two in 100 of us would emerge with their capacity for creative genius intact. Imagine the world we could create.

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