returning

How sad if we pass through life and never see it with the eyes of a child.  This doesn't mean you should drop your concepts totally; they're very precious.  Though we begin without them, concepts have a very positive function.  Thanks to them we develop our intelligence.  We're invited, not to become children, but to become like children.  We do have to fall from a stage of innocence and be thrown out of paradise; we do have to develop an "I" and a "me" through these concepts.  But then we need to return to paradise.  We need to be redeemed again.  We need to put off the old man, the old nature, the conditioned self, and return to the state of the child but without being a child.  When we start off in life, we look at reality with wonder, but it isn't the intelligent wonder of the mystics; it's the formless wonder of the child.  Then wonder dies and is replaced by boredom, as we develop language and words and concepts.  Then hopefully, if we're lucky, we'll return to wonder again.

Anthony de Mello