Are you tired of your children's stifled yawns and drooping
eyelids when you try to read them Ken Wilber's latest treatise
on postmetaphysical spirituality? Does your unusually precocious
Indigo kid have trouble fathoming Sri Aurobindo's critique of
Advaita Vedanta? If so, an innovative genre of children's
picture books may be just the thing to raise your child's
consciousness to radically new spiritual heights.
With titles like Born with a Bang: The Universe Tells
Our Cosmic Story and All I See Is Part of Me, this
distinctive class of kids' books represents what must be the
latest defensive tactic of “spiritual but not
religious” parents everywhere—inculcating children
in the ways of Carl Sagan and Eastern philosophy before they
even have a chance to learn about Noah's Flood. Spanning epic
tales of cosmic evolution and esoteric explanations of God, it
is a genre that encompasses both scientific naturalism and
nondual mysticism—usually seen as two opposing currents in
the philosophical stream. But despite any apparent
contradictions among them, these books all express visions of
universal Oneness and are clearly aligned in their fundamental
cause: to awaken children to a sense of the sacred in the midst
of a secular world.
“I tried to distill big abstract ideas into very pure,
simple phrases, so simple that a child might understand
them,” says Martin Boroson, author of Becoming Me: A
Story of Creation. “I also tried to keep a sense of
innocence and avoid language that was tied to any particular
tradition.” Boroson says the idea for Becoming Me
came to him one evening while he was meditating, when he
“realized it might be possible to convey the mystical idea
of transcendence and immanence in the form of a children's
book—a story in which God, who is infinitely big, really
likes being little.” Narrated in the first person by God
(who remains unnamed as such), this lavishly illustrated story
follows God's divine play as he grows tired of being the only
thing in existence and so transforms himself into the manifest
world of duality and multiplicity, culminating in the creation
of you, the reader, whom God calls “little Me.” In
other words, it's an exegesis on nondual mysticism for
kids—pointing young potential sages everywhere toward the
realization that the transcendent Creator and his creation are
ultimately One. Other books of this kind that clearly espouse
nonduality include What Is God? by Etan Boritzer, the
aforementioned All I See Is Part of Me by Chara M.
Curtis, and Because Nothing Looks Like God by
Lawrence and Karen Kushner.
If you're uncomfortable with the idea of a spiritual source
of creation and prefer to stick to more scientific ground, then
a trilogy of picture books written by Jennifer Morgan and
illustrated by Dana Lynne Andersen may be more appropriate for
the impressionable minds under your guard. Like the best of the
nonduality books, Morgan's series is written in the first
person, but from the viewpoint of the universe rather than that
of an explicitly transcendent God. “I am the Universe and
it's time for us to get to know each other,” says the
omnipresent narrator in Born with a Bang. “After
all,” it continues, “I'm 13 billion years old now .
. . and how old do you think you are? Nine? Thirteen?
How about 13 billion years old too! You are a part of
me—you are part of the Universe. You have never been
separate from me. That's why I'm going to tell you a story about
me, which is about you too.” Despite such sentiments'
apparent pantheism—the belief that “God” is
synonymous with the natural universe—it isn't clear why a
merely natural cosmos should be so happily self-aware. In fact,
Morgan's books appear to fall somewhere along the hairsplitting
divide between pantheism and panentheism—the idea
that the universe is pervaded by a divinity, spirit, or
conscious intelligence that is ultimately transcendent. It is a
worldview in which the scientific and the spiritual
interpretations of
reality suddenly find themselves not at all
opposed.
Even the more mystical Becoming Me
“is consistent with scientific theories of evolution and
cosmogenesis,” claims Boroson, “but looks at it all
from another vantage point—that of consciousness. For
example, the book shows the process of evolution but from God's
perspective, as an enormous playing-with-possibilities.”
Indeed, what may be most distinctive about this new genre of
books is that whether they seem aimed toward the scientific
crowd or the devoutly spiritual, none of them precludes the
possibility of being viewed through the lens of panentheism,
which gives ample room to both spirit and nature and gladly
accepts the reality of both.
Because of its potential to unite the traditional
archenemies known as science and spirituality, it's likely that
panentheism may turn out to be the reigning metaphysic of
twenty-first-century thought—for children and adults
alike. But no matter where the future ends up taking
spirituality, it's nice to know that the kids of the third
millennium are being looked out for by the more enlightened
among us. And who can say where such early mystical studies
might lead? Perhaps little Jenny, with her blanket and her
flashlight, poring over the universe's latest autobiography in
the stillness of the night, may one day become the leader of an
interstellar civilization abiding perpetually in a state of cosmic consciousness.