SAD, as an acronym, usually stands for Seasonal Affective Disorder, a type of depression caused by lack of sunlight in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere. In this blog it stands for Suffering And Death, the game we all engage in here.
Unfortunately, we don't see it as a game. We see it as all there is.
During my Catholic religious education, some might say indoctrination, there were many sayings we had to learn off. One that stuck with me was "Unless we become as little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of Heaven." (Matthew 18.3) I thought about this a lot and tried to figure out what it meant.
In A.H. Almaas's book "A Pearl Beyond Price" he talks about child psychology and how as babies we develop and absorb our behaviour patterns. He stresses that the period between one month and ten months is critical since during this period we form a "dual unity" with our primary care giver, usually our mother. He references the work of Margaret Schönberger Mahler.
The irony in all this is that while I was busy trying to figure it out, there were child psychologists out there who had been studying it for years. And they had the answers.
Also, I had wondered about our eyesight as babies. What do babies really see? The answer to this may never be known since as babies we have no verbal ability to tell anyone what we are seeing.
"When a baby is born, although her eyes are physically capable of seeing well, the brain is not yet mature enough to interpret all of the visual information, hence things will remain pretty blurry for the first few months. As the brain matures and becomes more complex, the baby’s vision will improve." (Wikiparenting)
"From the day your baby's born, his eyes will aid his physical, mental, and emotional development by allowing him to take in information — a little bit at first, and eventually much more — about the world around him." (Babycenter)
Although these sites differ on whether your child is a boy or a girl, they both agree that our eyesight is fully developed by eight months old. Walking and talking usually develop in the last quarter of our first year. As one grandmother put it to me, "Aren't we terrible, at six months we are busy encouraging them to walk and to talk. By the time they get to two or three we are shouting at them to sit down and shut up."
Our first year is very critical to our overall development. We are absorbing the stuff that will be with us all our lives. This absorption period continues until we are seven or eight, but is mostly complete by the time we are three. It is the most intensive learning period of our lives. And it is a period that we have absolutely no control over.
We are taking everything on board without any ability to discern whether it is good, bad or indifferent. We are absorbing the mental and emotional patterns of our parents and alloparents (individuals other than our actual parents who act in a parental role - grandparents, brothers, sisters, relations, minders and carers).
And, curiously enough, we are trying to heal them. When we are born we have no sense of separation. We are one with everyone and everything. Innately, we share our parents and alloparents mental and emotional states, their ups and downs, their pain and their suffering.
We replicate these states within ourselves, just like our parents did and their parents before them. They become our behaviour patterns, and even though as we get older we learn that some of these may not be useful, they are the ones that we resort to in times of stress.
The big problem is that, as adults, we are not aware of them. They are, seemingly, not under our control. They are buried deep in our minds and rise to take us over with alarming speed and with little concern for their consequences.
They all hinge on our identification with our bodies. We believe that we are bodies and that our bodies control our minds. In fact, it's the other way round. Our thinking controls our bodies.
That our bodies control our minds is the basis of all allopathic medicine. The idea that putting something into our mouths or injecting it into our bodies will fix our problems is based on the belief that we are chemical beakers. Something has gone wrong in our bio-chemistry and chemical intervention is required to put it right. While the body is perceived as a bio-chemical factory this may make sense. Once we see the mind as the root cause of all our problems, we realise that all we have to do to heal our mental and emotional problems as well as our physical one is to change our thinking.
Let us not continue to ignore all that we have learned about the mind. Let us not continue to see ourselves as limited, powerless and doomed bodies. Let us give up the idea that "someone knows better". That there is some expert out there that can fix us. The body is an amazing design that will heal itself the instant we stop playing our SAD game.
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