II The Loss of Innocence
The emotional body has a component like an alarm system to let us know when something is wrong. It is the same with the physical body; it has an alarm system to let us know something is wrong with our body. We call this pain. When we feel pain it is because there is something wrong with the body that we have to look at and fix. The alarm system for the emotional body is fear. When we feel fear, it's because there is something wrong. Perhaps we are in danger of losing our life.
The emotional body perceives emotions, but not through the eyes. We perceive emotions through our emotional body. Children just feel emotions and their reasoning mind doesn't interpret or question them. This is why children accept certain people and reject other people. When they don't feel confident around someone, they reject that person because they can feel the emotions that person is projecting. Children can easily perceive when someone is angry and their alarm system generates a little fear that says, "Stay away." And they follow their instinct – they stay away.
We learn to be emotional according to the emotional energy in our home, and our personal reaction to that energy. That is why every brother and sister will react differently according to how they learn to defend themselves and adapt to different circumstances. When our parents are constantly fighting, when there is disharmony, disrespect, and lies, we learn the emotional way of being like them. Even if they tell us not to be that way and not to lie, the emotional energy of our parents, of our entire family, will make us perceive the world in a similar way.
The emotional energy that lives in our home is going to tune our emotional body to that frequency. The emotional body starts to change its tune, and it is no longer the normal tune of the human being. We play the game of the adults, we play the game of the outside Dream, and we lose. We lose our innocence, we lose our freedom, we lose our happiness, and we lose our tendency to love. We are forced to change
and we start perceiving another world, another reality: the reality of injustice, the reality of emotional pain, the reality of emotional poison. Welcome to hell – the hell that humans create, which is the Dream of the Planet. We are welcomed into that hell, but we don't invent it personally. It was here before we were born.
You can see how real love and freedom are destroyed by looking at children. Imagine a child two or three years old running and having fun in the park. Mom is there watching the little guy, and she's afraid he might fall and hurt himself. At a certain point she wants to stop him, and the child thinks Mom is playing with him, so he tries to run faster from her. Cars are passing in the street nearby, which makes Mom even more afraid, and finally she catches him. The child is expecting her to play, but she spanks him. Boom! It's a shock. The child's happiness was the expression of love coming out of him and he does not understand why she is acting this way. This is a shock that stops love little by little over time. The child does not understand words, but even so, he can question, "Why?"
Running and playing is an expression of love, but it's no longer safe because your parents punish you when you express your love. They send you to your room, and you cannot do what you want to do. They tell you that you are being a bad boy, or a bad girl, and that puts you down, that means punishment.
In that system of reward and punishment there is a sense of justice and injustice, what is fair and what is not fair. The sense of injustice is like a knife that opens an emotional wound in the mind. Then, according to our reaction to the injustice, the wound may get infected with emotional poison. Why do some wounds get infected? Let's look at another example.
Imagine that you are two or three years old. You are happy, you are playing, you are exploring. You aren't conscious of what is good, what is bad, what is right, what is wrong, what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, because you are not yet domesticated. You are playing in the living room with whatever is around you. You don't have any bad intention, you don't try to hurt anything, but you are playing with your Daddy's guitar. For you, it's just a toy; you don't try to hurt your Daddy at all. But your father is having one of those days when he doesn't feel right. He has problems in his business, and he goes into the living room and finds you playing with his things. He gets mad right away, and he grabs you and spanks you.
This is injustice from your point of view. Your father just comes, and with anger he hurts you. This was someone you trusted completely because he is your Daddy, someone who usually protects you and allows you to play and allows you to be you. Now there is something that doesn't quite fit. That sense of injustice is like a pain in your heart. You feel sensitive; it hurts and makes you cry. But you cry not just because he spanks you. It's not the physical aggression that hurts you; it's the emotional aggression you feel is not fair. You didn't do anything.
That sense of injustice opens a wound in your mind. Your emotional body is wounded, and in that moment you lose a little part of your innocence. You learn that you cannot always trust your father. Even if your mind doesn't know that yet, because your mind doesn't analyze, it still understands, "I cannot trust. Your emotional body tells you there is something that you cannot trust, and that something can be repeated.
Your reaction might be fear; your reaction might be anger or being shy or just crying. But that reaction is already emotional poison, because the normal reaction before domestication is that your Daddy spanks you and you want to hit him back. You hit him back, or just intend to put your hand up, and that makes your father even madder at you. The reaction of your father for just putting your hand up against him creates a worse punishment. Now you know he will destroy you. Now you are afraid of him, and you no longer defend yourself because you know it will only make things worse.
You still don't understand why, but you know your father can even kill you. This opens a fierce wound in your mind. Before this, your mind was completely healthy; you were completely innocent. After this, the reasoning mind tries to do something with the experience. You learn to react in a certain way, your personal way. You keep that emotion with you, and it changes your way of life. This experience will repeat itself more often now. The injustice will come from Mom and Dad, from brothers and sisters, from aunts and uncles, from the school, from society, from everyone. With each fear, you learn to defend yourself, but not the way you did before domestication, when you would defend yourself and just keep playing.
Now there is something inside the wound that at first is not a big problem: emotional poison. The emotional poison accumulates, and the mind begins to play with that poison. Now we start to worry a little about the future because we have the memory of the poison and we don't want that to happen again. We also have memories of being accepted; we remember Mom and Dad being good to us and living in harmony. We want the harmony, but we don't know how to create it. And because we are inside the bubble of our own perception, whatever happens around us now seems as if it is because of us. We believe Mom and Dad fight because of us, even if it doesn't have anything to do with us.
Little by little we lose our innocence; we start to feel resentment, then we no longer forgive. Over time, these incidents and interactions let us know it's not safe to be who we really are. Of course this will vary in intensity with each human according to his intelligence and his education. It will depend on many things. If you-are lucky, the domestication is not that strong. But if you are not so lucky, the domestication can be so strong and the wounds so deep, that you can even be afraid to speak. The result is, "Oh, I am shy." Shyness is the fear of expressing yourself. You may believe you don't know how to dance or how to sing, but this is just repression of the normal human instinct to express love.