Child-like Living

The child you were is still alive within you, even if it hasn't been allowed out into the daylight for a number of years. By getting in touch with the child within yourself you can regain a lot of the simpler joys of life.

By learning to live with yourself part of what I mean is learning to live with the child within yourself. This is one of the great clues to having a happy contented life. If you can learn to love yourself like you would a child, by being kind, by being gentle, by being forgiving and by being tolerant, even while you are being watchful and protective you will find a lot of your enjoyment of life returns. Whenever possible be willing to play along with the child within. Taking yourself a little less seriously is a good thing. Take your shoes off and walk barefoot, sit on the swing or the seesaw with a friend even if you are 35 years old or older, sing, dance and be fascinated by simple things like water running under a bridge or ants climbing a tree. Let yourself have the time to enjoy life again, this will help you immensely in your desire to live without the hang-ups that so often accompany 'adulthood'.

I personally believe that adulthood should involve an addition to, not a replacement of, childhood. What I mean by this is that becoming an adult really means you have learned to look after the child within yourself and no longer need someone else to do this for you. It shouldn't mean you have locked the child within you up in the basement and told it never to raise its head again. You now have the option to be either a child or an adult or even both at once. In becoming adult you gain the dimension of adulthood, but you don't, or you shouldn't lose the dimension of childhood.

To say it yet again, as an adult you should have your child self living within you. Your child self is your greatest source of 'the love of life'. Without contact with it, or with it suppressed or denied you lose the ability to have fun, to be spontaneous and creative.

Be wary of learning to mimic these qualities, you can only create sadness for yourself by taking this route, people like this have kept only the cover of the book of life and thrown away the pages.

One of the great problems with the human world is the obsession with becoming grown-up, ostensibly adult. Partly this results from a socially accepted misunderstanding of the fact that being adult is more fun than being a child. It is if you live it fully, but only because of the freedom it brings, the freedom that allows you to control your own play, not because you have substituted 'adult' pleasures for childish play. Play is an absolutely essential component of learning, giving up playing means giving up learning and this is like mentally dying. Learning is to do with experience, it is not to do with the accumulation of data, any machine can accumulate loads of data. Learning is what happens when you play with the data you have collected, it is quite possible to spend your whole life accumulating huge stores of data and not learn anything. A little data used well is better by far than much data used not at all, or even worse, used badly.

While evolution is striving to give us a longer and longer childhood to allow for greater subtly in our development, we are striving to climb back down the evolutionary tree by making our childhood as short as possible. All too often people see 'growing up' as rejecting the child within, locking away our living self and acting out the manifestations of adulthood. These people have not acquired adulthood at all, they have not learned to care for and look after anything. They have made themselves into unhappy balls of frustration and unidentified hungers which they desperately hope the three perquisites of adulthood:- drugs (including alcohol and cigarettes), sex, and work (= money) will satisfy.

The problems become worse when these people generate children which they try to raise. Never having learned to look after themselves, and having no real understanding of why they are alive they make atrocious parents. Passing on only the forms and mannerisms of life without any understanding of why these forms should be. They generate children even more unhappy than themselves. The cycles turn around and around and society has an escalating crime rate, a huge body of dissatisfaction within it that is continually intensified because neither our financial nor spiritual leaders can answer a problem they themselves are part of.

Don't be false however. You can't fake life, a little that is real is much better for you than a huge amount that is false.

Being false often seems attractive, but a habit of loving truth, of seeking understanding and insight will show up this foolishness for what it really is. False ego is concerned with what you look like, to others or to yourself. Your true ego is more patient and it is only concerned with what you actually are!! This means 'what you are' in a living real person sense, true ego isn't worried about whether you have a job or not, it is worried about whether you are honest with yourself and with others, whether you are genuine in the way you live. True ego will never tempt you to lie about yourself in order to have a better effect on another person, false ego will always take this route, true ego will lead you to be more modest about your own abilities, false ego will always make you want to stretch the truth just a little, and a little more and a little more. True ego will help you be a non-smoker, false ego will at best only want to be sure others see you as a non-smoker, for this reason false ego will be in conflict with the approach to becoming a non-smoker described in this book.

Though I have used the terms self image and other peoples images throughout these pages, this book is ultimately about becoming, not about images. It is about changing your being, your reality, we manipulate our self image as a step in achieving this change in our ultimate self. In the long run we want our self image and our reality to be the same. The world of human consciousness is a deep and fascinating world. The more we learn about it the more we realise how much more there is to learn. For some people recorded and well defined categories and descriptions of how our minds and consciousness works are useful. For other people the journey is more individualistic and nobody else's descriptions seem wholly accurate.

For this, and other reasons to do with the validity of personal experience in learning, I have tried to present here the ideas which will allow you to attack the problem of your unwanted habit/s in a new way without too rigidly defining a system of beliefs or set of facts explaining how addiction works, this has already been done in other literature. I believe that the spiritual, mental and physical aspects of our lives are all co-joined and interrelated, problems can be tackled from different fronts, however while it is possibly to change the physical without changing the spiritual much at all, the reverse is practically impossible.

To recap, the important first step is to accept that you are now a non-smoker, to ignore physical failures to manifest yourself thus and to mentally uphold this truth of yourself as a non-smoker.

The rest of the journey is remembering and protecting yourself. To this end we use a three pronged program revolving around faith, patience and forgiveness. To this we also add effort, remembering that the longest journey can be measured in inches equally as well as in miles.

The ideas here will be of more help if you refresh them now and again, one way to do this will be to reread portions of the book, some will be more relevant to you than others and you will have to decide which aspects to reread most often. Below is a short reading list of other books, not about smoking, but whose content will I believe harmonize with the spirit of this book and help keep you focused on what you are doing.

Finally I would like to offer you the cheering thought that this is really only the beginning.

Good luck, I sincerely hope this book helps you with your problems, if you have read it feel free to visit the website and leave your comments.