Childhood Vows : The Branching Streams

Childhood Vows : The Branching Streams

Children are mentally much more powerful than adults.  They are born with a tremendous potential and power to affect change, and it is the rare adult who can match the focus, the strength, the ferocity or the unambivalence of the 12 year old boy who finally understands a little bit of why he hurts and vows to himself never to let that happen again.  Or the young girl who thinks she is special because everyone says she is special and everyone treats her ‘special’.  She’s never quite sure what that special quality is, but she knows it is there and she knows others can see it.  It can take the best part of a lifetime to see how the axioms which result from vow energy can impede.  Mostly it is some kind of fear that stimulates a child to invoke her vow-power, his ability to control conditions.

These examples are archetypal, of course, but they serve to illustrate my point that much, maybe most, of our Present is intimately conditioned by a web of childhood vow-responses.   A lot of irritation and frustration could be avoided if the proper respect was offered to our vow-body.  This is a distinctly Buddhist vocabulary which is much more helpful than the ‘corrective’ prescriptions which we generally administer to ourselves when we doubt.