How do you know that you have an enlightened child?

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I’ve been meaning to write about non-self aware enlightenment for awhile now, haven’t had the right inspiration. This question hits me just right so let me make a go of it.

I present myself as having been enlightened since birth. How can I say that? It’s a really good question and nobody bothers to ask it of me. What that means is that I have figured out that I am enlightened and I’ve scoured my past to look for an ‘enlightenment event’ and couldn’t find one. Once you go far enough back in your past looking for your enlightenment event, it doesn’t matter anymore. What, I got enlightened in my mother’s womb? Kinda anticlimactic, don’t you think?

There is no point at my life that I can determine that I made any significant jump in the sorts of abilities that I enjoy now. My life has been slowly, but surely, getting a little better every day since I was a kid. I’ve talked with my parents a lot, and one thing that could convince me that I’m not really enlightened was that I got it from genetics. While I share many, many traits from my mother and father, my enlightenment is mine and mine alone. My family has varying levels of consciousness and I have mine. Level of consciousness is not personality.

So if you want to figure out the level of consciousness of a child, I have to say, you have a difficult task ahead of you. Figuring out my level of consciousness would have been really, really tough. My father was an alcoholic and after my mom threw him out when I was 6, I went from being happy-go-lucky to moody and broody.

What does it mean to be enlightened as a child? Nothing, you haven’t finished developing yet. Your high consciousness will not start visibly manifesting until you start to mature. It’s too busy making little changes across the entire being of the little person, setting him up for the kind of life he needs to live.

I read about someone who became enlightened at 6. He traveled up to the mountains and stayed there his entire life. His name eludes me, and quick Googling was fruitless. I believe it’s one of those exceptions that proves the rule. That kid didn’t get enlightened at six, he was enlightened the whole time and they just decided he became enlightened at that time later. Kids do stuff like that all the time, make rash decisions. They just usually have parents around to keep them from doing anything stupid. Spirit directed him to the mountains. No big deal.

When you’re enlightened but don’t know it, you need to come to the realization. When I was 15, I didn’t know anything about myself other than that I was smart and a little different from everyone else. When I was 25 I still didn’t believe I was enlightened. It was only after I started studying it and carefully considering everything that I finally realized that none of this would work on me because I already have what the methods try to give to you.

Then I looked back at my whole life and realized that I didn’t just get this stuff. Enlightenment, high consciousness merged with nondual perspective, had informed my entire life, not just the spiritual stuff. It was present during the dark times when I lost my father, and during the strange times in my twenties when I just didn’t know what to do with myself.

So let’s try answering the question. You have a kid, you want to know whether they’re enlightened or not. What can you do to find out?

Nothing. There’s nothing you can do. Because you can’t pick enlightenment out of all the other traits that make kids special. You can’t look at a smart kid and say whether he’s enlightened. An enlightened kid will be smart, but not all smart kids are enlightened.

I think Osho was enlightened since birth, and you can go read The Rajneesh Bible where he gives accounts of his childhood. You can clearly see enlightened traits, in Osho’s description. To be Osho’s adopted parents, they could tell you he’s special, more than that, I don’t think you can analyze to a fine enough degree. Enlightenment, that’s something you can only determine in hindsight at that early stage.