A lot of damage from overworking our children is offset once they are allowed to choose their activities on the physical plane, which engages the whole child through all the planes of existence. Free-ranging, in this case, is a desirable endeavor for them. Look to Montessori for how to include discipline in child-initiated activities, which also comes naturally when the child is attenuated to the light; a loving atmosphere, time, and attention are crucial to the spiritual development of any human being.
How to be in the world and not of it includes putting away paradigms that no longer serve our children. Obeying a master or authority figure, for example, is old school. Look for the master within oneself, is the adage here; children are capable of this even at very young ages. But how do you include the whole child?
Rudolph Steiner, in his book Supersensible Knowledge, alludes to the crucial element for anyone to fully activate on all the levels of being, from the dense physical to the etheric sub-planes:
That is one reason; another is that though a person is born from the astral world, that is, from the spiritual world next to the physical, as much as he is born from the physical world, what he experiences there is completely different from anything seen with physical sight or heard with physical ears. One thing, however, is the same in all three worlds - in the physical, the astral or spiritual, and the devachanic world - and that is logical thinking (1906).
To me, the important discovery here is that logical thinking is included on all the levels of being mentioned above. What impact this has on human development is pointed to in the following Steiner passage:
[Onlookers] depicted how primordial divine beings descended from spiritual heights and let their essence stream out to become world-substance that they then shaped and formed into the various creature’s of the kingdoms of nature: the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, and that of humans. In other words, divine essence streamed into and formed everything that surrounded us, and it finally celebrated a kind of resurrection within the human soul (1906).
The adage here has to do with the flow of energy from the divine to the dense physical, and not the other way around, as is so often thought in common language. We need the unification principle to truly understand how man descended like Angels from the Heavens and came to Earth to fulfill a destiny. This idea is further conveyed by Dr. Deepak Chopra, in his bestselling book, How to Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries :
As soon as one uses the term field, a step has been taken into the realm of quantum reality...
In this brief sentence, Dr. Chopra describes a top-down processing concept where the brain is the receptacle of the transcendent mind. Here, he summarizes this idea:
...you don't have to will yourself to organize even one brain cell into the incredibly intricate pattern necessary to produce a word.
In other words, the organizing power comes from a source unknown to humanity at the moment and can only be thought of as God – that mysterious entity attributed to the inexplicable (2000).
Going back to how we develop as human beings, even in childhood, my thought on this paradigm is that the hourglass is half-full. What occupies the space in time? Though no conclusion has been drawn here, one aspect is crucial to all human development: Know Thyself.
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