A few weeks ago, while our wives and their lady friends went out for some much-needed Mother’s Day partying, a friend and I got together at his house with our five kids – all aged eight and under. His home is situated among dozens of tall old trees, up on a hill. Through the cracks of the trees, you can see the beautiful Pennsylvania Susquehanna Valley in the distance. My friend went inside to prepare food, so I stayed outside with the kids. They ran through the grass and trees, playfully and giddily laughing and chasing each other. As I watched them, I saw the sun rake across their property to a specific point on the ground. I descended to it, stood there, sun pulsing across my face, and looked up. I looked up at the trees swaying in the breeze; that sound does something to me.
In that particular moment, I remembered something. I remembered that we are a bunch of animals, still living in the semblance of a natural world. We are trying to survive, protect our young, nurture them, love them, and help them remember that being human is sensational. These moments are more than just fodder for a Substack post, though–these rememberings manifest the sacred, what religious and spiritual scholar Mircea Eliade would call a hierophany. In these moments, something beyond the mundane, secular world manifests as a demarcated experience of value. A value that points to something only the soul can know.
It reminded me of Carl Jung’s notion of “The No. 2 Personality.” We each have this No. 1 personality, our everyday, rationalistic, literal, ego-dominated personality. Yet we each have this deeper, ancient human in us, “The No. 2,” that is old, instinctually wise, intrinsically woven into the fabric of the natural and transpersonal worlds.
As I reflected more upon this hierophonic moment on my friend’s property, words started to whisper in my ear:
The human soul presents itself when a qualitative, emotionally affective, and emergent value is placed on a particular moment of being — on the experiential nature of being itself as it unfolds in a particular instant.
Therefore, the soul, and the qualitative imprint of a particular moment in time, can be increased if we relearn how to properly see. What do I mean by “see?”
In our contemporary and technologically addicted stupor, we so often miss the sobering capability of seeing through the eyes of our “No. 2.” We forget to see with the eyes of the two-million-year-old human inside of us. We forget to see with the clarity and nuance of our stripped-down essence. We forget to watch our children play. We fail to see our eyes in the mirror—eyes of wisdom and brilliance that are just too beautiful to articulate.
What would their gaze enjoy and value if our bodies and psyches could see? I believe that our No. 2 personality sees like the eyes of a child. It sees and experiences a reality where inner and outer converge into a playground of endless possibility. Our No. 2 sees life unfolding as a never-ending road of personal story and mythic significance.
It begs the question: how does one begin to see again?
Here’s an experiment for you–
Next time your kids play quietly in your home–with Legos, coloring, or with action figures–stand back and watch them for a minute. Observe from a distance. Breathe deeply and quietly–sync into your child’s flow of experience. Then after a minute, get a bit closer, then a bit closer, then a bit closer–notice where your eyes and heart are drawn. Then, finally, join in with them with a big smile.
Most importantly, enjoy your child. Enjoy their presence, appreciate how they lead you in play, and let them teach you how to play again without rules, expectations, or hopes.
A few nights ago, my wife and I needed our boys to go to bed after an insanely exhausting weekend. They were wired, it was 10 pm, and they had school the following day. I was beyond frustrated and could not handle their intensity. My wife had fallen asleep (lucky her), and I sat in our boys’ bedroom, attempting to help them calm down and fall asleep. At one point, I watched them silently as they drew with a pen in their notebooks. They would periodically smile as they were lost in their imaginative dreaming. I was enjoying them, not berating or criticizing or demanding them, just enjoying. My seven-year-old son asked me to cuddle in bed a few moments later. He handed me his notebook and said, “Read it, Dad.”
As I read his words, tears came to my eyes. He had written a reflection on lightness and darkness, the importance of being on the side of lightness, and the encouragement to others to do the same. He never typically asks me to read his writing, but he let me in. When I looked back into his eyes, I saw an ancient soul in the face of a sweet modern boy. I looked at him through my No. 2, and he looked back at me with his own.
This moment with my son inflicted not only a core memory with him but also a realization/question of how often parents miss and do not see their child's beautiful, ancient soul trying to manifest. How frequently is a child, in their aloneness, attempting to make sense of their metaphysical makeup? How often do they already know that there is an ancient nature in them, that they feel deeply, that our modern world seems to disvalue entirely? The No. 2 personality of your child knows itself, inside and out, and yet if it’s never seen, validated, or enjoyed, what happens to it? It turns against your child as a feeling of a sense of self-disgust, self-doubt, and worse, self-alienation.
Yet, if the ancient human in your child, in my children, is seen, enjoyed, and welcomed into modernity, children will have enough self-trust to follow the thread that only they can follow.
Go and see.