Modern neuroscience confirms that from the earliest stages,
long before words and concepts arise, newborns are profoundly conscious. Their
developing brains demonstrate integrated activity, uniting sensory inputs into
coherent experiences, even in late pregnancy. We now know that infants can form
memories far earlier than once believed. The hippocampus, central to memory
formation, is active within months after birth, quietly recording the textures,
sounds, and sensations of life. Yet as we grow, a veil descends: most adults
cannot recall their earliest years, an experience called infantile amnesia.
These memories are not lost; they are simply folded into deeper layers of the
mind, inaccessible to ordinary recollection.
This fact alone points toward a fascinating paradox: babies
are aware, perhaps even more deeply than we comprehend, yet their early knowing
slips from conscious access as the egoic self — the story-bound “I” — takes
shape. If the capacity to form memory and experience begins at birth, why
should we assume that babies begin as “blank slates”? Perhaps they arrive as overflowing
vessels, not empty ones — already luminous with presence, already connected to
something far greater than the limits of language.
Across wisdom traditions, there has long been a recognition
of this spiritual openness in the earliest stages of life. Mystics and
philosophers alike have described the newborn state as one of unfiltered
beingness — before conceptual thought separates the world into subject and
object, before layers of identity harden. The Gospel of Truth, one of the Nag
Hammadi writings I deeply resonate with, hints at this primal knowing. It
speaks of humanity’s “forgetfulness” of its divine origin, a forgetting that plunges
us into fear, alienation, and striving. Yet the Logos — the divine presence
within — never departs. When Jesus came as the awakened one, he came to remind
us of what had always been true: we are, and have always been, indwelt by
God.
In this sense, infants are still closer to remembrance. They
come into this world carrying the untouched radiance of the Logos. Their gaze
is unclouded by doctrine, their awareness unfractured by dogma. They live not
through the filters of identity and ideology but in the immediacy of pure
presence. When we look into their eyes, perhaps what stirs us so profoundly is
the recognition of our own original state — the spark of divinity before the
veil of forgetfulness descended.
And yet, something happens in the first years of life.
Slowly, as language, socialization, and cultural conditioning take hold, the
pristine spaciousness of infancy begins to contract. We learn our names, our
roles, our place within systems of belief and power. In this process, a kind of
spiritual amnesia sets in. It mirrors the neurological infantile amnesia but
operates on a deeper, existential level. We forget not only our earliest
memories but also our primordial belonging to the divine.
From an esoteric perspective, this “forgetting” is not a
flaw — it’s part of the grand design. Consciousness itself, the eternal Source,
is engaged in an infinite exploration of itself through experience. Each soul,
each fragment of divine awareness, embarks on a journey into form, limitation,
and polarity. We incarnate to know love by tasting its absence, to awaken to
light by moving through shadow. Infants, in their first breaths, are still
vibrating close to the memory of unity. But as the soul settles into the
density of embodiment, it willingly enters the amnesia that allows for the
drama of rediscovery. Without forgetting, awakening would be meaningless.
There are echoes of this truth even in scientific anomalies.
At the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, researchers
have documented thousands of cases of very young children — often between ages
two and five — who spontaneously speak of past lives, describe places they’ve
never been, or recall events verified later as historically accurate. These
memories almost always fade as the child grows older, just as early infant
memories do. Mainstream science may dismiss such cases as coincidence or
confabulation, but for those of us who see consciousness as fundamental, they
point toward a deeper reality: souls carry stories across lifetimes, and
newborns arrive trailing the fragrance of eternity.
When I reflect on reincarnation, I see it not as a karmic
punishment to escape but as an eternal, egalitarian cycle of growth. Over
countless lifetimes, each soul experiences all polarities — joy and sorrow,
power and vulnerability, love and fear — in an ever-expanding spiral of
learning. Babies enter this world as ancient travelers wearing temporary bodies,
still luminous from the threshold they’ve just crossed. But the density of
physical existence, the collective conditioning of culture, and the weight of
survival slowly dim that light. This is why so many mystics describe the
spiritual journey as a kind of “returning” — not to something new, but to what
has always been.
From this perspective, when we say babies are “highly
spiritual,” we are recognizing more than innocence. We are recognizing that they
have not yet forgotten. The “kingdom of heaven” that Jesus spoke of — which he
said belongs to children — is this unmediated intimacy with the divine, before
thought divides reality into pieces. In their laughter, their wonder, their
instinctive capacity to love without condition, infants embody the qualities of
Spirit itself.
But the forgetting is inevitable — and necessary. If we were
to retain the full memory of our divine origin while inhabiting these fragile,
temporary bodies, the game of experience would lose its depth. We are meant to
step into the play fully, believing for a time that we are separate, limited,
even mortal. Yet life, through its joys and heartbreaks, is always nudging us
toward awakening. The veil lifts slowly — sometimes through meditation,
sometimes through love, sometimes through suffering — and we begin to remember.
Science can describe the mechanisms of memory loss and
neural development, but it cannot quantify the ineffable quality that radiates
from newborns. Philosophy can ponder the nature of presence, but it cannot
capture the direct experience of gazing into the eyes of a baby and sensing
something timeless looking back. And parapsychology can catalogue cases of
past-life recall, but it cannot prove the reality of the soul to those
unwilling to consider that consciousness precedes matter.
For me, though, the answer is clear: we are born spiritual
beings, and we never cease to be so. The divine Logos, the cosmic
consciousness, the Source — call it what you will — dwells in us from before
the foundations of the world. Infants simply live closer to that awareness.
Their “spirituality” isn’t something they perform or even consciously recognize;
it is their natural state of being. As we grow, we do not lose this essence —
we simply become distracted by the noise of identity, fear, and striving.
The path of spiritual awakening is not about acquiring
something we lack but remembering what has always been true. In this sense,
every adult carries within them the same luminous presence we see in infants.
The difference is that babies live from it without question, while we, having
forgotten, must choose to return.
Perhaps this is why so many of us feel awe when we hold a
newborn. On some deep level, they are mirrors, reflecting back to us the
infinite reality we’ve always been. They have just stepped from the timeless
into time, from unity into multiplicity, and in their unguarded gaze we glimpse
the mystery of our own origin.
Yes, babies are born as spiritual beings — not because they
are innocent or untouched, but because they are eternal. They come carrying the
echo of the infinite, and while the first years may veil that memory, it never
truly disappears. Awakening is the process of peeling back those layers, of
seeing again with the clear eyes of a child, and realizing that we have been
divine all along.
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