gospel of Thomas 4

Jesus said, "The man old in days will not hesitate to ask a small child seven days old about the place of life, and he will live. For many who are first will become last, and they will become one and the same."

This saying of Jesus is telling us something about the nature of knowledge, human knowledge. A small child, just seven days old, is empty of knowledge. The mind is not yet full of clutter.

Have you ever looked into newborn baby's eyes? That empty spaciousness. That innocence, purity. A newborn is a buddha, is in an enlightened state. A baby knows nothing in terms of thoughts, ideas. And because the baby is not distracted by such things, it lives directly in the world. In a simple way. Its basic needs occupy much of its time. When it is hungry, it calls for food. When it is cold, it calls for warmth. But apart from meeting these essential requirements, the baby is just interested in everything, equally. There's no preference for this or that. Everything is interesting. The baby is curious, and alive in its innocence.

But somewhere along the way, we start to gather knowledge. And with that knowledge, we become arrogant, vain, proud. And we begin to think that we are somehow superior to that newborn, because we have knowledge. But this knowledge is just clutter, clutter in the mind. And in fact, in becoming so wedded to knowledge, we lose our innocence, our divine emptiness, our enlightenment. It gets buried under all that nonsense, all those ideas about the world. And we begin to live in those ideas, instead of living in the world.

But by and by, we see that there is no peace, and no happiness, to be found in this way. And as we grow old, we begin to become humble again. And once more, we can turn to that newborn child, and look to it for a hint as to what our place in life really is. For the baby is living that place. And we too can return to it, if we can drop our knowledge about life, if we too can become empty, like the baby, as innocent as the baby, as simple as the baby. And looking into the eyes of a small child, a newborn, will help us to do this, will help us to come back to our home, the home that is within us: our buddha nature, our enlightenment. And if we do that, we will become one and the same with that newborn baby. We will be in the same state as the baby, and we will feel no separation from it. We will feel no separation from anything in existence. 

Newborn babies do indeed have much to teach us.