Way off topic -- I meet an old friend who is only six months old.

I think most of us have had similar encounters -- don't I know you from someplace? Most of us have had the feeling at one time or another. The thing that drove this encounter home was from whom it came -- a 6 month old baby.

When I was very small I had a pal named Jimmy. Nobody could see him or talk to him except me. To me he was very real but after the grown ups told me enough times he was what was called an "imaginary friend" he stopped coming around so often and after they told me he really wasn't there often enough he quit coming at all.

I have a theory that babies are born with a lot of knowledge that came with them and a lot of abilities, too, that we thrash out of them because this knowledge and these abilities don't fit the physical plane we occupy at this time. I wonder what would happen if we encouraged them?
 
What's also interesting to me is when I've run into young kids with what I call an "old soul". I'm sure alot of you have had this experience. The kid doesn't act like they knew/know you but has the demeanor of a MUCH older person and seems wise well beyond their (and often my) years. Uncle Bill's most recent post made me think that maybe these are babies who didn't "have it thrashed out of them" and so they started out with much of the knowledge they arrived with still intact. Interesting eh?
 
Here is an example of the use of the ideas Bill expressed in the Tibetian tradition of thought training. http://www.island.net/~dharma/thought_transformation.htm Note the reference to mothers in stanza 7. The thought is that in the countless revolutions of the wheel of life, we have each played mother to each other countless times. This thought is used to stimulate compassion in times and places it would be otherwise difficult to feel it.

I first encountered this text at the Kopan monastery in Nepal in 1979. I wrote it down by hand and have kept it with me since. Now I am pleased to find it on the web.

I once felt some of the old feelings as I wandered alone through the ancient ruins of Nalanda university. I couldn't "quite" remember when I had been there before.
 
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