Human Beings Are Asleep

So the human being, then, is the individual who can either become conscious of the fact that everything is in praise, and everything is in glorification, and everything is in prostration; or who can be heedless of this fact. The idea, then, within the Muslim tradition, is that Islam is the process of waking up to this reality. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: human beings are asleep, and when they die they wake up. So there is an idea that we are in a dreamlike state. And it is really interesting that the word in Arabic for child, which is ghulām, comes from ghulmah, which means to lust after, to desire; that a child is a ghulām until they enter into what is called puberty, and the word in Arabic for puberty is iḥtalama, whose root comes from a word which means to dream. Now, when one takes the root meaning of this iḥtalama, it literally means to internalise the dream. If one takes the word for reaching adulthood, it means to internalise, or become aware of, the dream. The idea there, it seems, is that children are in a dream world. It is a beautiful world that they are in; but they are not aware of the dreamlike nature of the world that they are in, and it is a gift. And actually, from the Muslim point of view, children have no accountability, and the beginning of discernment is about the age of seven, when one begins to take them to account, gently. Prior to that, traditionally, the Muslims did not encourage any type of discipline for children before the age of seven; the discipline should be very gentle discipline. The idea is that they literally do not have within them the capacity to restrain themselves from their actions.

Now children, obviously — any parent of a five-year-old will see the child getting a sense of right and wrong — but the idea there is that, really, their brains are such that one can tell them, do not do this, and they will do it again; oftentimes not because they are disobeying, and they might appear to be guilty when reminded, because suddenly they become aware; but there is a type of forgetfulness that takes place in the child's world, because the brain cannot maintain this continuity. One will see it. Chilton Pearce talks about this phenomenon: when the neural networking is taking place in those first seven years, a child at about the age of two and three — the will is developing, and it is a very important time; and what he says is that one of the tragic aspects is that the will in children is broken at that age. The parent will literally want to break the will, because they see this child rebelling; they see this child saying "me", and "no". They learn "no" — this is the first word that children really get in contact with. It is very interesting that they do a negation: to negate. This is very important in the Islamic understanding, because the first and primary task of the human being is to negate — to negate creation; and this is why the shahādah itself begins with a negation, lā ilāha, no god: that the human being must learn to negate before it can learn to affirm. And so the child first learns negation, and then it learns affirmation.

And it is interesting that when a child's will is developing — one of the examples Pearce uses — a child will beeline for something, and the parent, or the adult, will say: do not touch that. And the child will look at the parent and just keep going, and the parent will interpret that as gross disobedience. What Pearce says is that the fact is that his will — the volition in his very primitive neuro-system — reached critical mass; and at that point the adult says, do not touch that, and the child cannot help himself any more. It cannot stop, and it goes and does it. Now we can see that in our own lives as adults. There is a point when human beings reach a critical mass. One sees the chocolate, and says: no, really… — go ahead, just try it — no, really, not today… — go ahead, just try it; and then suddenly it gets to critical mass, and that is it: they cannot stop. So we see that in adults as well; but in children it is blameless, whereas in adults there is a sense of: come on, you did not have to eat it.