By Vijay Phanshikar :
    “Heaven lies about us in our infancy ...”
- William Wordsworth,
in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality
 from Recollections of Early Childhood”. 
 
 
 Prose  

THE simplicity of this expression is simply amazing. In just seven words, William Wordsworth brings to fore the core idea of spirituality -- the immortality of the soul. This, again, is universally felt by all of us. For, as little children, we are excited about life and its countless surprises. It is an age in which the idea of death is deliberately kept away from the kids. For them, everything is growing and glowing, including their own bodies, including the world around them, including their friends and their friends and their friends. It is all really heavenly -- and looks like supremely beautiful. For, at that age, the idea of ‘ugly’ has not dawned in human mind. Sleep is beautiful. Being hungry is beautiful. Play is beautiful -- and fights during play also are beautiful. And since there is nothing called dying in the little ones’ vocabulary.

 

So, when someone really passes away, the child is told that the person has gone to visit God in the heavens. The little one believes those words. Or more particularly, he believes the elder who tells him that some person has gone visiting God. This faith in the elder, this unquestioned leaning on the good-natured words of the elders, this ignorance about possibility of grief in life -- it is all really heavenly, divine, suggesting immortality of the soul. Elsewhere in the same poem, Wordsworth says, “Our birth is but a sleep and forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath elsewhere its setting ... ... From God who is our home.” For innocent little one blessed with childhood, when everything is growing and glowing, and the idea of dying has not entered the mind, life is heavenly beautiful. Everything is growing and nothing is dying. And, in spiritual reality, nothing is dying, and even birth is but a sleep and a forgetting the old or earlier incarnation and entering a new phase.

 

In the Bhagwad Geeta, too, Lord Shrikrishna said, the soul discards the old clothe (the body) and wears a new one. In this new incarnation, the memories of the old do not crop up -- as bliss lies in forgetting the old influences, and in looking forward to new experiences. So, Heaven lies about us in our infancy ...! The concept of immortality of the soul is not very easy to fathom -- for the uninitiated. But those who acquire the habit of deep thinking return to the thought of the immortality of the soul every now and then (as part of their spiritual elevation). Blessed are they -- heavenly is their sense of bliss !