2001_Childhood Spirituality

Hundreds of examples of childhood spiritual experiences have been collected by researchers in England and the United States. Oddly enough, they have been missed by the mainstream of transpersonal psychology. Three kinds of childhood experiences contradict the theoretical positions of Wilber and Washburn in regard to early stages of development: (1) when on the basis of their own experience children realize that the adults around them are spiritually ignorant, (2) when children become aware of their identity beyond the physical self and beyond one lifetime, and (3) when they know or discover methods of achieving on their own a state of nonordinary consciousness.