Early Life Stages

Are babies unconditional love?  Sort of, but with a big qualifier.  The love between a baby and its mother is a love between two distinctively different consciousnesses.   The mother is an adult at the ‘personal’ or 'transpersonal' stage of consciousness, whereas the baby is at the pre-personal stage.  The infant can’t tell the difference between inside and outside – the chair and thumb are the same.  Some call it the ‘fusion’ state or the ‘primary matrix’ because the baby is at the fundament stage of growth.  It is primary narcissism – the infant is all mouth, the world is all food.  No disagreement here, babies are cute as a button and they are fun to play with and adore, but the love is a limited unconditional love.  The infant cannot take the role of another; it is locked into its own egocentric orbit; it lacks intersubject or interpersonal love and compassion.  No tolerance, benevolence and altruism.

The love between Mother and baby can be spiritual. And the baby itself may experience a spiritual state, but it’s only a temporary experience.  States must be converted into permanent traits if spirituality is to become mature, stable, constant awareness, capable of taking the role of other and being reflected in genuine love and care.  So the baby, as we all have done, must venture through it’s ‘hatching’ stage, then through the ‘emotional’ stage to finish the ‘pre-personal’ stage of growth.  In the ‘personal’ stage the toddler must travel through the ‘Conceptual’ self and deal with images, symbols and concepts (the symbol “fido” represents my dog, but it doesn’t look like my dog).  In the middle of the ‘personal’ stage the pre-adolescent child starts to fit in with his biological impulses, fit in with social roles, the peer group, to take on the role of the other. The self’s identity switches egocentric to sociocentric – the child relates to a world of roles and rules.  And learns all sorts of scripts.  At the end of the ‘personal’ stage, around 11-15 years, the adolescent learns the capacity for formal operational awareness or “formop”.  Concrete operational awareness (Conop) operates on the concrete world.  Formal operational awareness (Formop) operates on thought itself.  It’s thinking about thinking.  

The Swiss developmental psychologist, Jean Piaget, developed several famous experiments to spot Conop and Formop – the paradigm shifts in a child’s worldview.