Awakening from Dull Conformity - The Little Prince Series
Adults who looked at the drawing the six-year-old had made of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant thought it was a hat
. Why a hat?
When I was growing up in Yorkshire, having been born in 1946, we always wore hats when we were outside. If we were ever seen without our school cap perched on our head in the proper mannernot tilted out of alignment!we were for the high jump.
The story of The Little Prince was written in 1944 and in those days it was a mark of respect to wear a hat in public. Even as late as when I went to college in 1964, ditch diggers and gardeners on campus wore a hat amid all the mud.
It used to be that a woman had to wear a hat to enter a churcha practice, incidentally, that can't be found in the Christian Scriptures, which say that a woman's hair is her glorious "covering."
The image the author is painting for us is one of individuals who have learned to conform to the constricted way in which society operates. The little boy has already, at just six years old, become what family and his culture expects him to beno longer who he truly is.
The new Julia Roberts movie Eat, Pray, Love focuses on how the central figure in the story tended to lose herself in romantic relationships. Well, growing up, just about all of us lose ourselves in our relationships with our family and society in general.
The little boy calls his drawing of the boa constrictor digesting the elephant his Drawing Number One. In so labeling it, he is signifying that it is archetypal of what his life has become: constricted as if in the grip of a boa.
The author makes the point that the boa constrictor swallows the elephant whole. It's an image of the massive influence society has on us when we are young, since we are largely unquestioning and gullible.
Before we know it, we have swallowed all kinds of beliefs and ideas from the adult world around us that just aren't true but that affect the quality of our life for years to come unless we someday begin to question for ourselves.
Notes the narrator, after swallowing the elephant whole the boa is unable to move. It then sleeps for six months to digest the elephantan incredibly insightful image of what happens to us as children.
We come into the world alive, increasingly active, and soon jumping for joy and running around excitedly. It's a picture of the enthusiasm with which we embark on life. But before long, we barely move.
We are like the six-year-old Michael Brown talks about in Alchemy of the Heart who has learned to act like a little gentleman instead of the excited young boy he really is.
We have all been put to sleep by the world in which we grow up.
Awakening is about rediscovering the delighted and delightful child we were originally, before society stuffed us full of the indigestible nonsense that has caused us to endure such compromised lives of conformity and mediocrity.
Awakening is quite simply becoming our natural self, the self we were born to be before we learned to act a certain way.
Who we really are is so different from the way the social boa constrictor has made us that, as Jesus put it, it's akin to be being born all over again.
This ongoing series on spirituality through the eyes of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's story of The Little Prince continues tomorrow and daily. It is a commentary on the Namaste audio book Lessons in LovingA Journey into the Heart.
Awakening from Dull Conformity - The Little Prince Series
By: David Robert Ord
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