There are moments when the world arrives so freshly it feels like you’ve stepped into it for the first time. The air changes. Colors sharpen. Sounds land differently. For a second, there’s no story to hold it.
That’s childhood wonder—not as a memory, not as nostalgia, but as something immediate and present.
Most of us assume we grew out of that. But what if it never went anywhere? What if it’s still here, under the mental scaffolding we call “being an adult”?
Sometimes it takes something simple—walking through a doorway, stepping outside, feeling the day touch your skin—to see what’s been here all along.
A Doorway, a Dog, and a Sudden World
You know, we never really grow out of our childhood.
This struck me today when I walked from the kitchen through the door to the back porch with Grizzly the dog. Both Grizzly and I had this experience of total wonder at the world outside. It was as if the world I had existed in one second before was completely gone, and then this world appeared—different sights, sounds, smells, textures, everything.
The wonder of it, the profundity, the innocence and simplicity—it was really poignant.
And it dawned on me: that childlike experience of the world is still here, of course, for all of us.
What Childhood Actually Is: Appearance, Disappearance, and Wonder
Especially for a young child, everything is seen in simple ways. As they move through the world and move through their environment, the environment isn’t just changing. It’s appearing and disappearing. New experiences come out of nowhere, and they’re totally overtaken by that.
The wonder of it all isn’t something they recoil from. They’re not tracking time. They’re just feeling and seeing and playing and touching and experiencing.
So when I say we don’t grow out of our childhood, what I mean is: childhood hasn’t gone anywhere. We don’t leave it behind. It’s always here.
What we actually do is build something over it—or, more properly, we start distracting ourselves from it.
We Don’t Evolve Out of Wonder: We Build Over It
It’s not as if that child really evolves into an older child and then a young adult and then an older adult, as much as this: the childhood wonder, innocence, simplicity, spontaneity never goes anywhere.
Then a process starts where attention moves more and more into thought. Attention moves more and more into an internal world, until that internal world becomes so solid that we literally forget the world around us.
We forget what it is to experience the simplicity, wonder, openness, non-duality of this—this right here.
It’s here for all of us all the time.
“Regaining” Childhood Isn’t Regaining Anything
So there are these statements about regaining your childhood, regaining childhood innocence, and so forth. I think those are really good instinctually. They’re true in the sense that it’s possible. But it’s not even something you regain.
It’s just here.
You’re looking at the same world you always were. As a child, the world you looked at—or the non-world you looked at or the experience you looked at—was the same as it is right now.
[Possible clarification needed: what “non-world” refers to here—pre-conceptual experience, or something else?]
What’s changed isn’t the immediacy of what’s here. What’s changed is the overlay.
The Filters: How Thought Rewrites the World
Filters of thought. Filters of anticipation and expectation. Aversion, desire, fear. Time. Past, present, future. Problems, solutions. Other people—what they mean to you, your relationship with them.
Endlessly thinking about all this creates a world that filters experience. It filters the direct seeing.
So again, we don’t evolve from childhood to adulthood. We build this false world—this inner world—that we call “being an adult,” over the child. That’s all that happens.
So you can’t really lose your innocence.
Trauma and the Sticky Inner World
Just to be clear: we all build this adult world, this inner world.
And when we’ve been traumatized—severe trauma and so forth—it can make it even more uncomfortable to live in that world. And yet the binding to that world is still strong.
So even if there’s trauma, even if that child has really been harmed, and the adult has been harmed, it doesn’t mean that childhood wonder isn’t there. It’s still there. Same thing as before.
It’s just that the inner world we’ve built has become very sticky.
It can become more sticky because of certain kinds of trauma, but it’s still sticky for everyone.
The Inner Story Can Be Pleasant—and Still Unsatisfying
Many people live in that inner world and it tells a good story about their life—maybe a non-traumatized story.
Sometimes that hides trauma too. Sometimes the story that everything is fine hides significant amounts of trauma.
But the point is: the inner world itself is unsatisfying. It’s fundamentally unsatisfying and it always will be, because it’s not real. It’s not the truth of reality.
The truth of reality is all around you. It’s in the wonder. It’s in the sounds. It’s in the sensations.
What Pulls Us Away: Thought After Thought, Fear After Fear
When there’s no mitigating experience of going inward—turning attention inward constantly into thought after thought after thought—then what’s here is obvious.
But for most of us, what’s happening is dissociation and judgment, fear, psychological fear, avoidance. Past, present, future. Reliving the past. Avoiding reliving the past. Imagining the future. Resisting imagining the future because it’s anxious, anxiety-provoking.
All of this can be constantly happening, but it doesn’t change the fact that simplicity, innocence, and spontaneity are here all the time.
You can’t actually not see it. You’re seeing it.
It’s just that attention turns back very quickly into thought—turns back very quickly into that inner world that doesn’t exist.
The “Protection” That Isn’t Protection
That inner world feels safe in some sense. It feels like protection, but it’s not.
It’s also very uncomfortable. It’s also distorting. It’s creating delusion.
It makes us unconscious to how we affect everything around us, including ourselves and our loved ones. How can we cause harm and not even know it?
Because we live in this false inner world.
That’s the scaffolding of being a person, an adult, and so on—the scaffolding built over that childhood.
And the childhood is here still, always.
So you always have access to that.
Unbinding Returns You to What’s Always Here
This whole process I talk about—unbinding, waking up, and then doing the shadow work and the deeper perceptual filter work—all of that is available to anyone.
And it really just drops you back into what’s always been here.
Every single person who has done this, every single person I know who has actually traversed this territory I’m talking about, comes to the same place: they realize they are fundamentally okay. Everything is fundamentally okay.
There’s something completely available. There’s something always available at all times that can’t be tainted in any way. It can’t be hidden even.
It’s always here for us.
And that’s a really good deal.
A Simple Practice: Bring in a Little Wonder
So see if that resonates with you.
And as you move through the day, the simple advice is: bring in a little wonder.
Don’t keep telling yourself you know what’s happening in the way your internal world wants you to. Don’t keep narrating that you know where you’re going, where you came from, what’s real, what’s not real—judging this, judging that, all that heady stuff.
You don’t have to have that. You don’t have to carry that around.
You don’t have to keep using it constantly to remind yourself of who you’re not, but who you think you are—as that inner world adult person, whatever that is.
It’s all distorted. None of it is necessary.
The Senses Are Direct Access
So open up to the wonder. Notice it. Feel it.
It’s in the senses. The senses are the direct access: the feeling, the sensations, the sounds, the tones, the notes, the air, the space, the colors dancing, the shades, the darkness and light—all of it together.
It’s like a symphony.
It’s always here, always available, just for you.