The early child is in a totally concrete sensory world. The physical however is but one of the many orders of energy each with a different resonate meaning. In preparing for what comes next the early child is open to non-sensory events, extra-sensory, telepathic and clairvoyant perceptions that they assume are normal. When shared with the adult who does not experience these other realms the child is shamed, the experience is denied and that capacity disappears.

Now on the other hand you have Piaget’s term of moving from the concrete to the abstract and what does that mean?  Well at first the child is in this totally tangible concrete world.  That is everything that the child experiences is something that can be tasted, touched, smelled, interacted with on a sensory level by in large you see, by in large.  Now there are lots of exceptions to that, but as you go along that becomes greater and greater.  It moves out into ever greater realms.  

The physical, the tangible, is only one of the many orders of energy and now all these orders of energy that we should start and open up to were we not constrained, were we not blocked.  Now for instance think about a friend Tobin Heart, who wrote a book called “The Secret Spiritual World of Children.”  He had taught all these little kindergartener’s, 4 and 5 year olds for years and years and years, then 6 year olds, and he put together a whole book of all these experiences that these children were having and they would share them with him but had grown literally timid about sharing them with their parents because they were experiences of what, things that were not what we see every day but they were like William Blake seeing angels in the window.  So his father gives him a good thrashing for such nonsense.  Well Tobin Heart was talking about all these things that these children see, their what we would call psychic experience but they’re not psychic experiences they’re just beginning to pick up other frequencies all around.  We find that some of these frequencies other people don’t approve of so they begin to shut down on this.  Then again they’re expanding and they get negativity for their expansion and they shut down.  And so finally they want to limit themselves only to that which the other person can tangibly interact with; taste, touch, feel and smell.  And all these other capacities, intelligences, intrusions, ways of seeing are slowly lost.  

So then we spend the rest of our life projecting these ideas of the spiritual out there that we try to open up to again but we were open to it.  That’s all we knew until we hit the straight negativity of the world constraining and limiting us and we had to shut it all down in order to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves because we’re threatened and ashamed and made to feel guilty.  

Think of Gerald Jampolsky, M.D., one of his early books he talked about the hundreds of 4 and 5 year olds that had been, Gerald Jampolsky, M.D. was a physician, medical doctor who worked with children mostly, all these hundreds of children brought to him, 4 and 5 year olds by their parents who were concerned because the child was saying all sorts of things that didn’t make sense or having experiences that disturbed the parent very much and they began to think that their child was having psychopathic or pathological experiences, that they might have something wrong with them.  

He gave such examples as the little boy or girl both out walking with their parents and they would suddenly say to their parent don’t go down that street, there’s a dog there that turns very red when you get near him.  Let’s go down this street because that dog stays nice and blue and so on.  The parent finds this weird.  They don’t see red or blue dogs.  The same thing for children or maybe this was Tobin Heart who would come in and say at kindergarten that they knew we were in trouble because the teacher came in all red and ordinarily she’s such a nice blue.  A phenomena like that they’re seeing things but they quickly realize bringing negative response from their caretakers, from their parents or their teachers or whatever so they quickly learn to screen out those senses, those other senses.  Rudolph Steiner has some twelve of them he uses that are not approved by their society.  There again they have to adapt to their society.  They have to adapt to their culture and part of the sad adaptation is what, literally shutting down on capacities that they’re born with.