Are You Truly Being You, or Living from Childhood Brain Patterns?

Spiritual Insight from the Story of The Little Prince

Have you ever considered how much of what we do in life is the result of the way we have been programmed while growing up?

We in so many ways act out brain patterns that weren’t of our making. We just picked them up from family, school, religious institutions, and society in general.

Much of how people live is close to robotic.

This is reflected in the character the Little Prince meets on the fifth planet he visits as he travels from his own asteroid toward the Earth. This third planet is tiny, with room only for a lamplighter and his lamp.

The Little Prince asks why the lamplighter puts out his lamp, then almost immediately lights it again. Why a lamp anyway, given that there are no people or houses on his planet?

Everything the lamplighter does is programmed by orders he received a long time ago. His rigid obedience to these orders mirrors how brain patterns laid down in our childhood still drive us today. He can't break out of his rigidity.

The problem with living from such brain patterns is that these old neural connections no longer serve us well because we are living now, not then.

This is depicted by the way the length of a day on the lamplighter’s planet is only a minute, since the planet’s rotation has greatly sped up over the years. He’s finding it incredibly exhausting to keep up a routine that's no longer feasible.

Many of us are tired, enervated, worn down because, instead of responding to the aliveness of each moment and it’s requirements, we are driven by our past. The consequence is that we end up battling our natural rhythms, which burns us out.

It’s worth taking some time to ask ourselves why we do the things we do, examining each of them carefully to see if they are truly important or simply relics of past programming.

What expectations are we living under that rule us long after we no longer need to live as we are living?

When we move into a state of flow, so that we are truly present in this moment, it’s amazing how much energy we have—how great our enthusiasm for life’s tasks becomes because we once again find them meaningful.