From Presence to Pretence - The Little Prince Series
Posted: Saturday, September 04, 2010
by David Robert Ord
Namaste Publishing.com
A little boy of six came across a picture book of nature in which there is a boa constrictor swallowing an animal whole. This image stuck in his mind.
In due course the little boy picked up his colored pencil and made a drawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. He called it Drawing Number One.
The little boy’s age of six is significant. It’s roughly the time when formal education gets underway, a process that in my life many years ago did a whole lot more to constrict my understanding of myself and my world than it did to expand my sense of who I am and widen my horizons.
One morning as we are playing in the front hallway of our house, we see visitors arriving. Because of our parents’ inability to see anything but their unresolved experiences reflected in each other, our home is currently saturated with emotional heaviness. The site of visitors is a welcome change in the atmosphere. We are overjoyed! Consequently, we jump up and down singing a loud song: “Visitors! Visitors! We have visitors! Visitors are coming!" We dance about the house jubilantly, chanting our joyful song.
As a reaction to our spontaneity, our parents shout, “Quiet down and behave yourself! Can’t you see we have visitors arriving?"
Consequently, as the visitors step through the front door, we are standing statue-still, suppressing our energy, now with barely a toe moving. “And this is our child," our parents say, pointing our way.
“Oh!" they exclaim. “What a well behaved little child you are." They lean forward and pat us on the head like a dog, then look back at our parents and say, “You are so blessed to have such a well-behaved child."
The boa constrictor has begun its work. Who we really are as an excited, enthusiastic, jubilant, adventurous and unique individual is well on its way to being crushed.
When I was six years old and started school it was the year 1952. In Yorkshire, northern England, where I grew up, the scenario Michael paints for us was exactly what happened to us as children in those days.
I learned to act like a "little gentleman," though inside I was really an alive little boy—an aliveness that by age six had already waned considerably as a result of the corseted way in which my family and English society in general expected children to behave.
The boa constrictor mentality that pervades society doesn’t always do its work in the same manner.
Whether we grow up to be little ladies and gentlemen, or to be wild and get yelled at, the effect is the same: who we truly are is in the grip of society’s boa constrictor. Our real self is in retreat.
So what was the boa constrictor like in your life? How did you begin to act, instead of just being? In the footsteps of the little boy of six in the story of The Little Prince, it's worth pondering.
Michael says in Alchemy of the Heart that the attention we receive as a child so often comes “for behaving inauthentically." He writes:
This behavior is safe—we remember this. We take note of this moment. We file this particular “act" they call “good behavior" in the favorable memory department. It brought us attention and made us feel special and appreciated. In this moment, our authentic essence withdraws a little and slips into the unseen.
We experience a gradual shift from presence to pretence.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery captured this so well by beginning his story of The Little Prince with the little boy of six, the age when formal socialization really gets underway, drawing a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant.
What society does to us as little children takes a whole lot of digesting. We will be a lifetime feeding on the consequences.
*Editor's Note: This is the first in a daily series of articles that will examine the story of The Little Prince. Two translations of the original story are available in English, both with their strong points. The Namaste Publishing audio book Lessons in Loving—A Journey into the Heart is an extremely helpful tool as we explore this delightful and yet incredibly insightful tale of the Prince.
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