There comes a point in a child’s development when he or she will learn the concept of “object permanence.” This is the point when the game peek-a-boo is not as much fun, because the child understands that the world does not disappear when he or she closes her eyes. Buddhism can return people to that “perceptual simplicity” of childhood, according to Andrew Olendzki in Tricycle, by encouraging them to attend to merely what appears. He quotes the Bahiya, saying “in the seen there will be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the felt just the felt, and in the thought just the thought.”
Source: Tricycle (subscription required)
Image by Yogi, licensed under Creative Commons.
