The myth of the child’s innocence || Acharya Prashant (2018)

Questioner: Although we start speaking, listening and interacting with the world between the age of two and three years, we do not remember much from our early childhood. In one of your videos, you said that when pure witnessing happens, it doesn’t get registered in the memory. Is this the reason why we do not remember anything from that early period of our life? Is it because our minds were uncorrupted as toddlers and everything was just pure witnessing then?

Acharya Prashant: All the memories of that period are very deeply registered in the mind—so deeply that those memories do not come to the conscious surface. Kindly do not think that the experiences till the age of two or three years do not get registered in the memory. They do not get registered in the conscious memory, in the memory that is accessible to thought. But they do leave a very deep imprint. And because it is deep, so it is inaccessible.

Why do those impressions go deep into the consciousness? For two reasons. One, because, first of all, your system is not prepared with language. To register anything as a memory, you require language. Conscious memory requires language, and you do not have language until that point, so how will you record an event? But the event nevertheless does get recorded in a way that is more subtle and more deep than language.

You have said that as toddlers we are uncorrupted by the mind and witness everything purely. This is very naïve of you to say. Young kids are deeply conditioned creatures. They are just like animals. That which you call as the Self is not at all available to a human child. Forget about a two or three-year-old—the Self is not available even to a five or eight-year-old. That is why, if you read the scriptures as a five-year-old, it will not benefit you. As a five-year-old, eight-year-old, or two-year-old, one is just an animal, and animals are driven purely by their