The Child Within the Shell

The Two Within

Are we children wrapped in adult skin?
Sometimes it feels that way — as if the years only added layers of protection, not transformation. Beneath the practiced calm of our faces still lives the wide-eyed child who once wondered where the stars went during the day, who cried easily and loved without hesitation. Time teaches us posture, tone, and caution, but it cannot teach the heart to forget what innocence felt like.

In this theme of the two within, I arrive at a crossroads — between the child and the shell that pretends to be an adult. Somewhere along the path of life, we begin to wear this shell of maturity, responsibility, and composure. Yet if we look closely, across all faiths and philosophies, we find echoes of the same truth: the Divine calls us back to simplicity.

In Hinduism, the nine incarnations of Krishna trace a journey from humble beginnings to divine play — from the simplest life forms to the highest Self, who dances and plays the flute. To me, that cycle ends where it began: in the spirit of a child. Children, after all, dance, play, and follow their impulses without fear or self-consciousness. They live in tune with the moment — spontaneous, light, and true.

Jesus, too, in Matthew 18, calls us toward that same innocence:

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And in the Gnostic Gospels — in Thomas, Philip, and Mary Magdalene — the message deepens. They tell us we must return to that state of wholeness before we were divided, before conditioning, before judgment. The child represents the unbroken soul — the oneness we lost when we learned fear, hierarchy, and shame.

The Tree of Life

For many years, I’ve felt this truth stirring inside me — the seed of a book I always thought I’d call The Tree of Life.
I see humanity as that tree: rooted in the dirt of our beginnings, stretching outward into the world through countless branches. The further out we grow — gathering knowledge, titles, and achievements — the more specialized and separate we become. We get our associate’s, our bachelor’s, our master’s, our doctorate… and yet we drift farther from the roots, from the Source, from the simplicity of God at the center.

Wisdom, then, is not in climbing further out but in returning inward — back down the trunk, back to the roots, to the soil that nurtures us. Back to the child within.

The Unnatural State of Adulthood

I believe much of our depression, anxiety, and exhaustion arises from living in this unnatural state — the performance of adulthood.
We wear it like armor, but inside that armor is compression, pressure, and sorrow.
The natural state is the childlike one — not ignorant, but curious; not naïve, but open. The child lives in why, not in what is. The child touches the flame to learn, rather than believing someone else’s warning.

When we begin to live only by what others tell us — society, parents, schools, churches — we drift from our own experience of truth. That is where conditioning begins. That is when innocence fades and the spontaneous joy within us starts to harden.

Be Like Water

Even the Taoist masters understood this truth. Lao Tzu spoke of the wise child as the truest sage — and Bruce Lee, echoing that ancient wisdom, said: “Be like water.”
Water doesn’t resist. It flows. It doesn’t despair when it meets an obstacle; it finds a crack, or creates one over time. Water doesn’t cling to form, yet it nourishes all forms. That is the way of the child — fluid, resilient, alive.

Have you ever seen a child learning to walk? They fall a hundred times, yet they never grow depressed or hopeless. They simply rise again, curious, unashamed. They do not yet know failure — they only know flow.

The Fall from Innocence

This is the essence of the story of Eden. In that garden, Adam and Eve were children — perfect, unashamed, whole. But when they ate from the tree of knowledge, they gained judgment. They saw good and evil, right and wrong, and with that awareness came separation, guilt, and fear.
They became “adults.”
They became self-conscious — and so they covered themselves, just as we do now.

The child was lost beneath the shell.

The Return

Yet the journey of life, I believe, is the return to that child — the reconciliation of the two within. The adult is the mask; the child is the essence. The child does not judge, does not compare, does not divide. The child simply is.

To live in that state — before prejudice, before ranks, before shame — is to remember God. It is to see the old man and the newborn as equal, to see the dog as angelic, to see life as one vast, playful dance.

And so I understand now the words of Jesus, of Lao Tzu, of Krishna, of Bruce Lee:
They were all pointing to the same truth — that the highest wisdom is not in knowing, but in unknowing.
It is in becoming again the pure, fluid, unguarded child that lives within the shell.

Because in the end, there are not two within us.
There is only the child — and the child is everything,
and everything is the child.