Do you feel powerless; not only against the world but also against yourself? Are you paralysed with anxiety, despair or depression in which your authentic self seems but a fleeting hint of memories past? What does it mean to truly come alive? Are you so concerned with evil that you forget to live? The Power of Childhood goes to the heart of the power of childhood to address these dilemmas. As we discover the seeds of bliss and joy that seem obscured by the phantom of darkness of the ego we will find that the unconditional love that emerges is the greatest gift we will ever be able to give our own children ... ------------------------ When you do what you don't want to do and don't do what you want to, it's not the devil, and it's not sin. It's childhood consciousness, thwarted. We come into the world in a state of love. To the extent that our natural expectations are met we become confident and happy. To the extent that they are not, we develop a protective shield of fear around us that becomes our self-sabotaging false identity or ego. None of us is without this. We don't have rational access to the powerful source of our pain. Only by deeply experiencing our pain can we transcend it. In so doing we develop a deep strength and understanding that enables us to forgive, and thereby come to experience the Love that we truly are.

Why are we caught up in a spiral of ever-increasing violence and environmental destruction while simultaneously calling ourselves rational and intelligent? Can religion, science, capitalism, psychology, politics and education help us to change our behaviour, or is our destructive behaviour in fact deeply entrenched in these very institutions? How free and democratic are we really, in South Africa and in the rest of the world? Why did Jesus say, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven”? What does it mean to become like a child? In From intellect to intelligence, the author combines his wealth of experience and insight with the wisdom of many others to penetrate into the heart of the crisis of humanity and planet earth. He critically explores and questions the very foundations of Western civilization and its interaction with Africa and the rest of the world, demonstrating how ‘wisdom of the most conventional kind’ has often created nothing less than a highly dysfunctional society. A society in which many of us may be very clever, but few act with intelligence. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “An increase in man’s spiritual potentiality is now the only change in the biosphere against the biosphere being destroyed. ”Using these words as his theme, the author points out that our spiritual potentiality has nothing to do with religion, but is ultimately our capacity to be fully and openly human: our crisis is essentially the loss of our common humanity. There is another way, and it is deceptively simple: a return to natural intelligence. This happens spontaneously when we integrate the head with the heart: when we are natural instead of normal. We can learn much from indigenous cultures, including African cultures, but only if Africa reclaims its own spiritual heritage.