Our conscious minds are filled with thoughts most of the time. These thoughts take many forms: memories, imaginings, knowledge, beliefs, immediate sensory experience, and fleeting images to name a few. All are important to some extent. But there are two types of thoughts that are far more important than all the others when it comes to forming our personal realities: beliefs and knowledge. But what is the difference between them?

A belief is a thought or an idea whose truth and validity you no longer question. You take it for granted. And the moment you do that, it becomes invisible as a belief–at that point it is re-categorized as a fact! So if you want to know what your real beliefs are, don’t look for things that are labeled as beliefs, look for things that are labeled as facts in your personal database of ideas.

Knowledge, on the other hand, at least as I use the word here, is very different. Knowledge is not so much an idea as it is a direct experience. You don’t have to believe in gravity; you can experience it directly. You don’t have to believe that extremely bright lights hurt your eyes. You can experience that directly, too. The only thoughts that are more powerful than beliefs, when it comes to providing the structure around which you form your own personal reality, are those that meet this definition of knowledge.

The Wisdom of the Ageless Child is a term I coined to describe knowledge that we can acquire through direct, immediate experience, but that is invisible to us until we look right at it. Here’s a simple example.

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Who chooses my thoughts?” It is a simple question, but I have never met anyone who has ever asked it of themselves. It just isn’t something we question. Yet no one I have ever met has ever told me that they have asked themselves that question. Have you?

There are a great many things that we can know in this direct way that we have probably never even thought of before, and some of them have profound implications that can affect our entire sense of what it is to be alive as ourselves. Experiencing these truths for ourselves can be a truly life-altering event.

This blog, and my work for the last several years, is devoted to searching for, and exploring the importance and value of, this kind of direct experience. I consider it the most important work I have ever done.

That, in a nutshell, is what The Wisdom of the Ageless Child is about. For a more complete discussion of how this came about, and where it leads, is described in the page entitled “More About the ‘Wisdom of the Ageless Child.”