Start acting childish.

Now that I have begun learning the secrets of sitting down, shutting up, and just watch the world around me, there is something that I'm beginning to figure out. Hold onto something, because some of this is probably going to get a little strange.

How we perceive the world is the world. The world is exactly what we make of it, it exists because we perceive it to. That is because we have millennia of paradigm telling us that's how it is, how it was, and how it will be. The Paradigm is our general consensus of reality, everything that humanity knows and accepts to be true, established and cemented by the systematic unification of our collective consciousness.

The sky is blue. How do you know that? Is it really blue? Of course it is, the Paradigm tells us so. Countless hours of humanity seeking and stripping back the layers of reality to codify and label everything has constructed the Paradigm that now blankets us. It's what we, as a race, do. We control things, and we control things by breaking everything down and giving it a definition, a meaning, a purpose. Once upon a time great learned men of antiquity believed that diseases were caused by tiny invisible malevolent spirits that inhabited a person's body and made it ill, or brought on by the hexes of witches and warlocks. Were these people wrong? Who are we to say, with the span of ages between us and them. Those people firmly, irrefutably, believed that was how the world worked. The gods drove the rain, made the crops grow, cursed and blessed man and looked down upon his works. That was their Paradigm.

But our Paradigm is always changing, always evolving, as man pierces the layers of reality to discover new truths. They are true because we believe them to be, because the Paradigm that we have created says they are true. The truth, like the Paradigm, is always evolving. As it does our world gets smaller as it is simultaneously growing, looking closer and closer to the heart of reality exposes just how inconceivably massive it all really is - and how little of it we could ever possibly understand.

When do we, as people, as individuals, become entangled within the Paradigm? When does our brain lock into the collective and perceive as it does? Is there a definable moment, perhaps a trigger, that calcifies our perception of the truth, of reality?

Now knowing this, look to children. When a small child believes that the boogie man hides under his bed, that child firmly believes it to be so. The Paradigm has not yet enveloped the child. That same child believes, knows, that if he places a tooth under his pillow before sleep that a magical fairy will come and take it away, leaving behind a small present. The world is magical, full of infinite possibilities. Children can be anything, can do anything, because reality hasn't yet stepped in and told them they can't. And we, the adults, have the onerous task of someday initiating our children into the Paradigm. The charge of stripping away all those beliefs that the world can be a brighter, much more magical place. That reality works a certain way, and that is just the way it is.

Take some time someday and sit down and watch children play. I guarantee you it will brighten your day, it never fails. Something about that innocent magic is infectious. Now here's a challenge for you: spend some time every day and push against the Paradigm. Believe in something bigger than yourself, something that hovers around the edges of what the Paradigm tells you. What would happen if everybody did that? What if we all took a moment to be like children and simply believe that the world really is more than what we accept it to be?