Child Within as infants have no awareness of their own state, emotions and motivations. Even as older children who can speak have very limited insight into their own actions. Anybody who has raised a boy is familiar with the blank look on your teenager’s face when you ask him why he did something particularly rash. A shrug and “I dunno—it seemed like a good idea at the time” is the most you’ll hear.
Although a newborn lacks self-awareness, the baby processes complex visual stimuli and attends to sounds and sights in its world, preferentially looking at faces. The infant’s visual acuity permits it to see only blobs, but the basic thalamo-cortical circuitry necessary to support simple visual and other conscious percepts is in place. And linguistic capacities in babies are shaped by the environment they grow up in. Exposure to maternal speech sounds in the muffled confines of the womb enables the foetus
to pick up statistical regularities so that the newborn can distinguish its mother’s voice and even her language from others. A more complex behaviour is imitation: if Dad sticks out his tongue and waggles it, the infant mimics his gesture by combining visual information with proprioceptive feedback from its own movements. It is therefore likely that the baby has some basic level of unreflective, present-oriented consciousness.
In our child within meditational state we may seek to recreate this unreflective, present-oriented consciousness.
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