By James Fitzgerald Children represent the great hope of any civilization, imbued as they are with a natural curiosity and awareness of the truth and charged with energy and vitality. In almost all indigenous traditions, the natural world represented the gateway to the cosmos, or higher realms of wisdom, and so new-borns were quickly offered exposure and freedom to explore this lush meta-physical inheritance. In the Americas, some communities would even allow giant eagles or condors to take toddlers on flights of wonder above the canopy of trees — the exaltation and awe induced by these experiences would open psychic gateways in the child’s brain that imbued it with a life-long connection to the ecological neural network of the planet. The technocratic custodians of history have of course recast these initiations as myths about giant birds abducting young children in a former wilderness that was laden with dangers in every…