Mark 9:37 Meaning Whoever Receives One Such Little Child

To welcome the innocent is to welcome the Self, for there is no boundary between one mind and another once the belief in separation is laid aside. Whatever love is extended to the smallest and most defenseless is extended to the whole, because the whole is not divided into parts that can be treated differently.

And love received is never received alone. To let the awakened Self be welcomed is to welcome its Source, for the Self and the One who gives it are joined without seam. A mind that opens to any innocent presence finds it has opened to the entire chain of love reaching back to its Creator.

Children: the innocent presence in every mind, the defenseless Self that carries the whole within it.

The little child is the picture of yourself being shaped into your Father's image, the small new state you take up and carry until it grows. To receive that child is to accept a desired state as already yours and hold it as fact, and whoever does this receives the creative power itself, for that power is your own imagination and nothing outside you.

Each layer opens onto the one beneath it. Welcome the assumed state and you welcome the imagining self that gives it life; welcome that self and you reach past it to the awareness of being from which everything comes. The sender is not a distant god but the I AM, the sense of being alive that is the origin of all things. So the chain runs inward: the state you take in leads to imagination, and imagination leads to the pure fact that you are. To take in the small self you wish to be is to take in God.

Innocence is what is being welcomed, and a child is innocence still unspoiled by accumulation, no ego yet built, no comparison, no ambition to be the greatest. Men quarreling over rank were shown the one state their quarrel had made impossible for them.

To receive such a child is to receive the same quality in yourself, the awareness you had before the mind gathered its opinions and named you. Whoever welcomes that in another has already welcomed it inwardly, and it does not stop there; innocence opens directly into the source from which everything comes, with no intermediary.