This sits weirdly with how we measure awareness. We tend to equate consciousness with language and logical processing, but that’s just a modern bias. In Carl Jung’s framework, we’re ignoring the vast, pre-verbal ocean of the unconscious that actually births conscious thought. Jung always stressed that consciousness is a surface phenomenon, not the whole structure. When we operate on infants, we’re interacting with a mind that’s deeply rooted in that primordial layer—aware, feeling, but not yet shaped into the ego we recognize.

It reminds me of the Moon card in tarot. It’s not about literal darkness; it’s about the intuitive, pre-logical state where perception happens before analysis. We all started there. In my own practice, which is honestly just a messy 5-to-10 minute meditation window most days, I’ve noticed that the quieter I get, the less I rely on words to “know” things. There’s a Daoist concept of wu wei that keeps coming up for me too—non-action, or rather, acting without forcing a framework onto reality. Maybe infant awareness is just pure wu-wei. A state of being that doesn’t need to declare itself to be valid.

I’m not saying we should halt pediatric medicine, obviously. But ethically, it forces us to question how we define sentience. If awareness doesn’t require speech to exist, how do we protect the silent ones? I’d love to hear how others are processing this. Does your work or practice lean more toward the measurable, or do you trust the unspoken signals more?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Yoga Nidra: The State Between Waking and Sleep | Mystic Wiki.)