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Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing Introduction "Birth is shock. It is the primal incident. As an incident, it is usually interpreted psychologically—in terms of its emotional-mental or subjective impact. But its significance is in the event itself, the sudden event of existence as the whole body. Birth is itself shock-vital shock, a recoil at Infinity. Our life is a drama of subjective struggling against an unbearable demand: relationship, incarnation, or love. We are in the mood of recoil, contraction, and self-possession—not by virtue of some inward and soulish pre-existence, but by virtue of birth itself, the apparent independence of self all relationships imply. All that is other implies the separate me. Even infants, growing adepts in the shock of living based on birth, demonstrate this reflex, the self-sympathy that dramatizes our suffering. There is no innocence, for all have been born. The feeling of independence is the burden of living beings."(The Paradox of Instruction) Birth Is Shock If we are to serve our children, we must understand their True Condition and constantly draw them to it. To do this, however, we must also understand the condition they tend to presume, their fears and habits of recoil, just as we must understand ourselves in order to grow. In this way, children are not fundamentally different from adults. Every action of the born being is that of Narcissus, the threatened, separate one, and this is no less true in childbirth than at any other stage of un-Enlightened human life. "The feeling of independence is the burden of living beings." All beings feel separate and tend to act on the basis of that feeling. Practitioners of this Way must grasp this most fundamental understanding and constantly apply it in service to our children. Adi Da points out that the universal drama of Narcissus has its root in incarnation itself: I have called this "Vital shock,"
the shock of birth itself. It is not merely the trauma of
going through the birth canal, but the trauma of realizing
independent existence—which is the case for all of you.
And you not only have the sense of independent existence,
but at the experiential level you seem to be something that
can be destroyed. You recognize that everything with which
you are related can be destroyed. Everything upon which you
would want to depend can be destroyed or taken away from
you. This basic recognition is present from the beginning of
life because each person is bodily existing. This vulnerability overwhelms the infant and child, and thus every child recoils from manifest existence to protect himself from further shocks. Adi Da has called this recoil the first philosophical gesture of the being. Its effect is much greater than any mere idea, however: it fashions our entire existence: Adi Da: When we look out into the universe, we feel insulted, rejected, unloved. And so we make philosophy out of our apparent independence. Thus, the primal event of suffering is not some circumstance that happens to us. It is not an event within our objective experience. It is not some thing that we conceive to exist in relation to us, or over against us. The primal event of suffering is us. Our suffering is not recognized as separation from something else in particular. It is our own appearance, our own independent existence, and we interpret this present event as separation on that basis. That interpretation is our first philosophical gesture, the first time we say or feel "you don't love me." (The Way That I Teach. pp. 145-6.) This recoiling gesture of the being is true even of infants. There is a great fear behind the persona of every being, no matter how young, and we must not be naive about it. Adi Da: Each child has a characteristic way of expressing his or her awareness of this fundamental sense of vulnerability. Some children feel emotionally separated from those who love them, and this feeling is reflected in a chronic sense of somehow being poor and unlovable. Other children express this basic sense of vulnerability through the mechanism of doubt-they do something wrong and think they might lose approval, they fear that their connection to life and love will be threatened. Both these types of children feel threatened by human experience, mortal experience, but each of them expresses it through a different response. Both types are pointing to the same thing: They are both communicating to us that they feel they can be harmed or that they are in a vulnerable position. Everybody expresses this emotional state in some fashion. ("The Great Lifetime Illumination," p. 19.) Adi Da makes it clear that this vulnerability is not something learned through life experiences but that "the later shocks of life in the form of pain or actual experience of separation only reinforce something that is fundamentally obvious to the being from the moment of conception". ("The Great Lifetime Illumination," p. 21.) He also points out that this recoiled emotion is not as profound as one might think; it is founded only in the sense—the presumption, not the reality—that we are separate. Fundamentally, it is not our experiences in particular relationships that tell us we are not loved. Some people do not love us, surely, but nevertheless we are simply, always, and already philosophically disposed to believe that we are not loved. It is our interpretation of existence, not on the basis of any relational experience we have had with other human beings, but on the basis of our apparent independence itself. Our sense of independent bodily existence means separation to us, whereas, you see, it is really only the sense of independent bodily existence. (The Way That I Teach, p. 146.) The child's search for love and unity through internal and external means, though less dramatic than adults', is no less active in him or her than in grown-up seekers. There is only one way out of this round of contraction, reaction, and seeking, and that is to Awaken to the Condition, and not merely the potential in Nature, of the individual—to rest in That which is Prior, in which we already and always inhere. Adi Da: What human beings must realize is a condition of Unity with What is Alive, What is Life. Every child and every adult must become stably and emotionally involved in the dimension of Reality in which things that can happen in the more obvious human or manifest dimension of our physical and outer-directed consciousness do not have the consequences that they seem to have when we live in our primitive fear-consciousness. We must awaken to a fundamental emotional sense of being connected to the Reality that does not kill us, that does not separate from us. We must awaken in such a way that we basically do not feel threatened by human existence. This is fundamentally what religious consciousness is all about. ("The Great Lifetime Illumination," p. 19.) This unthreatened consciousness is the spiritual disposition of love, trust, and surrender-the faith presumption. It is this unthreatened consciousness that we must cultivate in our children, and because the ego does not love, trust, or surrender, we must transcend ourselves in order to serve them. From conception onward, our bodily, mental, and psychic approach to the growing child affects what he will learn and what he will presume about life. The relaxation, release, or healing of vital shock and the threatened consciousness in children is what we must constantly serve. They are utterly dependent upon our intimacy with them to transcend themselves, to be vulnerable and to feel. Our true intimacy with them nurtures them and requires them to give up the lie of separation and betrayal that holds them back from the possibility of a spiritual Way of life. Thus, children are healed only through "re-bonding" with Life. We are all faced with the difficult demand to remain vulnerable in relationship, to incarnate as love, and children must feel and be served to meet this demand in terms they can understand. This is the only way that they can be prepared to meet the tests of this world with two sides-both pleasurable and painful—and use the unique opportunity for self-transcendence that a human birth represents. Therefore, children need a life in which the "dynamic of growth" is consistently present: nurturing intimacy and the demand to constantly go beyond oneself. Our culture is based on the expectation that children can and will mature through all the seven stages of love. For this to occur, they must receive this lesson continually: Only the Mystery grants one the strength of heart, mind, and body required to fulfill the difficult demand of real life. This manual of study covers four major principles that must be understood if parents are to bring their children the radical disposition-one that does not reinforce the egoic adaptation. None of these principles-intimacy, discipline, attraction, and sex and body-positiveness—are separable in actual practice. By applying them, our tendency to focus on the "problem" that children's dramatizations appear to demand us to solve is undermined. This free and Happy approach is our test, our sacrificial service to children, so that they may live a truly religious life and remain always free to be Happy. The fourth principle-transcendence of sexual neurosis-has received relatively little attention in the culture. Adi Da points out "that sex-negativity is the primary life-negative message that children get. His "Life-positive, body-positive, sex-positive, Happiness-positive, and in every sense positive" ("Our Defense of the Body in God", The Lesson, Vol. 4, p. 211.) message educates us in the free acceptance of each child's bodily pleasure and native urge to ecstasy.
Chapter One Intimacy Is the Healing Principle Adi Da: The right association of true devotees duplicates the spontaneously healing mechanism that the Spiritual Master brings to each student. That mechanism is love. Mutual love conducts the Radiant Power of Life, and it purifies each of us of our accumulations of independent, subjective, and mortal experience. Through right association we consciously share the qualities and energies of Life in a most benign way, so that the imbalances of each individual are harmonized by the spectrum of qualities radiating from others. The process of reception-release engaged in such devotional intimacy is the direct communication of Life-Force, providing a circuit for the conductivity of energy in the bodily being. And such love and spiritual intimacy is the perfect rejuvenating Agent, the Force that enlivens the whole bodily being and enables us to transcend the whole world. (The Eating Gorilla Comes In Peace) Session One Intimacy Is the Healing Principle The intimacy that Adi Da recommends to students is nowhere better summarized than in this excerpt from "Become Wounded by Love": What I mean by this Love for one another is to become wounded by love, to submit yourself to that, to live in that world and make your relationships about that. Be vulnerable enough to Love and be loved. If you do this, you will be wounded by this love. You will be wounded, but you will not be diseased. The Wound of Love is the hole in the universe, and ultimately it is Realized as such. In this hole in the universe, this domain of Feeling without armoring, without self-contraction, the great physics is present, the great science, the great possibility, is evident. Hardly anyone in human history has known of it. Human beings in general do not want anything to do with it. They do not want to come close enough to it to be wounded in their intimacies with one another. It is the doorway to infinite Transfiguration, Transformation, and finally Outshining of phenomenal existence. It is the way into the Transcendental Domain. You must be wounded in order to Realize God. You must be wounded to hear and see. It is felt even physically as a kind of wound. It is felt as intense, armorless vulnerability. (Crazy Wisdom, Vol. 2, No. 7, p. 31.) By resting in the wound of vulnerability with our children, they feel connected to Life. They depend on us to continually reconnect them to Happiness and love, so that they may be healed of the shock of independent existence and move through the stages of life in their appropriate time. Thus, true healing takes place in an environment of open feeling, in which the being is given access to the Wisdom and Power of the Divine. This restores the heart to its native disposition of Love-Communion with God. Children do not learn Communion, vulnerability, and love by themselves. They must be lead to spiritual intimacy with God. They will tend to merely play out their threatened consciousness if we do not provide them with a humanizing, self-transcending culture in which intimacy heals the self-contraction. Intimacy Is the Healing
Principle The purpose of discipline is to provide children with conditions through which they may adapt to the laws of life, or the demand for a relational and sacrificial disposition. The key to helping children make this adaptation is to integrate them into social conditions and behavior to the point of enjoyment—in other words, to draw them into a sphere of intimacy. Once a child has learned to enjoy relational life, or the circumstance of intimacy, then the basic discipline for improper behavior is to temporarily withdraw the privilege of social contact, though without bodily punishment. The effectiveness of such discipline, however, rests entirely on a free and Happy approach to the child. Obviously, not everyone is able to practice this discipline, because it requires a profoundly loving commitment to the child. Therefore, parents, teachers, and other adult intimates must awaken to this responsibility so that it becomes possible to truly serve the child through this approach. Strong, dependable, and loving relationships with children form the foundation for the application of discipline, through which children are aided in their adaptation to a lawful way of life. When this discipline of temporary separation or exclusion is practiced without the background of an intimate love relationship, it becomes a very dehumanizing and non-sympathetic approach, and the child is likely to become more and more exaggerated in the very qualities that the discipline was intended to address. So long as intimacy is firmly established, temporary separation from the social circumstance is useful, because it allows the child to recognize what he or she truly values, and what is truly of value, which is love and intimacy. Such discipline puts the child in a position in which he or she can and must make choices based on what is valuable: The child can react and dramatize, or he or she can choose to be in relationship in a circumstance of love and intimacy. It is not easy for a child to recognize what is valuable in the midst of the bombardment of experience that anyone encounters during childhood. If we are to help children to realize that intimacy is the primary value, then love must prevail in the child's life. Only in this way can intimacy be brought into the foreground of his or her experience. If the pleasure of intimacy is absent, if love is not freely given, then the child is automatically reduced to manipulative, reactive efforts to attain love and attention. Based on this consideration, there are three principles that must be strictly adhered to when a child is dramatizing and requires discipline: 1. Do not assume a problem. Rather, assume a happy willingness to serve the child, based on your understanding that the child's unhappiness is an opportunity for him or her to hear the Teaching and for you to serve the child in that hearing. ("Hearing" is a technical expression used by Adi Da to describe the intuitive understanding of the self-contraction and simultaneous intuitive awakening to Transcendental Consciousness that arise through disciplined study of the argument of the Adept. Such hearing is the foundation for the practice of true spiritual life.) 2. Ask the child to talk about how he or she feels. All children, and preschoolers in particular, tend to regress to a nonverbal state when suppressing emotions. It is important to draw them into a relational disposition in which humor and sympathy for the ordinary man's dilemma can be expressed on both your parts. 3. Be creative in bringing the child an alternative to his or her unhappy action. Basically, there is one thing that children are reacting to, and that is the absence of intimacy. Reactive emotions and inappropriate behavior in general are secondary symptoms of a primary frustration. What is being frustrated is intimacy, or life-positive, associative energy. Thus, you cannot deal with these secondary, reactive emotions directly, as if they were the point. What the child is actually suffering is the point, and that is what must be addressed in him or her. A circumstance must be provided in which the primary emotion of love can be expressed or chosen in any moment... On the basis of such consistent intimacy, temporary social exclusion of a child for negative or unrelational behavior can and does serve his or her social and spiritual adaptation. Children should not be instructed about life and emotions primarily through language, or by being "talked at," nor should they be arbitrarily disciplined in the absence of prior intimacy. Rather, they should be instructed through intimacy, through the development of sensitivity to the primary emotion of love. Always enhance that sensitivity, rather than deal problematically with secondary emotions. Children should be practicing the primary associative attitudes and experiences of serving, sharing, listening, touching, and so on. What all this points to is that there are no "methods," no techniques for disciplining and raising children if you are not already loving. If you live this Way of life, the principles of creative human adaptation, including the discipline of children, will become obvious. In that case there will be no need for conventional techniques. The profound obligation to serve the highest adaptation of human growth will be your natural capability. Your service will be to God, not to fulfilling your own present and arbitrary requirements through loveless and willful demands. Your action, your body, and your speech will become ecstatic in your confession of the True Condition to your children. When you love there will be no failure to serve them in this Way of life. Intimacy Is the Healing Principle (based on conversations with Adi
Da, 7/19/80, Intimacy is the healing principle. Parents and teachers of both sexes must live an intimate life with children. It only creates a vacuum, a problem, if this does not happen. You must establish your relationships on the basis of intimacy. Children become more and more exaggerated when intimacy is lacking, and they are reduced to manipulation when the basic pleasure of intimacy is not present. Anger in children is an indication that they do not have a feeling of human intimacy. Therefore, we must always provide right guidance in an intimate situation wherein all formalities are understood. If a parent is always absent, there is an absence of intimacy. There is one basic thing to which all children react—absence of intimacy. We must, as parents and teachers, create and bring real value to intimacy with people, the world, and God. Thus, children should not be instructed about life and emotions through language, but through sensitivity. Anger needs to be transcended (not suppressed) by helping children to be concretely aware of their feelings and to learn a different orientation to them. When the life-force becomes dissociative in children, then anger develops. Serve the awakening of sensitivity and associative energy. Be communicative with them about their desires and interests. The primary emotion of life has to be expressed through sensitivity and awareness. A child transcends his reactive emotions and anger only when we bring him into a condition of sensitivity. For instance, anger is not transcended through suppression or release but only by bringing the individual into awareness of his or her feeling relationship to others and the world. In other words, you must constantly deal with the primary emotion of relatedness, or love, and enhance that sensitivity, rather than deal problematically with secondary reactive emotions. Summary Points 1. The purpose of discipline is to provide conditions through which children adapt to the laws of life, or the demand for a relational and sacrificial disposition. 2. The key to helping children make this adaptation is to integrate them into social conditions and behavior to the point of enjoyment, into a sphere of intimacy. 3. Temporary exclusion from social contact is useful because it allows the child to recognize what is truly of value, which is love and intimacy. 4. It is not easy for a child to recognize what is valuable in the midst of the bombardment of experience that anyone encounters during childhood. 5. Three important principles of discipline are: a. Do not assume a problem; b. Draw the child into a relational disposition; c. Bring the child an alternative. 6. Every reaction has its basis in the felt absence of intimacy. 7. Children learn about life and feelings primarily through intimacy, not language. 8. Anger and other reactive emotions are a sign that the life-force has become dissociative. Draw children into emotional association, serving their sensitivity to what they are feeling and to what others are feeling. Always enhance children's sensitivity to the primary emotion, which is intimate relatedness, or love. Intimacy as the Constant Occasion of Existence (an excerpt from a talk by Adi Da, 9/4/76) None of you grew up in a true culture. You were not met by elders and brought through the trial of your growth. You were not obliged to learn what it is to think, to feel, to act, to be incarnate bodily, to be sexual in truly human and spiritual terms. In the larger society, you are thrown into the world in your late teens, supposed to be a man or a woman, but with no idea of what that involves. Therefore, we are creating a culture within our community in which to fulfill the initial adaptation of your birth so that you can enter into the fourth, or humanly mature, stage of life as the master of your birth, capable of the truly creative and free life of love. The society or culture of our living is an occasion in which to complete the process that has been so badly managed in your case and that is so badly managed in the world in general. What you need for growth, for fulfillment, is not an orgasm, a sandwich, a book, a belief—you need none of those things. What is required for human and spiritual growth is the complete commitment of the body in love, in Enlightenment. You need intimacy as the constant occasion of your existence. You need to abide heart-full in each instant in relation to all this arising. You must become capable of that. The first three stages of life is the period during which an individual is prepared for such a full existence. However, most of you, no matter how old you are, in some very critical way represent a life that is incomplete in its essential adaptation. The culture of the community is intended to complete that transformation, that adaptation. That transformation is effected by individuals working and living together, combining themselves in all the ways that support their survival, their happiness together, engaging in ordinary relations with one another and being tested in those. You must practice all of that until the presumption of Enlightenment, which is the sign of entering into the maturity of existence, is real in you, is stable in you, is not qualified by your failure to be the master of your whole condition. Session Two What Intimacy Is Not There are particular ways that parents (and adults in general) typically dramatize their lack of real understanding of Adi Da's Teaching about children. One of the most common of these dramatizations has its origins in infancy when our children were a new event in our lives and required almost constant attention. We often continue to grant our children an amount of attention that is really only appropriate in infancy and that does not truly serve them at an older age. By becoming fixated in attention to our children, we reinforce their tendency to be neurotically attached to having our constant attention, and they frequently develop a false, "cute" persona to keep our attention on them. Adi Da describes this conventional play between parent and child: Children are often treated as if they were precious, as if they require special attention to satisfy their independent, self-glorifying nature. Self-glorification, or Narcissus, is not what life is about at all, nor what spiritual culture is about. All the "preciousness" of the mother and the father with their son or daughter must be released. Parents must constantly release their hold on their children. They must release them from the binding effects of their own neurotic tendencies. All children learn to be involved
in this "precious-cutesy" game. Such preciousness leads
toward either sexual promiscuity in adolescence or, if the
individual is not sexually active, toward sexual
disturbance. The game of the precious child is the
culminating incident of the emotional neurosis shared by
parent and child, wherein the parent will not let the child
go. The "precious-cutesy" game is a way whereby parents bind
the child to a false relationship. It is a way of constantly
relating the child to the false relationship between it and
the mother or father. For example, the girl plays that the
father is her boyfriend, or the boy plays a romantic game
with the mother. There are many possibilities and
combinations of this neurotic pattern. Another common way in which we fail to serve our children is by failing to discriminate between dissociation from and self-transcending release of them. If, in an attempt to "release" our children, we merely dissociate from them, cut them off in order to protect ourselves, only hurt will result. We must rather allow our relationship with our children to grow with them and become spiritualized. Adi Da describes the difference between release and dissociation: Parents should not be playing the conventional role. That does not mean there is no intimacy—no one should feel that at all. Parental release is a demand for profound intimacy, spiritual intimacy. It means living a life of intimacy and progressively expanding within it, rather than living the parent-child bond. ("Our Children's Sphere of Intimacy Must Constantly Be Expanded") Prior to emotional conversion, we tend either to create a cult with or dissociate from all our relations. We do the same with children. By tendency we are involved in a cycle of neglect and consolation with our children. Observe this cycle in yourself. It is founded in the self-contracted cycle of anger and guilt that children tend to evoke in us, and if we do not understand and transcend this cycle, we deny our children the consistent intimacy, the nurture and demand, upon which they depend for growth. One sign of this cycle is in our attempts to console the child. We want to prove the love that we feel but fail to incarnate because of our own inability to be vulnerable and intimate. We also tend to console our children for another, even less conscious, reason: We hope that they can thus be spared the painful confrontation with Narcissus that we have been obliged to. But this is a confrontation that your child will inevitably have to make. Children need to learn, in simple terms, what the self-contraction is—that it is felt as un-Happiness-and they need to feel that it is not something that is happening to them but that they are actively generating. Without this understanding, children cannot rightly relate to the life of discipline and devotion that is offered to them by the Adept and that is brought to them most immediately by parents, teachers, and guides. Children must acquire a healthy respect for the force and profundity of the ego and the great intention that is required to transcend it. We cannot prevent the ego in children, nor is this desirable, but we can bring them to their greatest Help, Satsang. Adi Da: You cannot prevent the strategy of Narcissus in a child in any case. As soon as there is attention, there is perception and cognition. And as soon as there is perception and cognition, there is, through the phenomenon of targeting, the reflexive or reflected sense of specific and separate self-existence. Each individual must understand this process in himself as he matures. All you can do as a parent is retain and assert your humor and, as much as possible, not exploit or even suppress the strategies of egoic life the growing child will necessarily manifest. (unpublished talk, 1975) Thus, do not cooperate with or be an "enemy" of Narcissus. Become a spiritual friend and release your child from your hold on him as a "mommy" or "daddy." Do not think that by holding onto your child for an extended period of time that you can protect him from what there is to inspect. You must consent to let your relationship change daily, if that is what is called for. Adi Da speaks of this process of growth not only in personal terms but as a social response: A growth process in childhood takes place literally from the moment of conception until eighteen to twenty-five years of age, which is the culminating period of transition out of childhood. A fundamental principle concerning the development of children is that their sphere of intimacy must constantly be expanded. As they mature, in other words, children should constantly move into more and more relationships, more and more intimacies. From birth until six to twelve months, the mother is the primary relationship of the child. Parents must be educated to observe the signs of the child's readiness for a more expanded sphere of intimacy. The parent has the constant obligation to move the child into the larger sphere of community. ("Our Children's Sphere of Intimacy Must Constantly Be Expanded".) This expanded sphere of intimacy is not about being casually associated with everybody. Spiritual Practice is the form of real intimacy, and intimacy is a conscious creation and requires real work. Adi Da: Adults must establish a culture, act as spiritual servants for the children, and permit them to grow beyond this sphere of concentration on the parent. This can be misunderstood to mean that we should abandon the relationship, but we must not exclude the parent relationship at all. The principle of this Way is relationship. The intimacy that is to be created with children is profound. What must be dropped are the conventions inherent in that relationship, not the relationship itself. Rather than move away from the relationship, parents must develop it. The parent-child relationship should become more and more like a friendship, rather than a form of psycho-physical bondage. Therefore, parents should not play the conventional role. However, that does not mean that there is no intimacy. In fact, this parental release is a demand for profound intimacy, spiritual intimacy. It requires progressive expansion within a life of intimacy, rather than living the parent-child bond. Children should become more and more intimate with people to the point of living fully in the Good Company of a sacred culture. They should represent an emotional strength within that culture. At the end of the second stage they are related to community, and in the maturity of the third stage they take up the sacred Way of the community as adults. Thus, the principal point of view of this consideration is that every child's sphere of intimate association should be constantly widened and expanded, progressively and in a lawful order. The cultural disciplines with which children are involved should permit them to fully devote their lives to human beings, to the natural world, and to the Divine Reality, each in a progressively expansive manner. ("Our Children's Sphere of Intimacy Must Constantly Be Expanded".) Summary Points 1. "All the 'preciousness' of the mother and the father with their son or daughter must be released. Parents must constantly release their hold on their children." 2. The "precious-cutesy" game is a way whereby parents bind the child to a false relationship. 3. Parents have the constant obligation to move their children into the larger sphere of community. 4. Adults must establish a culture, act as spiritual servants for the children, and permit them to grow beyond this sphere of concentration on the parent. 5. The parent-child relationship should become more and more like a friendship, rather than a form of psycho-physical bondage. Session Three Serving a Child's Capacity for Intimacy with the Divine in Daily Life In order to serve our children's capacity for intimacy in all their relations, we must appreciate what it is to be a child. A child's perception of existence is very different from ours. When we enter into relationship with a child, we rarely feel into what the child's perception of life is and communicate to him on that level. Rather, we tend to relate to him in adult, verbal terms, whereas a child's perception is very feeling and concrete. Children do not interpret what they experience, and they presume little or no knowledge about it—they simply respond to what they see and feel. If we are to serve children's intimacy with the Mystery and not merely give them verbal information about life, we must feel beyond our tendency toward mentalizing and abstracting the Teaching. What children need is a concrete demonstration of love. If children do not feel bodily that they are loved, they cannot connect with the Divine, with Reality. What must become basic to their personality (and to our own) is the fundamental trust of Existence. It is the foundation of spiritual life and growth—the basis of dependence upon the Divine, the faith disposition. Adi Da: Faith is trust in the fundamental Nature of Existence. It is simply that feeling itself. It has no other content that believes, "If I have faith, my body will get well. If I have faith, the world will create peace. If I have faith, I will live forever"—it is not that. It is just a fundamental emotion, the emotion of trust, unbounded feeling in the context of birth. You know how difficult it is to come across that faith emotion. Nevertheless, simply to trust Existence should be fundamental to our being. How many of us trust Existence? I mean altogether. That trust should be most basic to our personality, but it is not. What is most basic to us is that we do not trust Existence. We are thinking about It, worried about It, and hyperactive because we do not trust It. We are seeking physically, exploiting ourselves and so on. Because of the emotional problem, we do not trust Existence, we do not love, and we do not enjoy free energy and free motion. We do not participate in the Current of Life that pervades Nature. We do not even acknowledge that Current exists. (unpublished talk, 12/82) Children evaluate life through testing it, and they test everyone they encounter. They want and need to know: What are the limits? Am I loved? Am I taken care of? And because we tend to relate to children in an authoritative, parental way, we tend to tell them how and what to do, rather than being in a relationship of vulnerability, of spiritual friendship. Thus, by our example, we retard their capacity for intimacy. When we love our children, we enter into the process of life with them, and we are free to conduct their upbringing and education as a samyama, a true consideration. The Truth cannot merely be spoken—it must be revealed in life. We must enter into profound relationship with children and enter into their perception of the world. We must teach them through a felt response to that perception. When the child is educated through real consideration—through being offered choices and seeing the results of those choices—then they do not feel threatened by demands and rules. Instead, they become naturally converted to a spiritual Way of life through revelation. Children will always test our Practice, our feeling, our love. We need never feel threatened by this testing. We need only to maintain our relationship with the child or children we serve through everything we do with them, everything we train them to do. As you teach children about the Spiritual Master and about devotional Practice, the most important communication you will take to them will be nonverbal. If he sees you on a regular basis entering into ecstasy in the company of others and in the Company of the Spiritual Master, he will follow that lead. Do not go into the Communion Hall with him and show him how to do every little thing, making sure that he sits like a soldier and that he reports that he feels the Presence. Enter into ecstasy yourself, and if he squirms around a little bit, it may be part of his experimentation. Of course, he must be taught to approach the occasion formally, but consider how formal he is actually capable of being, and then sit with him and let him feel you enter into ecstasy, into surrender, and he will do likewise. Just so, if a child sees you transcending yourself in ordinary circumstances, he will follow that lead as well. He will notice when you are in the midst of a difficult situation and are transcending yourself. Children watch you all the time to see what you will do! If they see you react, they will get the message that it is okay to be reactive. If you are entering into relationship with the Divine, they will get the message that it is ecstatic to transcend yourself. In that case, they will feel the ecstasy of transcending themselves. Adi Da: Children must be in happy, loving, open, communicative environments at all times. They must not be in the usual anti-life environment. They must be allowed to grow emotionally in free and open terms in their relationship to and understanding of the Divine, of people, of the world, of the realm of Nature and creatures. Then they will be free of all neurosis. They will come to an open understanding and be able to regulate and discipline themselves for purposes they themselves understand. (unpublished talk) Another very significant aspect of serving our children's capacity for intimacy with God and all apparent others is to provide them with a "Divine mythology," rather than conventional stories and entertainments. Consider the usual children's stories, such as The Three Little Pigs or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Why do children love these stories? There is the obvious tension-release mechanism, but, even more significant, that mechanism is built upon and directed toward a threatened being—overwhelmed by circumstances or by "bad guys"—who is magically saved in the end. Clearly, this reflects a conventional child's psychology. What is not communicated in these stories is faith, or reliance on the Mystery, or Life, that Pervades and Lives us and everything. As Adi Da points out: Children must learn what a spiritual relationship is. They must recognize the Spirit-Power that literally is contacted through feeling and breathing. They must learn that Power is the Divine. Therefore, instead of playfully allowing them to become motivated to play out the games of threat and fear that they encounter in conventional stories, orient them to a Life-positive understanding and Practice. We must try to teach children to live a happy and positive way of life through all their functions. Children generally communicate and dramatize that they feel threatened. They typically rehearse their future adult consciousness by identifying with threatened personalities. We must teach them to dramatize an unthreatened consciousness instead. Only from the unthreatened point of view can they overcome the difficult circumstances of life. Thus, it is all right that children become aware that life can he threatening or difficult. Such awareness is psychologically healthy. However, we must help them to see the threats and difficulties of life from the point of view of an unthreatened and spiritually awakened consciousness. We do this by helping them to realize a breathing, feeling relationship to the Universal Power, the Divine Personality of God. As parents and adult friends of children, we must communicate this Communion with God directly to children all the time. Encourage them to feel it. Then bring them to see how the Enlightened person overcomes difficulties in life. Through stories about such Enlightened beings, our children can discover the Power that really conquers the demons! You cannot look to the TV-and-storybook public world for such morally useful literature. You must seek out literature from the sacred spiritual traditions. In this Communion you also have the example of My own life and the stories I have written for children. These are the kinds of stories that must be the cultural foundation for the children of devotees, and any other stories must be Interpreted from the radical point of view offered by this Teaching. Children should enjoy a feeling, breathing relationship with the Mystery. They must learn to recognize the Happiness that is felt in relationship to the Mystery. Childhood should be seen in terms of a pattern of growth in which the child is always served to transcend the limits of his or her current adaptation, through the living association with the spiritual principle of Happiness. Get children to do something different than the usual life! Orient them to a spiritual understanding and practice of existence. Establish children in a Life-positive consciousness. Occupy them with living, adapting, enjoying, breathing, feeling, and relating to the Mystery, or God. We should be helping children to practice ecstasy. And in the midst of their life of feeling and breathing the Mystery, children need to acquire spiritual strength in relationship to the limits imposed by the body and the world. Children are involved in a spiritual struggle, working out a spiritual problem. Therefore, all children should be ecstatic and awake, consorting bodily with the feeling of the Mystery. We rest give them the gift of a fundamental emotional disposition of Happiness that is as native to them as feeling and breathing—a spiritual, Happy understanding of the Mystery of life. (Look at the Sunlight on the Water, pp. 107-10.) The Principle of Life-Positive Association (based on conversations with Adi Da) When children demonstrate destructive tendencies, particularly in relation to Nature and animals, this is a sign of fear of losing intimacy, as well as a sign of neurotic dependency on their parents. We must make certain that children have a true relationship with God. They go through certain rituals of approaching God, but they do not by tendency have a true feeling-relationship with God, just as they do not have a true feeling-relationship with Nature, or with other people. Help them to relate freely to God at all times. It should also be understood that some children feel that their relationship to God violates the parent-child relationship, that it violates an unwritten contract with the parents. If you notice this, help children to move out of the fear that their relationship with God violates their relationship with their parents. Some children have a tremendous fear of being wrong. When this is the case, you should take the threat out of being wrong. Being threatened is a primary feeling in children. The feeling of being altogether threatened evokes a specific fear. Therefore, you must relieve that game. Talk to them and play with them in a circumstance in which being "wrong" is possible. Get them to play at being wrong, and get them to release their fixation. You must work to draw them out of it and thus reduce the power of the circumstance of being wrong. Attract them into a position in which the circumstance of being wrong does not create strangeness and a feeling of being threatened. Get them to laugh at it. Relieve them of the ritual of feeling bad about being wrong. They are involved in a primitive mechanism, and you must draw them out of it through a stimulus-response behavioral approach, through God-games, and a feeling-sensitivity to their needs. Other types of children have a tendency toward feeling "poor me" and rejected. The same circumstance must be created to draw them out of that. You must serve the individual child to be an emotionally associated personality by constantly applying him to relationship in positive circumstances. This, rather than dealing with any neurotic complex he may have, is what draws a child out of dramatizations. The principle is to bring him into constant Life-positive association, into the condition of intimacy, and allow him to adapt and grow within that structure. This real education is what is needed. Universal Desire and the Way of Touch a talk by Adi Da, 8/14/79 Touch is precisely the dimension in which you must become awake. You must transcend the intellectualizable senses of sight and hearing and so forth. Samadhi is simply a matter of passing through all the internal lights and sounds and visions associated with the intellectual senses into the domain of the sense of touch where all the intellectual senses are suspended. At the level of touch we read the very condition of the nervous system in space. But, as touch, that condition is blind, it is prior to the usual body sense, prior to all the intellectually organized complexity of inwardness. Inwardness vanishes, and what is seen is at the skin level. Our contraction from infinity can possibly even be measured in terms of electrical activity at the skin level. It is only when the sense of touch becomes Enlightened that the subtle activity at the level of the skin achieves its Native State and permits bodily intercourse with the Infinite Radiance. The ultimate dimension or mode of the nervous system is cognized at the level of touch, not via the intellectual senses which include all the senses except touch. You propose, in your egoic fashion, to go about exploiting the intellectual senses, the receptor senses, which can be associated with higher person contemplation, in separation from the physical. Yet, separation from the physical is basically separation from the sense of touch. You tend to exploit these other senses because the surface of your being is not entirely released through touch into infinite Radiance. Your neurosis is reflected at the level of touch, in your avoidance of relationship, your contraction of the sense of touch. You recoil, you turn upon yourself toward the inward part. Therefore, you principally violate the organization of the being relative to the sense of touch, or simple, whole-bodily surrender. You are least conscious of the dimension of touch. You think information comes first through these intellectual senses such as vision—and all the games you play with these senses which are associated with higher imagination. But long before you see, the very surface of the eyeballs is contracted by fear. The very surface of the brain is contracted. The extremity as well as the root of the nervous system is contracted. The very presentation of the whole-bodily being is fundamentally contracted. Thus, the media of the body-mind all provide information qualified by a fundamental error of the whole-bodily being at the level of its most basic presentation. The Way is founded on touch. Only when the whole body, or the total surface of the body, is Enlightened—rather than when some isolated part is stimulated—can you fully involve yourself in the sense of touch. The whole body is associated with touch. All the other organs of sensation are creepy little internal sensors—and yogis always exploit these sensors. They do not take up the Way of touch, which is founded in the whole-body sense of touch. Thus, the liberation, the Enlightenment, of the sense of touch—and not its inversion—is the vehicle of the Way. Touch transcends all the other dimensions of sensation and awareness. Touch transcends sight and sound and all the mystical experiences that can be realized through the inversion of any of the other senses. You can experience all kinds of visions of the Great Being by inverting the sense of sight, but an entirely other dimension is revealed when the dimension of touch is liberated, freed from the subtle effort of contraction that separates the body at its skin level. The whole-bodily being resumes its fundamental presentation of itself prior to inwardness and recoil from the universal design and from its own Being and Radiance, its Condition in Truth. Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing Chapter Two Discipline Is an Act of Love Adi Da: Only true, spiritual, and moral community provides the human functional basis for the continuous testing and schooling of human qualities. When people exist outside the cultural bond of community, all the forms of anti-social and self-possessed aberration appear, and, once having appeared, they cannot truly be changed unless the individual is restored to the condition of community. Therefore, devote your freedom to community. Put your energy into human things. (Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House.) Session One A Review of the Instructions on Discipline This session is a review of the published literature on discipline. It begins with "The Initiation of the Challenging Force" from Ice Cream & Shoe, the toddler manual. This consideration of the artful application of the challenging force is included here because it does not only apply to toddlers. Can your child receive and always respond to a clear demand to go beyond himself or herself? The challenging force is best initiated and the positive response to it established at the toddler age, but if this has not taken place, then it must be done at whatever age spiritual life is embraced. Also addressed in "The Initiation of the Challenging Force" is the dynamic of challenge-nurture, "the two-man con." This also does not merely apply to the toddler age but should he understood as a principle of growth throughout a lifetime. Adi Da has said that students must not be afraid to "discipline and love one another"—in other words, to serve one another as we have been served by Him. True discipline is love. It arises out of the compassionate regard for all others that is awakened in students when they "hear" the Teaching of Truth and "see" the Spiritual Master. Children do not have the will or understanding necessary to choose a spiritual Way of life apart from our consistent offering of that choice to them. It is part of our Practice to create a culture that actively expects that children will live this Way of life. Apart from such a culture, they cannot mature spiritually. Adi Da: Children are simply incarnate human beings at a very early stage of development. They do not enjoy responsibility of a very sophisticated kind at all. Thus, they require and depend upon the human cultural environment around them—not just the natural environment—to come to the position of responsibility in which they can live as mature human beings. (unpublished talk) All practitioners are called to "discipline and love" the children of our community through a "culture of expectation" that is alive at all levels of maturity. If the demand to practice is presented to children only by the parents or only by the teachers, rather than being universally present in the culture, then it is much more difficult for the child to learn the necessary lessons of life. The "culture of expectation" is coincident with the "expanded sphere of intimacy." Thus, true discipline is simply the obligation of relationship. It does not arise from any politics of power that the parent may assume by virtue of age or size! Such politics only threaten children and create reactivity. True demand comes culturally. It is benign and diffuses the one-on-one dynamic of parent and child. Adi Da speaks further of the primacy of the cultural influence in developing the child's capacity for self-transcendence: The true community makes demands on children for socialization, and the parent is allowed another role altogether. Apart from community, the parent or teacher is attempting to get the child to do something. He or she is failing to orient that child to the circumstance of community, in which these demands are made by the community as a whole. When demands for socialization are made by the community, it is much more amusing and interesting for a child. It is also necessary. If a child is to truly socialize his life, he must adapt to the demands that are communicated to him through many intimacies, through the agency of community—and not simply to the demands communicated by a parent who for some apparently arbitrary reason wants him to do such and such a thing. The parent or teacher should be an agent of the community's demand. At some point the child must begin to recognize and value the sacred community. All the people who in one way or another make demands on him should be viewed by the child as agents of that community. In that case, his relationship to them is much more humorous. In other words, the whole field of individuals in which he lives and matures is then understood by him to be a kind of game of development. When he sees himself in relation to a game of development, then he can play it. It is no longer merely an arbitrary demand for control. Therefore, what you must do is literally to displace the "parent game," the exclusive bond of intimacy and authority that leads to characterize the parent-child relationship, and orient children toward community life. In that case, the disciplines that are required are much, much easier to maintain from the child's point of view. It is not a dilemma. (from "Childhood as a Game of Development", 1975) There is much understanding and healing, self-inspection and blessing, that must occur in order for this culture of expectation to come alive. A community of devotees actively involved in making cooperative agreements in relation to the children's culture creates a cultural structure wherein children do not need to resort to the unhappy strategies of the separate self. Instead, they can turn to the structure and Wisdom provided for them. The vision of cooperative community is the truly humanizing and ultimately spiritualizing structure of human life. In traditional cultures in which children are characteristically happy, emotionally strong, calm, and sensitive, what stands out is the community's embrace of every child, as well as the culture as a whole valuing intimacy above independent achievement. In such cultures children are not regarded as an independent segment of the culture, and therefore there is no distinction enforced "between authority (or the adult world) and children (or those who are supposed to be followers or duplicators of the ideal)". ("No Praise, No Blame") Only such an integrated structure of culture—one that recognizes the inherent enjoyment of intimacy with children and allows for emotional vulnerability, bodily intimacy, and free exchange of Life-Force among all members of the culture—can humanize children and so prepare them for a spiritual Way of life. Ice Cream & Shoe The Initiation of the Challenging Force Adi Da: The growth process is one in which the individual is progressively differentiated and granted his or her independence, but not presumed to have that independence completely until he has also demonstrated the concomitant responsibilities. We must familiarize the child with the world as he grows, and look to place him in a position of sympathetic contact with the total world more and more every day. When you see that the child is established comfortably in that level of contact, then allow it, grant it, presume it. At the same time, expect and demand that the child behave responsibly within that sphere of contact with the universe. You must give children lessons as well as freedom. ("Children Must Be Liberated", 8/5/78) If our service to them is to be more than conventional child care, it must be founded in recognition of their inherent spiritual nature. Our children depend upon us for instruction in and demonstration of the devotee's disposition of Blessing, the personal disciplines, and meditative and devotional practices. If we provide this demonstration, they can be naturally and gracefully attracted to the happy life of Communion with the Spiritual Master in God. The toddler stage, which generally takes place between eighteen and thirty-six months, characterizes that part of the first stage of life in which the child needs to differentiate physically from the mother. It is the time when energy and attention begin to be loosened from the child's preoccupation with dependence on the mother for sustenance and begin to become available for intimacy with a more expanded sphere of relations. It is therefore the time during which adults must introduce the simple beginnings of morality in relationship—responsibility for love in the toddlers' actions in the world. Adi Da points out in His essay and commentary, "Education, or My Way of Schooling In the Seven Stages of Life," that "Spiritual Communion, Communion with the Living Force, is based on individuation, on your knowing that you are there participating in and surrendering into it." Prior to the first year and a half of the child's life, he or she will have been almost exclusively exposed to the nurturing or sustaining force of life, primarily via the mother. Adults have not expected the child to take responsibility for his reactions to life's frustrations. However, at about eighteen months the child enters a new stage of expansion, accompanied by a growing sense of separation from what is not self. In the beginning, this awakened sense of individuality may cause the child to react by randomly or regularly waking up at night crying, or even screaming, for no apparent reason. Also, the child discovers "No" as an expression of his independence. This emerging willfulness and sense of self coincides with the child's exploring and socializing capacities. Adi Da points out that willfulness, while clearly the sign of a developing ego, and a more independent being, can be a regressive movement in a child, one that works against his real responsibility for himself by placing him In the "omnipotent infant" position: There comes a time with children, somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half years of age, when you must present a will to them stronger than theirs. Otherwise they will become omnipotent infants, and will actually regress. Their willfulness is not progressive, but regressive, a way to preserve their infantilism, the mommy-baby level of existence. Willfulness is a way of standing off and it works against their real growth. Therefore, you must propose a will that is stronger than their own, you must require things of them. This does not mean to suppress them. Never suppress children, but do become more strongly willful and make demands of them. Particularly at this age, break them out of the omnipotent infant game which they will tend to animate. This helps them to move on, to grow. Children are always naturally expanding from the egg level. They are becoming more and more socialized, more and more capable of expanded relations and expanded functioning, expanded activity. One of the liabilities of the usual mommy/daddy game that we play with children is that it prevents them from expanding, from socializing, from breaking out of the infantile mode. Thus, we must grant our children the freedom of engaging relations outside the parent bond. One of the virtues of living in community is that there are many individuals with whom our children can associate—many talents, many qualities. Thus, we must not "own" our children. We must be sensitive to them and let them be free and not create the neurosis that all of you are obliged to deal with in your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. Even In the best of circumstances, everyone will have these frozen characteristics, the problems that belong to infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Nevertheless, our motive should be to create the most ideal circumstance possible for our children. They have their own karmas, you see, so you can not perfect them no matter how well you raise them, but your basic intent should be to provide them, through real sensitivity, with the best or the most optimum circumstance for their continuous growth throughout their childhood and adult life. (from an talk, 11/27/82) Adi Da describes the toddler age as a time when parents must begin to release the child into association with the larger culture: At the age of two we really begin to observe this socializing tendency. That tendency is a reflection of the sense of independence or self-consciousness that the child has, the sense that he no longer must be identical to the mother—he does not need the mother as he did as an infant. He has a relationship to the mother, but also on a certain level he is free, and therefore wants to become familiar with other things and people. The age of three is another important moment, in which children begin to say things quite spontaneously and parents begin to remark about how mature the child looks and so forth, how they suddenly seem to have grown up. You begin to have a feeling about them sometime around this age that they are independent in a way they never were before, and you are not in the mood any longer to indulge their infantilism. You may have the sense that they should be a lot more grown up, even though it is not quite true. These are all signs that the child does not need you as a parent in the same way he did before. He needs a different kind of relationship to you in which he has more freedom but also more responsibility. You must make the lesson of responsibility at that age, when the moral growth of the truly human character should begin. From that point the child should be granted more contact with a larger society in the best of circumstances, where many women share responsibility for children. There should be a more formal approach to his learning and also a more formal approach to his responsibilities in relation to other people and in relation to the things with which he has contact. At the age of three, then, children need more demands placed on them, while at the same time they need acknowledgment of their relative freedom from the mother-child game. ("Children Must Be Liberated", (8/5/78). When the child does awaken to a felt sense of individuation at the beginning of the toddler age, he or she may engage behaviors which psychologists call "rapprochement," or "re-approaching" of the mother. The growing sense of separation and individuality is disorienting, and the child seeks reassurance from the mother. The mother should certainly give the child the assurance he or she needs, while not insisting on giving more mothering than is actually required. In this way, room is made for the father force to enter the child's life and mature him. This in no way means that the motherly or sustaining force should be removed from the child's life. Adi Da points out that "children need intimacy as the constant occasion of their existence." The nurturing force should be full, but the responsibility to be Happy, and to resort to relationship, must begin to shift from others to self at the toddler age. The agency of this transition is the father force. To the degree that the parent is not free of his or her own childhood wounds, he or she will tend to reinforce the sense of separation and bondage to the parent cult by trying to console the child, rather than requiring self-transcendence and resort to inherent Happiness. Adi Da: Women and men must grow up spiritually and humanly, and then relate to children rightly and not make a self-indulgent neurotic connection with them. Women tend to have relationships with children that are expressions of their neurosis. A woman, in her feeling of being unloved, becomes attached to her child in the same way that little old ladies become attached to their poodles. She feels there is an inherent bond of love. The child loves her, and that feeling is more important for the woman than the fact that she loves the child. She loves the child, but that love is largely dependent on her receiving signs that she is loved by the child. Women particularly use their relationship to the child in this way. They feel inherently loved by the child and indulge him or her in various ways merely to keep the child in a mood in which the child expresses the signs that the woman interprets to be love. Thus, the woman, who basically has a neurotic problem about feeling loved, indulges in this relationship with the child, who she feels loves her. She does not really serve the child's development into adulthood. She keeps the child in a rather infantile, animal-like state, like the poodle. She indulges the child and does everything she can to keep the child in a good mood, attracted to her as mother, shining innocently at her, and so forth. She rarely considers what the child needs for his or her development. ("The Dynamic of the Two-Man Con", 4/18/84). Adi Da also compassionately explains the origin of this lack of service: You must love everyone, but you are in love with only certain people with whom you enjoy a special intimacy. When we fall in love with children we feel an extraordinary passion. This is why people fail so often at being parents. They do not rightly serve the future of their children because of this love-connection. They do not relinquish attachments. Parents—both mother and father—are inherently in love with their children. The mother Is especially in love with her son or daughter. There is no question about it. The child might as well be a stranger, you see. The child is a stranger who fell out of her body. But she is in love with this person. In Love! Just as she is with her husband. It is not sexual. It is a profound love-connection. Parents must know what serves their children so that they will relinquish the clinging tendencies of this love-attachment for the sake of their children. ("I Love Everyone with This Passion", 5/8/84). Thus the toddler age is the time in which the dynamic of "two-man con" or the play between nurture and challenge, which is the principle of growth, is set in motion via the introduction of the challenging or fatherly force. Adi Da: I have spoken about the "two-man con" in the world of salesmanship. My father used it, in fact—not at all to swindle people, but simply as part of the process of persuasion. This is how it works: Two men with entirely different qualities approach the people they are trying to persuade. One plays something like the feminine role of being on the side of the people to whom they are making the sale. He is very sympathetic with them, communicating a sense that he might be able to influence the other guy, who plays the male role, hard-line, hard-edged, pressing them to make a decision. Although this dynamic is frequently used in salesmanship, the principle is taken out of life. This same dynamic is what persuades us, moves us on, makes us grow. It may take the form of conflict, but it is intended to work creatively. These two principles are present in every aspect of our lives. One is nurturing, supportive, and connects us to everything, makes us feel loved, makes us feel familiar, and evokes the loving, radiant disposition in us. The other makes the demand, frustrates us, evokes the capacity in us to overcome an obstacle, deal with ourselves, deal with what is difficult, move into new areas of experience and so on. ("The Dynamic of the Two-Man Con"). The father force must be a consistent factor in the child's life, but it must be brought artfully and sensitively. If the father force is brought too soon or too suddenly the child will interpret it as unlove, but if it is not brought strongly enough, growth is stunted. The transition from dependence on others for sustenance and nurturing to the capacity to receive and accept challenge, a "non-negotiable" demand, without collapsing into the mood of betrayal, begins around eighteen months and can mature at the age of four, if the demand has been brought to the child consciously, compassionately, and consistently. In other words, a child may be capable of receiving an absolute demand without feeling unloved and betrayed by the age of four if he or she has been rightly disciplined. In the beginning, the adult will have to attract the child into consenting to receive the demand for practice. Once a two-year-old was sitting at lunch with her mother, surrounded by other ladies, one of whom was a teacher at her school. When the teacher pointed out to the girl that she was not eating the cauliflower she had been given, the girl replied, "I don't like it. It doesn't taste good." The teacher tried coaxing the girl, in effect focusing the girl's attention on doing something she didn't want to do. Then, remembering the Master's injunction to draw children into the love-relationship, the teacher began to invoke the girl's feeling-service. She pretended to listen to the cauliflower, and told the girl somberly, 'The cauliflower says she'll cry if you don't eat her." Just then, the girl's mother finished her lunch and was getting up to leave. The girl called out, "Wait! I have to eat this cauliflower!" and promptly ate it happily. There may be times when a child needs to be drawn into the challenge through negotiation, i.e., your help in exchange for their cooperation. For example, if a child has been asked to finish a plate of food he doesn't like, and he will not consent immediately, it is fine for the adult to step back from the demand and offer help In deciding which of the foods he definitely has to eat and how much and if he can then have an extra bite of something he does like. The point of stepping back from or softening a demand you have already forcefully made, or making a "deal", is to allow the children to feel their relationship with you, and to allow you to re-initiate the challenge at the highest level at which they are able to receive it and actually practice. Such a gesture also communicates the graciousness of God. If the force of the demand has been too strong because you forgot to exercise humor and compassion, feel free to change the situation and to assert your own vulnerability. Children react when they have lost intimacy. Let them feel your love so that your demand doesn't come off as an impersonal decree that they don't know how to cope with and will tend to collapse in the face of. Adi Da reminds us: It is not easy for a child to recognize what is valuable in the midst of the bombardment of experience which anyone encounters during childhood. If we are to help children to realize that intimacy is the primary value, then love must prevail in the child's life. Only in this way can intimacy be brought into the foreground of his or her experience If the pleasure of intimacy is absent, if love is not freely given, then the child is automatically reduced to manipulative, reactive efforts to attain love and attention. (Look at the Sunlight on the Water, p. 66.) Summary Points 1. The growth process is one in which the individual is progressively differentiated and granted his or her independence, coincident with demonstrated responsibility. 2. You must propose a will stronger than the child's. Otherwise, regression results. 3. Children need intimacy as the constant occasion of their existence. 4. At the age of three, children need more demands placed on them. 5. Prior to the toddler age, nurturing is the only force actively brought to a child. 6. With the event of the challenging force in the child's life, the dynamic of the "two-man con," nurture-challenge, is set in motion. 7. The father, or challenging, force must be artfully and sensitively introduced and increased. This is to be done consistently, constantly, and compassionately. 8. A non-negotiable demand can begin to be given at the toddler age and, if applied artfully throughout ages two and three, can be fully received by age four. The Culture of Expectation based on a talk, 6/20/82, (Look at the Sunlight on the Water) Children must be "up against" themselves. They must be involved in self-transcendence. Unless parents begin to educate their children according to the principles of this Way in the early years of life, they will turn out to be the usual rebellious adolescents. Most of the time teachers and parents let the children "off the hook." Almost all children have a complete self-orientation, pursuing their own amusement, their own vitality, except when adults demand a little bit of them now and then. The discipline of self-transcendence must be obliged constantly! It is frequently being abandoned by children because parents and teachers abandon it themselves. Because the adults do not consistently bring the discipline to their own lives, they also do not bring it to the children. They tend to think that every child's life must be play, amusement, and pleasantries, but that is just the usual life of Narcissus. The children's condition of existence must be one in which they are obliged to live with sensitivity. They must be obliged to be relaxed, they must be obliged to practice service in all relations, and they must be sensitive to and mindful of one another. They need to learn to serve others consistently as a real responsibility. Children must only occasionally be allowed play that engages their vitality vigorously. Of course, it is not that they should never have physical activities or play. But the kind of play in which they are allowed to be just little vital creatures should be available to them only like an occasional "dessert." As with adults, so with children. If adults do not enter seriously into the process of spiritual practice, then they will not oblige their children to do so either. Thus children tend to be happy little superficial egos who cannot be responsible when they are confronted with the real facts of existence. As soon as children begin to feel our demands or feel that life itself is a demand, then there is nothing but reactivity from them. Children should express a feeling, quiet energy. Therefore, adults must introduce a "culture of expectation" for children and maintain it. And it must be maintained to be effective! They tend to think they are supposed to make life casually pleasant for children. This is not true. Every time a child dramatizes his or her particular strategy to gain the attention of others, he or she should be confronted with a definite expectation—an expectation that is not superficially enjoyable, so that the child will be made to see his or her own Narcissistic activity. Children must come to understand that they may be required to do things that they may not want to do. In other words, children must be given the structure in which to learn about both pleasure and pain. If children only lead a life of play, they will never be impressed by truly moral circumstances, nor will they be impressed with the total world of the Divine Reality. They will not see significant things about themselves—except their vital game—and this does not serve them. The being grows through confrontation, difficulty, and demand. Children are very repetitive. They repeat the same vital games day after day. Where are the new signs of their adaptation, where is their higher growth? We must be consistent in our service to children all day long. There must be this true or moral demand. Never step aside from it. If we consistently change our expectations of children, they will not change! Introduce requirements and discipline children if they do not meet them. Do this in the midst of a life of loving intimacy, for intimacy is the healing principle. Children must learn to be calm all day long, whatever they are doing. Adults make them stressful by allowing or encouraging them to lead a self-oriented vital life, and in this sense their play is disturbed. Calmness is pleasant, whole-body feeling is pleasurable. Children's wild, vital play is actually disturbing them, and they become dependent on feeling disturbed. They feel it is necessary for happiness, whereas it is a calm, balanced, feeling life that is truly pleasurable. We must help children become sensitive to other people and teach them how to cooperate and serve in all their relations. Also, children should learn to bring feeling and sensitivity to the meditative exercise, as given in What to Remember to Be Happy, and to other devotional practices appropriate to their stage of life. These activities serve the process of the child's relationship to the Mystery of existence. One child recently boasted, "I am supposed to remember the names of the characters in the Disney book One Hundred and One Dalmatians." Children should not be given such trivial education. An assignment such as this is the equivalent of junk food in the diet. Thus far, their diet is actually better than their moral training. This random moral instruction of them is the equivalent of junk food, whereas they should be talking about spiritual life, about the Mystery. They should be talking and learning about spiritual Teachers, and studying moral, religious, and spiritual stories. Children should be introduced, constantly and all day long, to a non-ordinary way of life. Find a way to make their lessons be aligned to the Teaching of Truth and with this spiritual Way of life. Their lessons should have moral and spiritual significance, and children should not be instructed in a way that merely impresses them, but that truly awakens their understanding. Another common misunderstanding relative to children is that parents and teachers often think children are supposed to feel that they are the center of everyone's life, almost to the point where they begin to think they are the center of the universe. There is no reason why anybody should have that tendency reinforced. Even at a very young age there is no cause for children to think they are the center of everyone's world. They must be brought into relational force with others. They must be served to move out of their independent self-involvement into the condition of relationship. My Teaching as it applies to education has been available for many years, but it has not been used. The situation of children in the community is the same as that of the adult practitioners. The instructions are very clear, but nothing changes. Parents and teachers will sit down with their children and talk to them every now and then, and have occasional serious considerations with them, but they never communicate to them a consistent cultural expectation. Thus, their moral teaching is only "dessert" to the children and is not really taken into account. It is only a momentary diversion from the child's life of vitalizing. In the usual life of children everything is play, and they are very lazy when it comes to service. There is an inconsistent demand placed on them without proper consequences for their actions. They are constantly involved with their superficial egoic dramas, instead of being calm, considerate individuals. In a traditional setting children would attend a brahmacharya school and live a completely regimented life under very severe discipline, with play as an occasional diversion. In modern American society, play is a way of life. The ultimate ideal is to be totally self-involved and even make your living out of being self-involved. In traditional spiritual societies, however, play was considered a "dessert." Teachers and parents fail to understand this. They constantly return to the "life-as-play" idea. Because their demands are not consistent, the children escape the edge of discipline necessary for true human growth. Children should not be permitted to casually leap around and vitalize. That kind of play should be a "dessert." The basic life of a child should be quiet and sensitive. It should be a learning process, an intuitive life of positive feeling and free energy and attention. If children's intuitive capacity is developed at an early age, they will not suffer from, and have to deal with, the usual self-centered orientation in their later lives. There should not be a lot of wild, vital play. Children do not know anything about true play! We have to consciously introduce them to play. We have to teach them in a way that is a balanced expression of whole-body equanimity. Otherwise children use play as a form of self-possession. Unfortunately, parents and teachers bring this kind of discipline to children only occasionally, whereas it must be maintained constantly. It must be obliged all day long. A child's life should not be anything that adults are committed to in their own childish and adolescent strategies. Adults as well as children are committed to vital stimulation, amusement, and distraction; this is the way most people are driven to live. It is already a big deal for people to put aside an hour for meditation. Therefore, meditation cannot serve any useful purpose, because as soon as the hour is over they either return to their stressful life of "getting things done" or to their self-indulgence of random vitalizing. Thus, no real energy is brought to the practice of spiritual life or to the creation of true community. If adults fail to bring this discipline to their own lives and to their children, then they give their children no gift. If there is no discipline of expectation for children, then adults are performing a total disservice to them. In the life of every child there must be calmness, sensitivity, and behavioral appropriateness. And the key to the fulfillment of this expectation is to vigorously maintain it all day long, every day, throughout the childhood years. Only then is the child's energy and attention free to feel and participate in the Mystery of existence. There is a basic principle that should be the underlying structure in the life of every child: Strict cultural discipline, maintained consistently for a very long time. During childhood that is basically how children should be served. Their casual play and vitalizing should be restricted in a disciplined culture of expectation, while they learn to fully adapt to the responsibilities of the second and third stage and the laws of mature human life. People have to make a turnabout relative to the way they serve their children and what they expect their lives to be. If you were to maintain this discipline over many years, you would see a profound change in the children—but it has to be maintained. If people would seriously approach this Teaching and use the wisdom that is given, then a very different level of maturity can emerge in the lives of their children. Unfortunately, people do not want to deal rigorously with themselves. They want life to be a constant diversion, not a discipline. And when they choose a life of discipline, they tend to spend most of their time with their reactions. People have to learn how to generate discipline from their own Place. Instead of being hyperactive and exploiting life, they have to become sensitive, calm, and observant. This is the best way for an adult to live, and likewise it is the best way to raise and educate children. Establish a disciplined spiritual culture of expectation, and oblige children to its demands and responsibilities. Otherwise, by the time they are twenty, they will only be self-involved chippies and punks, like every other self-centered adolescent, suffering and screaming their brains loose. Why bring them up for that? Summary Points 1. Children must be constantly obliged to transcend themselves. Otherwise, they develop a self-orientation that leads to conventional adolescence. 2. Children must be obliged to be relaxed, to practice service in all relations, and to be sensitive to and mindful of one another. If children only lead a life of play, they will not see significant things about themselves, and they will not grow. 3. We must be consistent in our service to children all day long. If we consistently change our expectations of them, they will not change. 4. Children should be talking and learning about spiritual teachers and studying moral, religious, and spiritual stories. 5. Children should be served to move out of their self-involvement into the condition of relationship. 6. Because of our conventional life-as-play idea, children escape the edge of discipline necessary for true human growth. 7. If children's intuitive capacity is developed at an early age, they will not have to suffer the usual self-centered orientation in their later years. 8. Children need to be instructed to play in a way that is an expression of whole-body equanimity. Otherwise, they use play as a form of self-possession. Session Two A Disciplined Life Is about Enjoyment One of the reasons we tend to shrink from discipline is that we ourselves do not want to submit to a disciplined life, and thus we have the idea that a formal, disciplined, orderly life is dull, gloomy, and restrained. And we pass this idea onto our children in subtle and overt ways, letting them "off the hook," just as we indulge ourselves. Discipline and order, however, are simply the right context of ecstasy, the environment in which energy and attention are free for intimacy, true pleasure, God-love. Spiritual life is not about being "neat, skinny, and right."(I Am Happiness, p. 55.) It is about the "infinite pleasure of love." In this session we will continue to consider the necessity of a disciplined life for children and its means. Spiritual Discipline as the Structure of Life (excerpts from a talk by Adi Da, 12/12/81.) I notice that children often do not show signs of real interest in anything in the universe. They often act very dull, as if they are completely uninvolved and unenthusiastic about anything in the universe at all. This is a sign that they are only involved in dramatizing their egoic dilemma. They must become involved in studying and doing something that is of great and challenging interest to them. Otherwise, they are all just a bunch of "low-brows." And children should not be confined in their discipline—their life must be about something. The difficulties children express are not always a matter of a lack of discipline. What you must do is put their attention on something other than themselves and their problems. You must begin to attract them into other areas of existence and oblige them to stop dramatizing their egoic psychology. Discipline should be the structure of life—that is all there is to it. Children have to know where they stand, and they have to know what is expected of them. Any child who dramatizes a rebellious, punk, egoic strategy must be served immediately. It is not to be permitted. They must know that anything contrary to the discipline of true spiritual Practice is not acceptable. A disciplined life is not merely not doing certain things, but it is about enjoyment. It is about enjoyment with people and things with which they are interested. You must divert children from vital, ritualistic, imitative games of jealousy and power, in which they are merely reinforcing a worldly psyche that will only make them conventional adolescents when they enter the third stage of life. They must very clearly understand what the disciplines are. In fact, write the disciplines that they are responsible for on charts on the wall and make sure they know exactly what their responsibility is every day. They should know exactly what they have to do, and they should just do it. They must be taught that the root of discipline is Happiness, Ecstasy, and God-Communion, and they must learn how to express their life as enjoyment through the disciplines. Children should not always be with adults. When I was young, from about age six on, I was hardly ever around adults. It is true that children need supervision, they need help, and they need the discipline and guidance of adults, but part of the problem dramatized by children is the lack of ability to live freely. Living freely, however, must take place in a structure of understanding and sanity. Thus, granting them freedom to do new things should be part of their education. Part of your acknowledgment of them is that they can be responsible for themselves. They are given freedom only on the basis of living the moral and practical disciplines of their spiritual life. Thus, the more disciplined they are and the saner they are, the more freedom they can have. This freedom is not about children wandering around together whenever they want, but it is about being able to spend time alone, being able to do different things by themselves where they are not always observed. Children should not feel that they are always being observed, perpetually under the eye of an adult. They must understand that if they show the signs of responsibility and live the disciplines appropriate to their stage of development, they can be given access to such freedom. The activities that children enjoy should only be allowed when they show the signs of this responsibility in their disciplined life. Thus, their life is fundamentally based on the incidents and activities that they enjoy, on a life of intimacy and happiness, but it is also rounded on a life of structured discipline. If they are not disciplined, then the enjoyable aspects of their lives are not granted. This is a very basic psychology in serving children. This is the way they must begin to live. Summary Points 1. Dullness and lack of enthusiasm in children is a sign that they are only involved in dramatizing their egoic dilemma. They must he involved in study and activities that are interesting and challenging. 2. Discipline should be the structure of life. A disciplined life is about real enjoyment. Children must be taught that the root of discipline is Happiness, Ecstasy, and God-Communion, and they must learn how to express their life as enjoyment through the disciplines. 3. Children should understand that freedom is granted on the basis of responsibility. The activities they enjoy should only be allowed when they are founded in a disciplined life. Discipline Is the Means of Adapting to the Laws of Life (excerpt from a talk, 1/5/76) Student: Adi Da, we tend to be afraid to discipline our children. We think that it's going to stunt their growth or that they are not going to be free and able to express their freedom. Adi Da : Individuals have a negative idea of what discipline is, as if it were always a matter of preventing a child from doing something. Real discipline is the providing of conditions through which children may adapt to the laws of life. It is not hand slapping. Punishment is one form of discipline. Punishment, however, is only useful when you already have the love and confidence of a child. In that case, stopping them from doing something works as a discipline because they feel the possibility of separation from you. The basis of such discipline is natural affection, not their dislike of you or your dislike of them. When discipline is not based on love, a shock is created between the child and the adult so that the Life-Force cannot flow between them. If that occurs, you must temporarily remove the child from the situation and allow him to be in a restful, easeful condition. When there is real conflict between an adult and a child, basically you must take them out of one another's company for a little while in order to serve them. Children and the Vital Dimension of Life (based on conversations with Adi Da) All relationships are forms of spiritual Practice. All relationships, all experiences, are conditions in which to understand, conditions in which to fulfill the obligations of spiritual life. It is useful to learn how to deal with children because they represent something in you that you are reluctant to encounter and transcend. The vital dimension of life is what you are reluctant to deal with, and children are very vital beings. They do not fundamentally represent much else. Whenever the opportunity arises to interact with the vital dimension of life, we usually become complicated and disturbed. Where the force of life is manifest to us, we are required to make choices. When we confront a child or a forceful person or a dramatic event that demands response from us, we are put in contact with the vital dimension in ourselves and all the complications that it represents. Learning how to live with a baby or with children is a great lesson, therefore. It is not simply the lesson of tolerating the disturbance they can create for you. It is a matter of really learning how to live with children. In the process you will also serve the undoing of the point of view of vital shock in your own case. All relationships are useful conditions for spiritual Practice because they all bring you to life, whereas the discipline conceived in isolation as a self-effort leading toward a goal does not involve the confrontation with life, does not involve the undoing of vital shock. Rather, it involves the exploitation of your need to escape the implications of vital life. Summary Points 1. The vital dimension of life is what we are reluctant to deal with. We usually become complicated and disturbed when the force of life is manifest to us and we are required to make choices. 2. Learning how to live with a baby or with children is a great lesson. All relationships are useful conditions for spiritual Practice because they bring you to life. Self-Transcendence Is a Necessity from the Beginning (from a talk by Adi Da, 11/23/80) Many of the so-called games that children play are ways of reinforcing attitudes and behaviors that are relatively negative. If you watch children playing spontaneously, you will notice that they usually play and are animated by power games and neurotic self-ideas. A great deal of what we call spontaneous play on the part of children is really not spontaneous. It is rather mechanical exploitation of the problems they have. Therefore, the most useful form of bringing up children is one that constantly helps and obliges them to bypass neurotic patterns of self-involvement. In traditional religious communities, therefore, the upbringing of children was relatively formal. Formality, however, does not eliminate the possibility of spontaneous, happy play. It does require children to deal with formal demands and adapt to them rightly, rather than blithering along "spontaneously." Children must deal with real conditions, real demands, and overcome their own limitations. I can observe karmic personality characteristics in an infant. I am sure you all can observe these characteristics, too. They are there from the very beginning. These qualities are not acquired through the child's social life or through their childhood experience. Their childhood reinforces those qualities, adds a certain emphasis here and there, but there is a karmic personality present from the beginning. Therefore, from the very beginning of a child's life, a useful education is one that enables him to transcend himself. It is not that you are obliged to overcome yourself only when you are older. The karmic limitations of personality are there to be overcome from infancy. That is why I have spent so much time considering with you all how to rightly educate children in the first three stages of life and help them to overcome limitations, require them to adapt, to really grow, so that when they are adults, they are not the usual neurotic individuals who must seek from scratch for the meaning and force of existence. In the case of an individual who is uncommon, highly developed spiritually or psychically, there should be signs that you may observe in them relatively early in life. For them the same education that is appropriate for all children in the religious culture is appropriate. However, your observation of them will cause you to serve them in a somewhat different manner, perhaps, to encourage the sensitivity you have observed. When you notice a child with a certain dimension of spiritual qualities—and the freedom that represents—you will not want to suppress those qualities through conventional demands for certain kinds of behavior or personal qualities. There are some individuals—tulkus in the Tibetan tradition, for example—who are actually in the stream of helping in the world in some fundamental sense, who have transcended the ego base already. They are inserted into this lifetime, therefore, for a fundamental spiritual purpose, rather than the conventional, mechanical purposes of an ego. If someone is observed to have these qualities, then serve the development of the life that they are here to live. Whenever we notice an individual of this type, we will consider what should be done differently with them. In any case, all the children should be brought up in the essential formality of true culture. You must be sensitive to them as individuals to see what neurotic patterns we must help them work beyond, as well as what exceptional qualities we must draw out. Exceptional qualities might appear in terms of ordinary human capabilities, and if we observe those in children, we will help them to develop these capabilities. Likewise, ask all the children about their dreams and about their visions. The "eyes and ears" exercise in What to Remember to Be Happy, in which the children practice inversion and seeing things at the level of the psyche, should not be merely a game in which they make up things to tell you. Children do see all kinds of things and dream all kinds of things. You can condition them to not see certain things, to believe that certain things are unreal and to have a Westerner's state of mind about it all, but if you do not implant them with that limitation, you will observe them communicating about a psychic life. It is true that before puberty the being often has more of this free, psychic life. At puberty a certain force of physical existence begins to manifest, and the psychic life recedes, but this is not to be viewed as a negative event. It is simply a characteristic of our development. It is generally true that the state of the psyche changes at that time, and the glandular system operates differently. At puberty, the pituitary body, the sexual hormones, and all the related growth mechanisms begin to come very strongly into play. Previous to that time the subtler features of the endocrine glands and the pineal body are in dominance, and thus there is more free psychism. Therefore, it is true that children, if you avoid conditioning them in the limited terms of conventional Western thinking, have a kind of psychic life that they can communicate about. The exercise in What to Remember to Be Happy is intended to enable children to be communicative about their psychic existence. When children are communicative in that way, you have an opportunity to observe their characters in a way that you could not perhaps otherwise observe. In this case, you have the opportunity to discover which among the children have more of this extraordinary dimension active in them, and you can acknowledge it and help to support it throughout their lifetime. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing Chapter Three The Principle of Attraction By Means Of The Way I Will Describe To you, I Will Attract All To The Divine Happiness and, At Last, I Will Carry All To The Divine Domain. (The Testamental Hymn of the Master.) Session One Inappropriate Behavior Is Simply the Sign of the Failure of Intimacy This session addresses a critical point that must be understood by all parents, teachers, and guides. It is that signs of frustration, reactivity, and inappropriate behavior in ch |