Children

The Need to have Children

One of the functions of existence is self-propagation. You know, some males conveniently imagine that childbearing is only the function of the woman, and therefore, if they have no children, the men don't lose anything. This is a very convenient male chauvinist idea. Because a couple having children leads to, in some intangible way, the emotional fulfillment of both, the human being becoming a complete person, you see. And I think that is why nature made it a cooperative effort. So this we should remember, that a child in a family is necessary for both - the man and the woman. In some way, a childless couple is an incomplete entity.

The desirability of having children

This relates more to economic desirability than otherwise. That is, balancing the budget; child or a car, a child or a house, a child or a pacific holiday - things like that. But if you wait long enough without having children, I am yet to meet a woman who has not felt sorry that she didn't have a child. It is not that men don't feel sorry. They are able mask their feelings better. But for a woman it is an essential and vital need, and in a greater measure, a need for self-fulfillment. So the need and the desirability are mixed up in such a way that you need not try to separate them.

Some people have brought forth some very specious arguments, devious arguments, that we should not add to the world population, that we should not bring in children into a polluted atmosphere. I mean these are virtually lies - lying to themselves first. Because when we want to have a child, we don't think of the world population and the current level of pollution in the atmosphere. People living in deserts have children, and Eskimos in the Arctic Circle have children too. So at the base of this unwillingness to have children, is selfishness. We have a good thing. Why spoil it by bringing in a brawling brat, who needs attention, care, and love?

It is not that we are worried about the expense. Because I have seen in America, couples wasting hundreds and thousands of dollars of toys on their kids. I mean the kids in America have more toys than the adults have books to read, for instance. All this expense on toys is to cover up their guilt - for the love that they are not able to give, for the time that they are not able to give, for the attention they are not able to give their children.

Essentially, selfishness means that the love and attention that we should give to others, we are sort of turning it upon ourselves. So the first prerequisite to even think of having children is that we should love children. We should love the idea of having children, with all that it involves - sacrifice of time, of convenience, of money, of your personal pleasures.

In the third world, economic penury is a blessing, because it keeps the family together. You don't have money to go and get drunk, or to go and sow your wild oats. So we stay at home, and one or two kids more makes not much difference, when you are already on the borderline of starvation. And it is amazing with what enormous love in the heart, and genuine generosity, such borderline families exist.

In a selfish, self-centered, pleasure-oriented culture, even the thought arises, should we have a child? I mean in Oriental cultures people would be shocked if a newly-married couple asks such a question. They would say, "Why did you get married, if not to have children?" And it's a well-known fact that if a couple has been married a year, and there is no child, everybody goes frantic. First they go to the doctors. If no solution results, they go to the astrologers. If still nothing comes, temples, pilgrimages, and ultimately a Master. This is the way of life in our Eastern cultures. Why? Because, as they put it very pithily, if you have an apple tree, you expect to have apples out of it. One doesn't grow a tree for fun.

So this is the dramatic difference between these two cultures, and I would suggest for your consideration, that the Eastern way is natural. Here again I would like to say that there is no moral judgement. It is neither right to have children, nor wrong to have children. It is natural to have children. So we are in the Sahaj Marg way, and we say it is the natural way, therefore it is natural to love, natural to get married, natural to have children. These things don't need permission; they don't need sanction. They shouldn't even be thought about. And of course, where, by samskara, some cannot have children, it becomes a very tragic situation.

When we come into being, we bring with us attendant joys and responsibilities. And there is a Vedic couplet, which has a very big pointer to this. It says, the father is reborn in the son. Not in any physical sense, but in the sense of a continuity of existence which he represents. And that is why we say that without a child who can mirror your love and affection, there is no fulfillment in life.

Paralyzing Parental Care

Family discipline doesn't exist nowadays. In my days, when I was a child, joint family living was the rule and we had grandparents. We had large number of children living at home; there was a great deal of play. People taught us things in the cradle, taught us the ethics and the moral situations coming from the Ramayan and Mahabharat and things like that. There was a harmonious environment at home, which is lacking today. Now the family is getting bifurcated. Children live alone. They get married, they have their small families, and very often parental care is missing. Unfortunately children tend to evaluate or equate care with love, and when they don't have sufficient care, they think the parents don't love them. And when there is no love in a family or at least as the children think there is no love, they become desperate to find this love elsewhere.

Therefore we find this phenomenon of going to playgrounds and the increasing addiction to friendship. And then they are exposed to an environment which is - at least to my mind - a little alien to the home situation. And then unavoidably, they cannot possibly avoid going to their friends and doing what the friends do, because the children seek acceptance at some level. They want to be part of group; there is security in being part of a group. They think they are loved, they think they are wanted, they feel needed, which, things nowadays under the pressure of existence with which the adults are pressed, the adults can hardly give us.

You know, a father in a metropolitan city often gets home only at nine o'clock. Next morning he has to leave at seven o'clock. What is the time he can give to his children? Forget the wife, how much time has he to give to his children? So the mother is often nowadays the custodian of the child's education, its training in ethics, its training in morality. But according to the Vedas, at least, the mother is the one who gives life to the children; the father has to provide the element of discipline, training in culture, training in social morals. And if father has to go away, the mother has to substitute, I think, with due apologies to the mothers - they are great women of our country, Swami Vivekananda has praised them beyond anything else he has praised. But the mother has to look after the house, she has to cook, she has to wash her clothes and, in addition, look after the children. And not many of the mothers are qualified to look after children: their educational needs, their social problems arising out of interaction with schoolmates and with others.

So you see, we have a situation which is breaking down slowly, little by little, because on one hand we have the parental influences which are diminishing because the parents have to make money, have to fulfill their own goals in society, their own ambitions. On the other side we have the children trying desperately to seek the love and attention they need from the parents and not getting much of it. It is undoubted that the parents love their children, but there is no tangible way of showing this love. So I feel that fundamentally it is the breakdown in the family life, in the family situation, and the corporate or other materialistic goals against which the parents are pitted, which is one of the main reasons for the children's breakdown, first emotionally, next morally.

The first thing that spirituality offers is, "Friends, reorient your goal." Start with the mind, purify the mind, orient it towards the proper goal, train it by meditation and then, you see, if the parents start it, the influence automatically percolates to the family environment. The children benefit from it. They get absorbed in the goals that the parents set for themselves because all children try to emulate their parents. A family in which the parents are harmonious, loving each other, fighting not for materialistic goals but aiming, striving for an inward nobleness to achieve spiritual goals which are eternal, long lasting, influences the children in the right way. Now the children, instead of just respecting their parents, begin to love them, to adore them and perhaps even to worship them.

Relationship of the Parent and the Child

A child trusts its parents. I have not seen any children distrusting their parents. Instead of seeing our parents in the future as our guides, as our friends, as our philosophers, as somebody who is leading us into the future, they have become the past to us. Why? Because they have done things which have hardened them as images and nothing more. They have ceased to exist for the child. These parents are dead to the children. They have gone against the basic human concepts of what a parent should be to the child. The child has to be afraid, it becomes insecure. And those who should love and cherish it have become ogres of selfishness, wallowing in their own so-called wealth and riches and satisfaction and happiness and pleasure. And the child is abandoned.

So you see, parents must remain in the future of the child, must not slip back into the past of the child. We have always to be ahead, not behind. Think of a mountain guide who is walking at the end of a line of people who are roped together to climb up a precipice covered with ice. He has to be up right in front, you see, then the people following him who have roped themselves to him will have some confidence, He says, "No, no, I will tie myself last. You all climb first." What can such a guide do? So you see, being in front means exposed. Exposed to the good, exposed to the bad such as we see it, exposed to danger. That is why when a child feels danger it goes behind its parent, it hides, but the father or the mother must be present in front, not hide behind the child. "No, no, child, you come to the front. I will stand behind you. I am behind you all the time." A child is not fooled by these things.

So, are we willing to be a sort of shield for the child whom we have raised to protect it against dangers, real and fancied? Which means, are we willing to take upon ourselves any possible danger that may affect my child? If not, such a person does not deserve to be a parent. It is a pity that in human society, we don't use the same care in breeding that we do with our animals and birds. I think there should be a law on the breeding of human beings - are these people fit to be parents, are they bedding just for pleasure or to be parents? I think it's a shame you see, that the care we give to our cows and dogs and chicken we don't give to ourselves, therefore we raise monsters.

When I have a child, it means I have to be its father, my wife has to be its mother. Are we prepared to sacrifice? Are we prepared to suffer? Are we prepared to stand in front of it and protect it from everything? Are we, in short, prepared to be a shield for it, ever in front of it, ever advancing ahead? Nobody holds a shield at the back, the shield is always held in front. If you are that, you are prepared or you are fit to be a parent. Otherwise it is better not to have children, you see, not to indulge in parenthood.

Parents should be living examples

If we live life in the right way the children automatically lead the life, in the right way. That is the importance of parenthood. That we provide the right environment, the right example. That is why I have always said that it is a big and onerous thing, you know, being a parent. Whether you are the father or mother is not relevant. We have to be alert. What is the use of a father, you know, smoking hash and telling his child, "You should not do it." And then when he starts doing it, the father cannot even muster the courage to tell him, "Do not do it," because he is guilty.

You should show what is right, rather than tell what is right. It is always easy to preach, and to be dogmatic, and to insist. By your living you should show your children what is this, what is that. That is why it is said there are two ways of bringing children: by example and by precept. We always try the precept, because to be an example is difficult.

There is a heavy responsibility cast upon every human being, male and female, and the family is the first step in that direction. One who cannot be a good father or a good mother, cannot be a good abhyasi, leave alone a good teacher or a good master.

That is why in Sahaj Marg the family life is so important. This is not a place for dropouts, for people who have run away from society, people who have abandoned their wives and come in search of spirituality or wives who have abandoned their husbands or both who have abandoned their children. This is not a place for them. This is a place for those warriors of the soul who say, "Yes, I have raised a family." "Have you suffered?" "Not that I am aware of." "Yes, but people tell me you have suffered." "Ah. It was not suffering!" For my child, how can I suffer? What I give for my child is not a sacrifice, it is my Self. How can I give my Self and suffer for it? Can you suffer when you give your love for something? When you take up a bird with a broken wing and take it home and kiss it and feed it its milk, are you suffering? Is that milk a sacrifice? Is it a duty or a pleasure?

So you see, until we have evolved to the level where a sacrifice is no sacrifice, where giving is no more giving but a pleasure, we are not fit to be anything. So it is the duty of everyone of us to take ourselves in our own hands and examine ourselves. Am I what I claim to be? Am I a father, am I a mother? Is this child mine, is it wanted or is it unwanted? Today there are too many children who are unwanted. And they feel it. They feel it from the time they are conceived. I have often advised prospective mothers who are bearing the child in their womb to speak to the child with love. Speak to it as if it is already there. It is there. Welcome it, love it. But on the contrary we have only hatred, attempts at abortion and that child grows up knowing it is unwanted. It is disgraceful. It is hated.

Life is possibility. Life is not complete, life is a process. It is a process in which we make the possible actual. And what is this possibility? That which surrounds us. What is it that surrounds us? Plenitude, beauty, harmony, love, everything is there around us.

So you see, unless we can create in the present all that we wish in the future, there is no future. Therefore the message of spirituality is quite clear - here and now! There is no future in spirituality, the future is here.

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