EWS #153 Raising and Educating Children – VI (Drivers for Growth and Independence) + Q&A_

March 4, 2023

Alina (0:00:25):
Namaste. Namaste Sraddhalu.

[Sraddhalu] Namaste.

[Alina] We are happy to continue Evenings with Sraddhalu, Part 153 today. Our current theme is “Raising and Educating the children”. Last time we have discussed the “Rapid Growth”. Today we will be exploring the “Drivers for Growth and Independence”. You may post questions in the chat box during the conversation, or you may send beforehand an email to our address integralstudies.in [at] gmail.com. I invite Sraddhalu to take this subject for today.

Sraddhalu (0:01:17):

Thank you. This is the sixth in the current topic of “Raising and Educating Children”, and we began with the newborns, went through various phases and various issues around development.

Today's focus will be on the “Drivers of Growth” and the independence that eventually must come as part of the growth itself. In the session just before last, I had already started this point of what is the prime motivation in a child and nature has already implanted, we saw, the innate curiosity which is, as Sri Aurobindo uses the phrase, “insatiable curiosity”, you cannot satisfy, you can give any amount of replies or explanations and eventually the child will, eventually the child will continue with more questions, more interest, and so on. And even if you allow the child to explore the world as it is, in principle, that curiosity should go all the way through till it knows everything and learns and masters everything. Except, it does not happen that way, and we can see that in ourselves. And we have to understand ‘why’ and what we can do as a correction.

The second gift Sri Aurobindo points out, every child is a natural hero-worshipper, so observing greater examples, imbibing, internalising, and thereby growing. These two things are already implanted by nature.

We have also to look at one more thing which is, behind it all, the one who is guiding the growth and that is the psychic influence. Innately we could say, within the psychic, at least at the level of a principle, all knowledge is already held, a deeper knowing which belongs to the Self is implied but not yet formed, articulated or developed in the psychic presence. But just the fact that it is there, it's like a magnet which influences through a magnetic field, and things on the surface begin to fall into place, if we did not interfere.

So there are two things happening: the influence of the Self, we would say generally, the true “Knower” with a capital-’K’, Sri Aurobindo writes, “and then there is the play of Nature, which is power of Self, now in a lower grade of working”. Both are working to push the development and push for growth. Ultimately growth will be in reference to the values of the psychic being but secondarily growth requirements of the various layers of your nature.

In some sense, because we tend to look from outside-in, we see only the nature's requirements: for the growth of the body, I need so many vitamins, so many minerals, and so on. But from an inside point of view, for the body to be made stronger, more beautiful, more harmonious, more supple, to be expressive of the psychic intention is a greater priority for which, secondarily, you may need these things. But even where the external nourishment is not good enough, the power within could compensate for it and train the body, shape the body to be able to adjust, ‘adapt’ as we say, to those circumstances.

(0:05:07):

So one of the great truths of evolution which modern science has come to recognise is the adaptation, adaptability of a species. But who really is the intelligence that makes that adaptation? And it goes back always to the Self, which is the prime guide to nature, but immediately nature is the active influence, the Self's influence through nature being indirect, it takes longer, so the adaptation may take longer than the immediate problem which may be malnutrition for which then the force of adaptation will begin to shape nature.

Now all this, I am looking at, at a macro level of evolution, but at the same time the same thing is happening reflected in a microscopic way, but the same relationship, the same play, the same process. So, we saw also in that discussion that the highest reward or motivation for learning in a child is the joy of learning. If you can awaken this, then literally the child is addicted to learning, this in a good way. But the joy of learning, joy of growth, is what you will try to, as a parent, as a teacher, as a grandparent, will try to nurture, imbibe and nourish. Yet there are now secondary and even tertiary processes, methods, influences, interventions that you could do, which will assist. And so today we will cover some of these.

I am conscious that not all of us are parents, but all of us eventually have to deal with children. But I am also conscious that it may not interest many because we think we don't have that responsibility. But what we are dealing with as a principle applies to everybody at all ages and would apply equally to us.

So for those of you who don't have too much interest in that aspect of child, education, teacher, parent, try to understand the underlying psychological principles and the powers, apply them to yourself for your own self-motivation but also to those who are around you. Maybe you are a, looking after a team in a business and all those principles would still apply though most of the examples are drawn will be in the child, school, education, home context, but you can catch the principle easily.

So we see in the unfolding of the personality, there is as if like in a flower, many layers of petals, and in each direction there is a petal. So the flower becomes a perfect example. Let's say, the centre would be represented by the psychic being, covered up by so many petals, let's say in this case each of my fingers is a petal, enclosing, around that another layer of petals, around that another, and around that another, and let's say innumerable. You have now the closed bud.

If the parent from outside says, ‘I want you to become a flower quickly, open quickly, you are too slow, you are too small’, what's going to happen? Second, there is a necessary sequence unless the outer petals open, the inner petals can't open. When the outer petals start half-open, they have half-opened, the inner petals have quarter-opened, and the still inner petals are still waiting. The parent can say, ‘ah yes I can see the inner petals are opening, speed up, speed up’. No. You cannot unless the outer petals open fully.

So any attempt to artificially accelerate growth, if you reach in now and force the petal out, you are breaking the symmetry, you are breaking the harmony, but also you are breaking the outer petal, and the inner which is still not strong enough to support its own weight is suddenly exposed and eventually will dry up and fall. This is exactly what happens to children when you artificially accelerate.

I have spoken about this before. It is worth highlighting here again as an example that dyslexia is simply the result of artificially forced and accelerated growth in which in the natural layering of the petals, one step has been skipped. This represents in the brain, and we can see this through fMRI scans that the information processing goes through certain layers and it skips a layer or rather a layer remains undeveloped. That petal was not allowed to fully unfold, you force the next petal to open, and so the flow skips a layer of processing, that's your dyslexia.

(0:10:08):

And the same problems even relating to attention deficit, etc., are all artificially created problems of the modern education and modern society and nutritional combination of these things.

What would you do? Well, do nothing. Do not interfere. Allow the natural unfoldment. Now this is easy to do in a more natural setting. Let's say you're in a farm. All the children play, maybe all the children in a big joint family or among neighbours, they are all playing, maybe there's one adult supervising to ensure they don't get into danger, but otherwise they have the full life-experience to participate in, including watching the adults doing work. Isn't it?

In such a scope, you don't need to do anything, literally. Rather, anything you did might interfere. And at best, when the child begins, comes back to you with a question, that's when you have a chance to participate, otherwise, pretty much they manage on their own. The problem is, we are no more in a natural setting. We are in such an artificially constructed space that everything is fake and artificial. So well, we are, and then there is this strange modern idea of uniformity of curriculum, uniformity of education.

Sri Aurobindo makes reference to that, and he does not directly dispute it, he just points to it as one of the peculiarities of the modern age, perhaps even a necessity for a globalised consciousness where we would expect everybody would have at least a bare minimum of common communication or background or culture which would represent a global value system, and perhaps this is the truth behind it. But other than that, this uniformity is actually meaningless.

For example, just take the example of India. Our textbooks are written by people, bureaucrats or academicians, sitting in a big city. You go into the villages, the things the textbook describe do not exist in the villages. If you wrote a textbook for the villages, it would be inapplicable and pointless in the city where they've never seen a cow or never seen grass, they've never seen a blue sky.

In China, Beijing, blue sky and stars in the sky is one of those things which you read about or hear about in stories or at best you may see in a video recording, because it's grey all through the year. All, all big cities are heading in that direction today. It is only a question of degrees. In Delhi for example, you cannot see the stars because of the light pollution. So what about the contact with nature? You have lost it.

But the textbook is now reflecting that loss. And what would you want ideally is, each space would have its own textbook or content suited to that space with a common curriculum base that could be across the country or even across the world eventually, but it would have to be at a more essential level especially in the early years. So what is it that you need to do? It's not about information learning, it's about developing of faculties. And here I'm going to highlight something extremely important. It is so important that I am going to say ‘it is important’ a few times just so that we highlight the importance of it.

All this while, all of us as adults, we have been warped in our value system of knowledge, education, learning, to think in terms of subjects and informational content. So even the test-exam is really about, this is actually a true question from an exam under British rule but then continued 50 years down in our Indian curriculum: How many wives did King Henry the VIII-th have and please name them? Now this is supposed to be a history exam. I don't know what. And you are supposed to remember the names.

What is the implied example taught to the child? Think about what that means. And what is the use of it at the end of the day in terms of my growth and awakening and development? Zero. It’s in fact perverse. As a value system it is perverse. But you learn all this junk and you will say ‘now I have a history degree, I have passed a history exam’.

We are so used to thinking in terms of subjects. We have forgotten fundamentally life is not about subjects. Life is about development of your faculties, skills, capacities, experience. The petals that open up in the flower, that is the child, do not represent subjects, they represent your senses, faculties of your senses, and processes and capacities, skills and experiences of all the parts of our nature, of our being, of our consciousness, even of our intelligence.

(0:15:29):

The ability to utilise the various powers, faculties of your intelligence is far more important than how much you could learn by heart in a pretence of knowledge. So somebody can rattle out formulas, maybe even apply them, but the intelligence has not developed, because, as you can see today, and this is a very good time to face these issues:

ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, can pass your board exams, can pass your medical exams, can pass your bar exams and pretty much every engineering exam. Is it intelligent, truly? Well, sometimes it comes very close to, and we have actually touched a point where there is the appearance of actual intelligence of some kind, although rudimentary. But that's not what you want your child to be. Isn't it?

You want your child to have actually developed the capacity to understand ‘why’ or derive those equations and literally recreate the whole of the history of the learning and growth of knowledge at least in the faculties utilised.

So finally, the point I am getting to is: It is not what you know, it's about your ability to exercise your faculties, powers of consciousness, and your nature, and the different parts of your nature and all their faculties. So we are going to completely reverse our priorities. We are going to say: subjects do not matter; development of faculties, powers of consciousness are what matter.

Subjects can be a means towards that, but if you do not do this, then the subject in itself is useless. Now this is quite radical. What it actually means in terms of a classroom experience or in terms of a home experience, in terms of your priorities as a parent or a teacher or in your business space as a leader? Think about this. Unfortunately, we are not going to go too much into all the forms and examples I could draw upon but catch the importance of this complete reversal of values, and it's going to take you time to adapt to this.

But you must remind yourself: In every activity you do, think about: What are the faculties that are being engaged? What are the parts of nature that are being engaged? What are the, what is the kind of growth that is taking place in your consciousness, in your capacity of consciousness and powers of consciousness and the psychological powers?

If you go through the normal rut of exam system of a bad educational system, pass exams and clear papers and get your certificates, there is a faculty being developed: persistence for example; memory sometimes though not always; and then the ability to do what you hate doing, it's a very important power and capacity of consciousness, but that also is being developed. But beyond these three, I don't think you will find too much that is actually being developed. On the other hand, if in the class we focused more on the faculties being developed, we would not have enough time to prepare for the mugging up required for the class exam, which in any case will not help develop the faculties. So there is always a compromise you are going to have to make, fortunately not in the early years.

So again, we come back to that number 6. If in the first 6 years, you have focused on the development of faculties and the base faculties which are relevant to that age group and the joy of learning and the encouragement that the child finds in that curiosity and that hero-worship, allow that to grow enough and you have already set a base in which all the rest of the journey in spite of the damaging influences of the systems, you would be able to manage. If that has not been set, later to rebuild or evoke those things will be, will be difficult but can be done.

There's a question which came very important which I will be taking up next time: “What do you do in a case of an adult who has already been through all the damages? Can you fix it? And what are the things?”

(0:20:09):

We are going to take that up as a separate theme on another day. But it does not matter even if you have been through damaging circumstances, you can start now. Think of yourself as a child today. And that's why I say, what we are discussing is extremely important for all of us just to teach ourselves in our growth. And in the Yoga, the goal is actually the awakening of all the levels and powers of consciousness to be amplified fully and integrated around the spiritual centre of who we are. Isn't it?

So in a sense, you need a much more accelerated evolution which is Yoga, consciously accelerated, much more complete, much more thorough than anything of your existing school system could give you. So, whatever may have been given to you at best is a starting point, at best, at worst was a distortion, now you start from where you are and grow. Potentially no limit.

We'll discuss that in greater detail later. But now we are looking at these layers of the petals unfolding. Each represents a power of consciousness, capacity, faculty, of a part sometimes. And in a single part, there could be many layers of petals opening or many petals simultaneously of a layer opening. For example, the intelligence, which is what we prize so much, we say ‘my child is so intelligent’. Okay. But that intelligence depends on a prior faculty of observation. Sri Aurobindo gives great importance to this. He says, if the observation itself was defective, on what basis will the intelligence draw any conclusion? And it may seem mundane. The reality is, as adults, most people are not observant enough, ‘enough’, I mean.

I am going to share an example which is a personal example and it is only to give you an insight of what actually happens in a child's mind at an early age. So I was, it's one of those vivid moments of early childhood, you know you don't remember everything, but there are these moments where consciousness is more bright and somehow it remains for life, it's one of those moments when I recall being on the bicycle, in a basket in front of the bicycle with my mother riding it, going to the kindergarten, probably second, third year, the sense of time is blurred at that age, maybe third year let's say of kindergarten, so let's say about age five, and I'm looking down, I'm seeing the road moving and I am seeing the wheel rotating, and at some point suddenly this thing strikes:

The wheel is pushing the road. But sitting on the cycle, the road is moving away, so it is as if the wheel is pushing the road away, we are not moving, the road is being pushed away. But in another part of the mind: of course we know we are going. And somehow these two joined, and suddenly there was this insight that: actually the wheel is pushing the entire earth backward and the earth is actually pushed against the wheel even as the wheel is moving forward. It’s just like that, it was one of those things, wow.

And then I remember, a few times it popped up. At some point I said this to my mother, ‘the wheel is pushing the earth and the earth is going back’. And she said: Aaahaa! I see! Something like that. I still have, I still have a glimpse of that memory.

But then, in time, over a few days, the idea came: Well, if the earth is moving backward that way, what happens to that bicycle over there which is going the opposite direction? It's pushing the earth this way. And then suddenly the mind opened out to the whole earth, as a picture: And every human being, let’s say, who is on a bicycle, pushing in different directions, and on the average therefore the earth staying static and only the bicycles moving. And that picture came up.

I'm giving this as an example to show you, actually in a child, the degree of perception of intelligence, the powers of intelligence, which are still latent, are extremely developed potentially or rather very advanced degrees of intelligence are waiting to unfold and they catch these moments, little petals now, it's not even a petal opening, it's a petal quivering, hhhaa, this is something, and another petal quivering, and preparing now to move like a bird flapping its wings while still in the nest, can't fly, but if it doesn't flap, it won't become strong enough to be able to fly eventually, something like that happens in the intelligence also.

So powers of intelligence, so many petals, so many faculties, many of them interdependent. If you have the observation, the full chain is going to follow. But if the child sitting there just becomes passive or looks at the pictures of the scenes passing by, and there is no triggering, there is no observing, there is no questioning, inquisitiveness, it won't happen. And we have mostly done that, we have reduced our children to passivity.

But if you encourage that questioning, if you encourage that curiosity, now the first observation is going to trigger an entire chain, and Sri Aurobindo describes that chain in great detail in his writings on education. Again when you read it, it seems so mundane, it seems so, well, obvious because of the way he states it. We do not realise how important it is. And as adults, this is so important.

(0:25:52):
If you have ever read stories such as Sherlock Holmes, they are of course rigged stories because the, Sherlock Holmes has observed some fellow having a piece of chalk on his finger and deduces something. Okay, we never saw it, we never got a chance to see it. But you can see movies today, movies of complex challenges of mystery to be solved. There you are shown everything.

Are you keen enough to be able to observe? And the camera is going to zoom to ensure that you cannot say that ‘we were not shown this’. But do you observe? In real life, how much do we observe? Occasionally people observe, ‘aaah that's a nice colour of clothing’. But there's so much more that we are missing. When the observation is there, automatically from observation, Sri Aurobindo says, you find comparison, ‘this versus that mhm’ and then looking for similarities and differences. Now it may sound so mundane.

But this is one of the most important faculties of higher intelligence or rather on which higher intelligence can operate. If you cannot automatically see similarities and differences between 2 or 3 or 10 experiences, you do not have any meaningful basis on which a useful insight or conclusion could be drawn. Even if you developed a power of intuition, the intuition entering your mind would not find the necessary points of support to be able to justify itself. You would know something, and then: How do I express this? If the power of articulation is missing, ‘I don't know how to express, but I just know’.

If the observations were not present: I know something is wrong But what is wrong? Well, I never observed. But if I have observed, the intuition will actually pull out from the recesses of your memory that image, and this, and this, and reveal everything. But it was in observation that it got stored in a way that was accessible. Of course, at a subconscious level, everything is remembered. But unless it is brought to the conscious surface, it's not available to you. Isn't it?

So, it may seem mundane what I'm describing, but I'm going to actually go ahead and say it in these words: Your power of intelligence, even if it was potentially good or is still potentially good, is ineffective because lacking the first two or three layers of the development. And as an adult, if we try to train the power of observation, it's much more difficult, because we are now too busy in the satisfaction of the intelligence, now drawing wrong conclusions, because uh wrong observation or insufficient observation. Isn't it?

And then we go by the passivity of images shown through cinema, television, news, etc. So we are misled very easily. We do not even recognise where within our own mind two completely contradictory ideas can sit simultaneously and we are not conscious that we are contradicting ourselves. Why? Because of these early layers which have not been developed. So all this is to explain this whole flower model of petals. Which petal is opening? How much is it opening? When is it ready really to open? When is it just fluttering to prepare itself to open? How do you know? How can you know? Isn't it?

You could do an entire model and it would be useless for you because unless you know what is active now. And that's why nature there takes charge. And what she does is, she awakens interest in the very faculty in the activity which triggers that faculty. So when a faculty is ready and wanting or trying to develop and unfold, an activity which fulfils that faculty will suddenly become extremely interesting.

(0:30:10):

So I'm going to say, interest points to faculty. Watch what the child is interested in: What kind of activity? What kind of interaction? What kind of observation? Of course everything is interesting, but in what way is it internalising in that interest? So you see little children as they walk, they stop and they watch a line of ants moving and they are fascinated by that way the ants move and the way the ants interact, if you have been let free to observe it, and you see that ants come and they touch tut-tut-tut-tut and then they go, and then they meet again another one tut-tut-tut-tut and then they go.

Sri Aurobindo makes an observation about this: ants communicate by touch. They don't speak, they touch and communicate. Now if you have observed this, you have noticed it, and then he confirms there is something happening there. Very important. The children notice it immediately, because suddenly all these minute things are vivid, they are still in the sensory mode, the interest is in the senses.

As adults, our interest is, is in ideas, in speculations, in thinking of the future or the past and then feeling upset about it, the physical senses are not so interesting, except as minimum required to do what we need to. So notice, there is an age when this becomes automatically active. Allow that. Do not interfere. Because you are setting a base which is going to be critical to the later development of intelligence.

Now because I have seen those ants doing that, when I read Sri Aurobindo, I said: ha-yes of course that is what it is he is referring to. But then there was something else we noticed. They also communicate by smell. So if there is an, line of ants going like that, you take a finger and draw a line in between, as if erasing, the line of ants breaks, they don't cross that boundary, they go back. And eventually one ant will cross over, and then another will cross over, and then gradually it's as if they rebuild a bridge of smell and then the whole chain flows.

What is interesting also if you observe carefully, for example, when you do this line, you've broken a chain, the ants here are confused, but the confusion ripples down the entire chain all the way quite far without the ants having crossed there. Now just this observation suggests to the mind, to the intelligence, to the intuition even, that there is actually a kind of an energetic path, passage. And smell perhaps is the means or there is more something energetic. The disturbance here is rippling down faster than the ants can move. And the line is disturbed at the other end.

Now all of this is actually giving you insights, and if the intuition is active, you gain some pretty interesting insights. Just with the intelligence you gain interesting insights, if you observed in the first place. And in order to be able to observe, you should be totally lost in that activity. You cannot be observing the ants while talking to somebody else.

And if your mom comes and says, ‘hey stop this, don't waste your time, come and do your homework’, you just missed a wonderful opportunity for the development of the intelligence and the powers. You see, unfortunately, the warping of values has gone so far. Even if you say this to parents and parents understand this, they cannot, they dare not, they fear to exercise this freedom. So especially because many of these faculties are built up in the early years, where you can afford, please do allow them. Allow them to be able to explore their world and as rich an experience as possible.

Even in cases, last time there was a question about mildly autistic child, and I have seen other examples here in the Ashram, even in such cases, if you allow them that experience and then help them to grow out of the closed doors in social interaction, but internally and in the senses they are totally lost. If you help them to come out of that social isolation and learn to then communicate or receive communications, you've actually allowed the intelligence to develop rapidly, and whatever was perceived as autism initially will be overcome and perhaps you may even see a genius potential which was being slowly, I will say, cooked in this pressure cooker, in that autistic phase, which is one of the reasons why you see in the real world, many of the very high IQ individuals have some kind of mild, what they call ‘Asperger's’ or ‘autistic’ or other such disability, as they call it, for which they would be given medication in childhood if they got a chance. You know, the pharma industry is ever ready to sell you drugs.

(0:35:36):

But if you understood this, you will say, no fine, go ahead, play. And the same child as he grows, eventually is developing this very rich in inner experience of observation upon which the higher faculties of intelligence are building and begins to engage in activity and build something and then you say, ‘ah that is genius’.

If at that point you say, ‘do your homework, stop doing this, pay attention, talk to me, listen to me’ and force i, you've broken the natural development of the intelligence and then you have a sick, sickness, and that autism becomes a problem. Otherwise, it's not. It's just a specialised focal space in which something of a higher grade perhaps can develop more rapidly. It didn't need to. It is bypassing certain layers or certain faculties, so it's like a flower, let's say we had 10 petals, only some have opened, and that's your autistic child, these petals which involve social interactions have not opened. But if this opens too rapidly and fully, you have this unbalanced intelligence, and the other side is closed, ‘Asperger’s syndrome’ you will say.

But if you allow this to happen and then use it as a link, the other side grows slowly, not a problem, but it's growing. As long as it's growing, you don't worry. Allow it. Nourish it. And through that nourishment, the other parts will grow and integrate. So interest is your first indicator of the faculty's awakening. And then you'll notice, within that as the interest grows, there's a boundary, ‘I can only do this much’, ‘know this much’, ‘understand this much’, or ‘exercise this much of the skill’. Here is a subtle need to push the boundaries. Observe that. And when you see that happening, help it, support it.

In most cases, if you are observing keenly, something very important happens. Your consciousness observing is actually aligning with the child's, and, remember, the child has already identified in hero-worship with you to some degree, and the fact that you are observing is actually pushing the child and helping, purely in consciousness-force.

So a skilled teacher, and this you will see in the true Montessori systems or in the true integral education systems, a skilled teacher would watch the children and notice where there is a difficulty and just pay attention quietly, and literally in the attention, there is a nudge, and the child gets it. Very interesting! Very important!

In the yoga tradition, they speak of three, three or four kinds of initiations of the guru. I may have mentioned this recently. One of these, they say, is the fish, the style of the fish, which initiates through the sight; and the tortoise, which initiates through the thought. Interesting.

So the fish doesn't have hands and feet, it cannot speak. But through that sight, or the consciousness going through the sight, is linking to its children and as if nourishing, giving, infusing knowledge, skills, influences, etc. On a human being it's much more complex and much more rich and deep, what is possible. But this is the principle behind.

Just the fact that you are keenly interested in watching and assisting in interest, the child picks up more quickly without you speaking a word. If you speak a word, you break that concentration, you break the natural unfoldment, and you spoil it all. And then if you punish, then you have the most extreme damage, the worst thing you could do, because now that petal is going to be stunted, or it's going to be warped. Observe.

And then from observation comes this nudge-nudge-nudge just from the fact that you're interested. Be interested, enjoy, participate in the child's growth. Next something else happens. I'm describing various fine steps or facets to this process. You'll find the child has observed a lot and then suddenly it's like ‘okay enough’, and then it's going to be not observing anymore but introspecting, thinking.

(0:40:17):

You remember we spoke about this a few sessions ago the three-step process of learning: absorption; assimilation; and then re-expression. This was in a session that we had on how to develop the capacities of learning, how to speed up the learning. Automatically the child moves into that phase and now he is lost in his world.

If you were to enter it, you will find all that, sometimes pretty strange thoughts, ideas, that's why I shared that example of this child on the bicycle looking at the earth moving. In that are the seeds of theory of relativity, if you want to put it that way. Isn't it? Without the mathematical equations. But the principles are held there. But already in the mind the picture has formed of the whole earth and somehow this multiplicity of many different movements, and the intuition is picking up the feel of the earth pushed. That's an intuition in the senses that is forming.

And this is happening in all children, if you allow it. You don't have words. They don't have words to express. If you could enter their minds, you would glimpse all these things. It's a very early stage of very fine, delicate, mesh of structures of mind and intelligence which are being formed, on top of which now all the other faculties are going to layer. And if this is complete and sufficiently formed, it's the basis for the healthy mind and healthy intelligence later. So when the child is introspecting, you wait. You do not interfere and say, tell me what you are thinking. You just broke that cycle of introspection and you are trying to force him to speak. Let him complete.

If you observe, the third step will then kick in. He will want to express. Now depending on age, he may or may not be able to fully express, at which point he will turn to you. Let's say, it’s a very little child cannot yet speak, he will turn to you, at that point, you nod and smile and say, ‘yes, very interesting’, and maybe you provide some words, and the child picks up a vocabulary. If the child is a little older, the child looks at you and says ‘wow’. And so you may either add words or just say ‘wow, yes’. And that's it. Or if he is older, you may actually begin to have a simple conversation: What did you observe? What did you learn? Oh this is so interesting. There are many ways, you could either become a participant observer or you could learn from the child or just have him articulate. Play. So again, the reference here is going to be ‘what is more interesting’. If the child responds to this kind of interaction, well, he is ready for it. If he does not respond, do not force it. Rather drop back to the level of his current engagement.

The attempt to accelerate this is actually harmful in the long run. I'll give another analogy for this. When you observe plants, under the soil is the seed, the seed sprouts, and the first thing when it sprouts is not an upward tendril, it's a downward tendril, building roots and then the upward grows. Even there, initially the downward roots are the largest, literally 80% of the plant will be in the root system, and then up will be a single shoot and one or two leaves starting. Even after that as the shoot grows which is a visible part, you are saying ‘oh healthy plant should grow fast’. No.

Interestingly the healthy plant is one, at least in those species that I am referring to, is one which is short and fat. If it is tall and thin, it is unhealthy. It's not going to be able to support its own weight. It's fragile. It's sickly. Short and fat, it's built a strong base to become a large tree later. Isn't it? So the size is critical in the early stage. If you have a large-enough base, strong-enough base, the full tree growth would follow. Of course, this also will grow, but in proportion this has to be more in the priority. It's exactly the same in the child. You make a strong base, the rest you will not have to worry about.

So observe the interest, observe what the child responds to match the child's level of engagement, or do not interfere, simply participate, watch from a distance if needed.

(0:45:00):

And if the child starts narrating, you could ask, ‘oh that's interesting’. You could just be a passive listener with interest or you could actually engage in conversation by asking more questions. The whole thing is to encourage that line of exploration.

If my mother had told me ‘What is this rubbish you are talking about? How can the cycle push the earth backward?’, it would have just cut that process and I would have  said, ‘oh okay, what is it? Mhm, I am wrong’. It would have broken the self-confidence of an unfolding tendril of the sprout. Isn't it? ‘Aaahaa! Very interesting!’ That's all she did, and that was enough to allow the chain to follow. So you will see the subtle need to push boundaries as this happens, you will see this three-step process happening: observe, participate or support as and when the child turns to you with the need for support. Otherwise do not interfere.

This three-step process, for those who may have not seen, was discussed in the evening series from the number 141 to 146, where we spoke of the development of intelligence and capacities of mind. Then comes another thing in the stage of training: The child having explored this, having gone through that three-step process, suddenly as if shuts that whole thing and turns away. Observe. Very often it would be to a complete opposite experience.

It's as if as the flower is unfolding, this petal having opened a lot, there's an imbalance and now the other petal, symmetrically opposite, needs to open, in faculties. And that will balance. Just observe. It's fascinating, if you just observe, nature is teaching you everything, the child is teaching you everything, you don't have to do much. A complete change of interest, now something totally different.

The same thing could happen also at later ages. I'm taking the young child as an example because we are looking at only this faculty. In the teenage something similar might happen. This is so fascinating and suddenly overnight the interest goes and something else becomes extremely interesting. Same principle: Two sides being balanced out. And then, interestingly, depending on the particular form, there may be an oscillation between these two or an attempt to integrate the two or at least at a faculty level at an attempt to integrate for which the activity might be different, where the faculties integrate. So you may say: Why is he skipping activities? No. His faculties are developing. Not activities. So I go back to that first statement: Very-very important:

Think in terms of faculties, powers of consciousness.

Not subjects, not form of activity, that does not matter.

If you have played tabla, the faculties being used, let's say, are of rhythm but not of tone. Now you switch to the flute and now you are getting the tone but maybe not too much scope for rhythm. Now I take up something totally different where the two blend or have scope for the play, interplay between tone and rhythm. You will see three different instruments in terms of consciousness. No, it's integration of two faculties. Think about it this way.

So you will understand what is happening in the child or what you need to do to help if you look always in terms of faculties, and the model of the flower petals is extremely valuable here. Then, so having done two different things, the attempt to combine, to integrate, and often involving an experience which is more rich and complex, which allows for a richer integration. So, there is a rationale, there is a logic, there is a sequence. In all this, it may happen that a child has a natural bias towards one of the senses. It just means that, that faculty is more developed or more ready in its unfolding.

As a teacher or parent, you would want eventually to have a equal development in all senses. In practice, it will never happen, but the opportunity should be provided. There will always be a bias. And as human beings our primary bias is our sight. It is only when we lose our sight that we pay attention to a hearing and then to our touch. So somebody who has lost sight, listening in a room full of 20 people conversing, can pick out a voice and say, ‘hey, so and so, how are you?, but who's at the other end of the room. If you went in with sight, you may probably not pay attention to the hearing to this degree. Only because you lost it, now this faculty has expanded. Isn't it?

(0:50:05):

Similarly, if your hearing was also weak or even just with sight gone, the touch becomes far more sensitive. Touching an object, you can, you are actually paying attention to things which you would not have been paying attention to. You can actually touch an object, let's say a bowl, a vessel, the way you would with sight say ‘this is old or new’, you could touch and feel old or new.

Even there is a particular vibration in which you can recognise colours, and so on. Fake leather versus real leather: Visually seems the same. To us, touch seems similar almost, but to the skilled touch, the difference is huge. It's not a subtle difference. And that shows you, it gives you a glimpse of what is possible with the touch. So, you would want ideally all the senses to be opened out.

You can't do that at the age of 15 or 18. You can do that at the age of 5 or 6. Because at that age, the full focus is in the senses. And if left to itself, the child can only tap a certain range of sensory experience, because that's all that's available, and the innate bias of the human being to be on sight, you can bring in activities through play which engage with other senses. So for example, you, for the fun of it, you put a blindfold and then we smell things or taste things or touch things and try to guess and interact; some kind of fun game. And the interaction is all that matters there. Just the fact that you did this, the child begins to now pay attention to that sense. And you can say: Well, at night can you make out just by touching what this is or that is? So it's a suggestion you place and then watch. At night can you feel? Can you sense? So often you have to go, get up at night for something. Can you walk?

And one of the things you realise, the space, sense of space is very different, subjective, with your eyes closed. But you can reduce it sensorially by counting steps. So you reduce it from physical senses to mental idea, you link the two. And now suddenly that which was an abstraction of space has actually got a physical sensory content just by doing some very basic exercises.

There's one group in Auroville which was doing “Awareness Through the Body” ATB. It's a very interesting course, basically around these things, on the development of senses, but linking the mind-awareness with the senses. Games of this kind, for example, enrich through all the senses and expose to all the skills relevant for that stage for that age.

Now comes the problem: You have to choose or perhaps the child will indicate a bias between width of scope and depth. Some children will take a narrow focus and go deep deep deep. Other children will shun narrowness and just wander around with wideness. Now this is not only at sensory level, the same principles would operate at the level of, let's say, formal learning of knowledge or information.

So let's say in teenage, some children would want to know everything about nothing. Something close to, well, or the correction would be nothing about everything, pretty much it comes to that, because you try to learn everything, and you learn superficially, you end up with very little of real value. Or you go the other extreme, you specialise and go deep-deep, there is this very humorous phrase ‘a specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less’, so you narrow down. But in fact, this is one of the very interesting characteristics of our universe, as you go deep into anything, you touch its infinity.

And eventually to be able to master just, let's say, electronics, you'll have to end up with the physics and the chemistry and the biology and the cosmology of everything, if you go deep enough. So this applies to everything. Even if you just take music as your field, if you really go in depth, eventually you will end up with the physics of resonance and the chemistry of the wood that makes for the quality of the instrument, all, everything literally comes through, if you go deep enough.

But in practice, we have a certain mould of temperament. So in my mould, for example, there is this passage like this, like this, and it reaches to that. Somebody else's mould goes narrow and goes a little bit and stops there. So when you see a narrow focus of interest, you would want to help widen, and that would be part of your responsibility as an instructor or as a educator.

(0:55:10):
When you find somebody going very wide, just accept, that's the need of that nature, but then suggest or try to find an area in which they would want to plunge deeper and encourage that. Again observe the response. If you find the child resisting, then you wait, then you are doing something wrong. Find a different point of entry, find a different focus. There is a point where the child says, ‘yes this is actually interesting’, that's when it will happen.

So I'm still coming back to the first responsibility being you need to observe the child, and the child will reveal to you what is required, and all this goes all the way through all the ages including adult age.

The difference with adults though is some of these barriers and blocks, distortions are rigid, and so the natural curiosity and flow which you will see in the child has been blocked. The principle would still apply that the adult will show you what you need to do or what is the correction required, but you will not be able to help because of the rigidity. Whereas with the child that is not yet, that is not yet there unless you have already done some damage.

So, again, observe wide-deep-balance integration according to their nature, according to their need, according to the stage of growth. No problem. Now comes certain natural distortions in activity that you might do, where the activity itself has a tendency to pervert. And I will give an example of this is what we call ‘video games’. The video games themselves are addictive because they are actually stimulating certain faculties in the child.

So let's say, you're entering an adventure game, there's the fantasy aspect of the child's interest, there's the narration of a story, there's a storyline that's unfolding, all the physical senses are engaged, sounds, sights, except for the smell, and, but the touch is there, your hands are doing things. The fine skills, fine motor skills as you move the joystick or roll a mouse or whatever it is you have to do, and the full focus of attention required, demanded of you even, so power of concentration, but on something shallow and instant reward.

You took your let's say mannequin on the screen, made it jump a few hoops, and ‘floam’ there's a very big loud noise, big picture, flashing colours, reward. Instant. So this somehow does not map to the real world. It belongs to a very narrow domain of the mind, but through which all the senses and other parts of your being are being utilised, accessed. But in such a narrow space, in such a narrow cluster of application of faculties, that it almost has no value in life, and yet it's tapping into all these different faculties and senses. And that's where comes the distortion and the addictive character. Because in the very design of the game, you have been given a very quick reward for something which was actually nothing, or it represented at best a little physical skill, and that's about it.

But it involved your full attention, full immersion. And again, it was a trap for the full immersion, because you were sucked into a fantasy world. It will still be useful. It will still develop certain faculties, but not deeply, not richly, and keep you in that very little box, very little small box of what that whole bundle is holding in. The instant reward in a narrow scope, false sense of growth and accomplishment: 10,000 points!

Now the number actually has no meaning. In reality, if you did something 10,000 of anything, it's huge. But here, you are being thrown numbers. See, each time you hit a point, you’ll get a little thing, 100 bursts out. It should have been 1, but you got a 100. You picked up something, it becomes a million, as if that thing has a value of million. Now in real life, those are not real numbers, you never get a million for doing something. Isn't it?

So the whole thing has been exaggerated or reality has been warped to give this false sense of growth and accomplishment. There is growth, there is accomplishment. Very small. But it's been falsely exaggerated.

And so the kind of addiction it creates is very similar to what you find through certain kinds of drugs, alcohol or tobacco, smoke, etc., where the mechanism of reward, which would be the feel-good has been activated but for nothing of real value. And so you become addicted to the false sense of reward, which then very quickly diminishes, and then is gone. Then you are in a lower than low, because now you have, your natural mechanism for reward has been distorted.

And this is what happens to those who withdraw from the games: you have a withdrawal symptom, suddenly the world is:  ‘I don't get my reward. I just picked up this object, I just ate my food. Where is the hundred? Where is the thousand? Where is the million? What do I do to get my billion? It's not there.’ And so it's a withdrawal symptom.

(1:00:45):

I'm explaining this so that you understand what the video game does. Yes, it actually triggers and helps in certain values, faculties, experiences. But outside that little box and with the false sense of exaggeration, it is actually ending with the opposite benefit or result. So in all this, and this is one of the great lessons we will learn from the video games: It could addict you or compel you, bind you, draw you in because it gave you positive reinforcement.

Yes, there is a some kind of negative reinforcement also you can lose, but for little things you are getting a reward, and so you get sucked deeper and deeper into the game. There are people, now certain games go, once you have crossed this you have a level 2, and a level 3, and a level 4, some people get so addicted, they go into level into their 30s and 40s. And now they are competing with the world's best in numbers which are so humongously large, you don't even know what they mean, they are just numbers, sounds in the head, pictures of zeros. And you are so addicted, it's as if ‘my life depends on being able to win those 20 points more than the other fellow’. You see how it warps you.

But the power of positive reinforcement is misused here. So I am going to take a moment here to highlight this positive reinforcement, because it is in fact the most powerful, it is far more powerful than negative reinforcement. Now those who are involved in social brainwashing and manipulating society and warping society will disagree. They will say ‘fear, punishment, threat is far more powerful than positive reinforcement’. Yes, they are more powerful to destroy, subjugate and suppress the masses; they are not more powerful for evolution and growth.

So we are talking of different objectives. For their goal, the negative reinforcement is more powerful. For our goal, positive reinforcement is enormously more powerful than any negative reinforcement. So what you do? What does it mean positive reinforcement? It means, you give a feedback. When something positive happens, you give feedback that is positive. That's all.

Negative reinforcement is, when something negative happens, you give a negative feedback. How does it help? It just tells you ‘don't do this’. Okay, so what do I do? I don't know. Whereas when there is a positive reinforcement, ‘ha this is worth doing’, and so you continue. You know what you want to do. Isn't it? So in practice, what do you do as a parent, as an educator? Appreciate every effort. But the appreciation need not be in words. This is where the subtlety comes. If you are not careful in your attempt to give a positive feedback, you can actually damage what is happening, because of the way we say it. So, I'll give an example here.

In our School, a child, and a teacher pat the head of the child, caresses the child and says, ‘Such a sweet child, such a sweet boy’ or a girl, ‘so disciplined, so obedient, so nice and helpful’, and the child goes mmhhmmmm, preening, and all the rest of us were not in that category, we go ‘ha fake-fake-fake’. We don't want to do that, we don't want to be like that, but we don't know ‘why’, and yet we have been, being denied that, we would also like to do that and be caressed by the teacher and say, ‘Oh you're so wonderful, I like you so much’, instead ‘this teacher is only, is only nasty to me’.

So I actually did that. It was, uh I made that mistake once. I saw this child doing something and he was bothering another child, and the teacher patted him and said ‘Oh so and so, sweet mischief’. I said, okay, so this is how it's done. So I went and did the same with the same tone and the same gesture, and the same teacher came and said ‘What is this you are so nasty, you are mischievous’. Okay, that's enough, lesson learnt. But it didn't make sense, I didn't know what was required, but the child is attempting to please, to gain something.

(1:05:03):

The moment you have warped the value of the feedback, the message is also warped.

So you have to be very careful: Do not praise goodness. Do not praise obedience. Do not give moral ‘good child versus bad child’ has no meaning. Do not praise obedience or compliance unless that is the goal.

So there is a special training programme where you have to obey, ‘now you obeyed well, okay’. In the military discipline, that would be a useful feedback, because in the military that's required. If you don't obey an order, then, well, the war is lost because of one man's stupidity or missed observation, but not in school, or at home, not in every child, so there you will not reward obedience or compliance.

This is what the cabal and deep state want to do. They want to reward obedience and compliance, which is how they want to reduce humanity to just passive subjects, robots and puppets.

But we don't want that. What is it you say? What do you do then to give that positive feedback? Always you appreciate what is intrinsic and in the evident value: Oh this is so beautiful. I like the way you have put this little thing. I like the way you put this spray of colours.

Maybe it's a picture, painting. And sometimes you don't even need to say what. You look at the picture, and [gesturing appreciation with pleasing smile] just that, you're happy to see, is the positive feedback, just the fact that you care to look at the picture and appreciate. So the child has drawn a house, family, and you say ‘Ooho’ and you hug the child looking at the picture. That's your positive feedback. You need to say nothing, you don't need to reduce it to terms. When you do that, you are warping its reality. By saying ‘this is beautiful’, that is, implied is, ‘that is not’. Okay? Or other things suddenly become unimportant.

So again depending on the age, younger ages: you say less, show in gesture, show in contact, show in happiness, by simply being present and attentive is the reward the child needs. You don't need more. As he gets older, you might highlight certain things.

Some child has written a homework, maybe there's not much you can say about it, but as you return the notebook you say, ‘You have such a beautiful handwriting’. Just that. And you'll find, next time the paper will come back with a even more beautiful handwriting. The child will be conscious while writing that ‘My handwriting is praised and valued by so and so’. That's all it needs.

And you don't need to make a drama of it by telling everyone, ‘See what a, what a beautiful handwriting’. No. Just a brief gesture, attention paid, that's good enough. So it has to be intrinsic, it has to be evident, do not reduce it to moral and mental values which would distort and warp the child's value system. The moment you say ‘Such a sweet child’, he sits obediently and does not disturb anybody, you have just encouraged him to become passive and do nothing. And the ones who are active, and they are creative, they are active because they are trying to do something, have just been demotivated or have become rebellious because they know what they have is more valuable but they cannot articulate it, so the rebellion starts.

Just appreciate each thing for what it is or just the fact that you are present is your appreciation and participation. Listen. Observe. Show care. Show interest as your best way of encouragement. You don't need words. Where necessary, you will use words, but you don't need them. I'm highlighting this, because this applies all the way through adult.

You are in a business space, you are looking after a team, there is something comes, you know the person has put a lot of hard work, they have just stayed up half the night maybe to finish their work, whatever it is, and all you need to say is: ‘Great, you just brought it in time, this is going to be so valuable, now please take rest’. Just that is enough to tell, that you care, and that you are aware that they went out of their way. The fact that you put that personal caring is the feedback that's required. You don't need to make a big deal of ‘Here's a gold medal for having stayed up half the night’. It's artificial. It's fake.

There are others who have done much more perhaps or in terms of value. Just because this fellow took a half a night and the other fellow did the same thing in two hours, are you going to not reward the fact that it was done more rapidly and more efficiently? You see, these are all fake values.

(1:10:10)

You drop them. Value the intrinsic thing. So this takes a lot of deprogramming. We are all programmed with these fake values of shields and medals and papers. So you go to, sometimes in someone's office, you see a whole hoard of papers, including their, from their school, kindergarten rewards that they might have got. Almost as if, ‘I am so great, look, how many little trinkets I have’. And I would actually think: ‘If you value that, then I have a problem valuing you, because that means you don't value the real things which I appreciate in you, or which I would appreciate in you’.

There is a disconnect somehow. Of course, when you're living in a world which values only trinkets, then you play with the trinkets, show them the trinkets were required, but move on to the real thing. So with children especially, and then with adults naturally, value or appreciate the little things. It's the encouragement in the little things which sets the stage for the big things which you then don't need to explicitly state in this way.

In fact for the children who come out with big, let's say, rewards or trinkets of this kind and if they did it easily, they get embarrassed if you say, ‘Oh you did so great’. ‘No’, they'll say, ‘it was nothing, I did nothing’. Actually in terms of effort, they did nothing. Somebody else put 10 times more effort but did not get the trinket, and they know that, they can see that, ‘I did nothing, I just put in one hour of work and I got this outcome, I was lucky perhaps or I was smarter or I worked smarter’.

The other one slogged for so many days, did so much more effort, gets nothing. So even in, when they get that trinket and if they say ‘it's nothing’, you say, ‘Well, okay, it is, you could have done perhaps more if you had put more energy’ or just keep quiet and just let it be, let them recognise their values, participate, that's all, be present, but appreciate the little things which value, which matter: ‘I am glad that you recognise those people put in more effort than you, you got it more easily, but they worked harder than you, it's okay’.

So if they are old enough, if you need a conversation about it, you can say: ‘If you put this quality of effort or effectivity for that same kind of effort that they put, you could actually do wonders, maybe’. But with children, appreciate the little things. That is the positive reinforcement which gets them going, and then the momentum built up, the big things will follow inevitably. Do not worry about big things now. Do not think: ‘How will you win a medal’ now if he does not learn to compete. Or ‘how will you win a medal later’ if he does not learn to compete now? You're going to ruin his life. And this is what most of the parents I find tending to do. There is a very simple test you can apply to know whether you did the right thing or not.

If as a result of the interaction you had, the action you did, the interaction, conversation, whatever form, I am generalising it, if as a result of what you had as an action or interaction you feel unhappy, then you did something wrong. If you tell the child ‘You have not done well in your exam, dadan-dadan-dadan’, and you feel miserable, something is wrong, you shouldn't have done that. If you criticise the child for something ‘You should have put in more effort’, but after that you feel unhappy, wrong. Very interesting.

It's a very interesting test because you are unhappy when the child has not experienced benefit or growth from that interaction. The goal of your interaction is their growth. If they don't get the growth, you have done something wrong. Use this as your reference. Maybe you don't know what to do, in which case keep quiet or articulate, if the child is old enough, articulate and say, ‘I don’t know what to do, but I really would like you to be’ whatever it is that you would like.

And then you can say, ‘Maybe you don't have that value, maybe you don't think it's important, but I think it's important and I want you to know it’, and leave it at that. Having expressed with clarity, maybe there's a pressure, maybe the child chooses to ignore that pressure, then it's fine. But the moment you have interacted to push and you come away unhappy, that push was wrong. If you made a push and you come away happy and can see the child is happy, you did right.

I'm not saying push is unnecessary, it's sometimes required, form of it, quality of it, the state of consciousness in which you push them, manner of push, how much you push, and where you stop, all these matter. And so each case would have to be seen differently.

(1:15:21):

But, if as a result of that interaction you say, ‘Ah I feel happy, I look at the child, he is content’, perfect. ‘I am miserable’, something went wrong. Child is miserable, most likely something went wrong, but sometimes it can be, he is miserable for other reasons, not because of the interaction. And so you will find, the child has benefited, you will feel good. Okay. So, and finally, it's all regarding positive reinforcement and the way to encourage and assist, finally:

If what you do does not work, if you do not see result, benefit, in terms of change in consciousness, growth of some kind, then stop doing what you are doing, it's not working, change it. So it's the same principle I would say in Yoga, when you are doing a practice which does not give you the result, you are doing something wrong or you need to change the practice or change the state of consciousness in which you do the practice, or why you do, or, etc.

But same principle would apply here. If you find scolding the child is not having the result, stop scolding. Scolding 10 times harder, 100 times harder is not working, stop it. Of course, you will instinctively go back to scolding, because you don't know any other way, you are trying to exercise a power to shape his life which he is refusing and so you get upset, that's your problem, not his problem. Isn't it?

If it's not working, do not persist in that way, find a different way, but maybe review what it is you are trying to get the child to do and what it is that the child really wants and then look more deeply along the lines we have already discussed. I have known of many cases where parents even hit the child, they got so frustrated, they spoke harsh words, denied them things, punished them in various subtle ways, sometimes in a passive aggressive way, where they will stop showing love or affection or show themselves as unhappy.

If you are feeling bad, you are, the child is feeling far worse. And if making the child feel bad is your objective, you have succeeded. But if your objective is the child to grow and you are feeling bad, you have not succeeded, something is wrong, correct it, change what you're doing. Okay, so this is as far as I will go with positive reinforcement.

The discussion won't be complete unless we touch upon negative reinforcement. I've already said, it damages growth, because the petal is forced prematurely or warped in the unfolding, out of sync, disharmony. And when you have a disharmony early on, remember that's the base on which the whole flower or tree is going to grow, the small distortion here becomes a huge distortion later on in the branches. And as you grow, the tree becomes rigid. Our body, our psychology, everything becomes rigid as we grow. Afterwards, to undo the distortion is extremely difficult. Yes, it can be done, we will be discussing that in another thing, but it will need an intervention of the Yogic principles. Left to itself, it is very difficult to undo, because that's how nature is, it becomes rigid.

So if you see, I had a creeper which is growing in the garden, it was climbing up and kept falling. So at some point there was a wire, electric wire for a bulb, for the outside door bulb which was passing by, and I put the creeper under the wire to hook it, to give it support, and I was pleased with myself. So a few weeks, a few months down, it's growing, it has become large. And then a year later, it has become so large and strong that it has forced the wire and almost torn it out.

What was needed was a different kind of intervention which would allow its freedom, but in the process of the wire being forced out, the creeper had also got slightly bent, a distortion, but the pressure of the wire against it, whatever. Little bump here at this early age will become a large bump later on. So negative reinforcement damages. Even a small damage will amplify later. They break, particularly the natural drivers of growth.

All that I have been discussing so far today are the drivers of growth. You work upon these, support these, nourish these, growth will be rapid, accelerated, healthy, complete and lifelong, at its own pace, we don't worry too much, but its own pace of accelerated growth as versus stunted growth.

(1:20:17):

But all these natural drivers of growth are damaged by negative reinforcement. And most importantly, this then points to the second part of our discussion today about the individualisation: When punished, a child withdraws, loses that instinct for the imitation to draw the best from you.

Withdraws now, and you might see a kind of an individuality, but it is an unhealthy individuality which is not drawing from the healthy sources of nourishment, it has isolated itself, and you may say, exaggerated individuality, early individuality, but not healthy, it has not learnt to absorb the things needed to make it complete.

Now left to itself, if it is not complemented by later corrections, this same individual now incomplete in so many ways, will compensate or try to compensate for that lack by exaggerated other distortions. And we see a lot of this today. It's as if almost a sudden wave of psychological sickness, insufficiency or distortion in growth of some kind is happening in the last 10 years particularly. And it's warping children's personality, and they come up as adults now with some damaged elements of insufficiency which they compensate with distortion and exaggerations in behaviour.

So, uh the unhealthy individualisation is happening, as a result of this. Dependence which pretends to be independent is the form that it takes, because it learnt quickly to separate, but is lacking, and so it's actually dependent from that lack, and yet it holds this, and then the whole chain. I'm describing this at a very essential level, the forms of it are numerous. One form, for example, might often have to do with your sense of who you are, or certain aspects of your personality or your nature. I had recently this occasion, I went to some institution, I won't name what, and somebody was sitting there, and I said: What's your designation?

And she said: I'm manager. And I was surprised, I said: Oh! Immediate response from her was: Why? Is it because of gender? So I said: No, I was surprised. Or is it because of my form? Something. She had an issue with her body. And I said: No, it's because normally the manager sits in that room where it says ‘Manager’, I didn't expect managers to be sitting here, that's why I was surprised. But immediately, instantly, you saw these two points in which the person had a huge insecurity and it had to do with her identity, gender and form, whatever it was.

But seeing that, it was also warning ‘Oops, be careful’. But you are finding this a lot today. This did not happen in the past when children were more free to grow and whatever your issues with identity, body, shape, everyone has issues one time or other, they don't become a problem, they don't remain with the completeness of individuality. Here the distortion was early on and was not, the twist was not undone, and now it's got fixed in the adult personality. You could help the person to get free if they wanted it. Uh it would take a while, because now it's almost as if it is a protective barrier and it is a hardened barrier in this case.

So, I am just giving this as an example as a outcome of negative reinforcement which delays or harms the long-term growth. So, the next phase which I wanted to focus on was this whole individualisation, and the separation, and the formation of individuality, but maybe we keep that for another time, and I will just quickly look at the chat box for any questions which are relevant to what we have just discussed.

Blue Lotus Mom is asking: “Can you explain about brain imbalances? My daughter skipped crawling, she is five years old, we were told, she is more left brain, do you have any reference?”

If she skipped crawling and learnt to walk, I don't see why that should be a problem uh as long as she has got her balance. Or rather I will say, the phase of crawling was accelerated. If you saw her crawl but she very quickly got through it where other children may take several weeks or months and she got through within a few days, but she went through the phase, I don't think it would have been skipped, it was just accelerated, I would say, that's fine, because this is now, right now a time when Nature is pushing, accelerating certain processes which are outside the, afterbirth and even pushing some of those processes back into the womb itself. I have spoken of it before, so I don't repeat.

(1:25:35):

So, Blue Lotus Mom says, “…She has her own R&D lab, she deep-dives in colours when she was four years old, now, numbers, and she, the mother doesn't know what to do with teaching her, she is self-learning her maths.”

Perfect! perfect! You have to do nothing. After today's discussion, all you need to do is just be there for her in support, in appreciation, and child should feel accepted and welcomed in her exploration and growth, whatever pace it is, form it is. As needed occasionally, you might need to help widen, but when the child is ready for that, not interrupting an actual process which is going on.

Uh so, Rahil is asking, “How to reduce the impact of vulgar and slasher kind of cinema on kids?” –Well, if we could, we would prevent them from being exposed to that kind of cinema. So just to give an example, in the Ashram School, the Mother allowed cinema to be shown, well, because it was a tool for knowledge in a way and for learning about the world, a very powerful tool. Sri Aurobindo actually states that cinema and telephone were premature in their timing as inventions. So premature in the sense that they came too soon and therefore the scope for misuse was greater. But the Mother herself would sit there and watch the films with the children, but there would be a censor board before which would go through and cut out portions which they were, which were considered inappropriate, and she had given certain guidelines.

And so, the, ideally one would select films. And second, within the films one would chop out portions which were considered having negative kind of influence or content. Today you cannot do that. You could still chop, remove certain films with whatever ratings they do, but the ratings are actually deceptive. You can watch a children's cartoon rated for the youngest child, where you will see Donald Duck for example taking a sledgehammer and beating up somebody, smashing them literally with sledgehammer. The degree of violence is extreme, is even perverse, except you are not being shown blood, it's not being splattered.

In that adult movie, the blood is splattered, that's the only difference. So actual difference is, is not so distinct in terms of the quality of consciousness. But what you could do is perhaps guide the children to refer to their deeper sensitivity. This work needs to be done soon enough. And then say: ‘You're going to see a lot of junk out there in cinema’. Explain why the junk exists, why even it's shown, why it's even allowed to be seen by children.

You can say that, ”There's no way to control, there used to be a time when cinema halls were the way to control and they saw your age and allowed, today there is no way to do that because it's online, it's digital everywhere. But you have to choose.”

And wherever you feel this discomfort, when you feel this crude, course, state it. It's best that you disconnect. Even if it's happening, you're part of a group, you disconnect and do not swallow, do not absorb. There is a very important point you have to make that: “When you are watching cinema, watch people watching cinema, they drink-in literally the vibrations of the energy that flows, the quality of consciousness, you literally drink-in, and it's a part of your psychology, you are full of it when you come out. So be very careful when you find something like that, just cut off, do not take it, do not absorb it.”

And of course there is the curiosity: ‘What's that thing that I am not supposed to look at?’ You will have to deal with that. But if that culturing has been done soon enough, then this should not be a serious issue.

Pushya's question about career: I would say go back to the earlier discussion we had about career and how to choose career, we have covered that in great detail. I won't repeat it.

But if you feel that the career you are choosing has a very low rate of success, but you feel this is what you want to do, do not worry. You are not choosing because of what you think might be success. You're choosing because you will feel deep satisfaction in doing it. Pursue that. And if you feel deep satisfaction, you will do well at it come what may. And even if you don't do well financially, you will do well in terms of what you do and you will have that joy of having done it well, which is the real reward finally. Isn't it?

(1:30:37):

Revathy is asking: “How does one learn to differentiate between being protective and overprotective? My neighbour allows her children 12 years to cross a busy street while I hesitate.”

Yes, it's a good point. The reference will be simply, you watch the children. If you feel they are hesitating, then they are not ready to do it. If you feel they are, that they want to do it, or they don't need you, they will actually say: ‘Now you can leave us, don't worry, we will take care of ourselves’. They are ready, psychologically, but not yet in experience. Then you will put them through the drill of what it is you need to do.

So I think in India you are supposed to turn left, then right, and then left again and then cross. In the United States or Europe it would be right, left, right. Because that's the incoming direction. So first you look, if there's coming, something coming, you wait. If there is nothing coming, you turn right. And if it is clear, again you look left because that is the last thing to check because by then something may have come. And then only you cross. Or in the other countries, it would be the reverse. But these basic trainings.

And initially you go with them, uh gradually you do a handover where you watch them cross, but you wait and watch, and you have, your presence so to say protective. Later when they are old enough, you even let them go on their own and in your mind you do a prayer if you feel worried, and that's all you can do. So, and so on, you will have to learn to let go. But the sign will be when the child shows eagerness to be free and to be able to do on their own, of course with the necessary handover of the protective practices, and so on. I think, we have pretty much taken the time that we had.

Okay, so just one last question from Blue Lotus Mom: “Where to draw line between toughness and sensitivities? In my daughter Shakti art classes, there are children saying bad words and her learning it, and my primary instinct is to change the class. Or face it?”

Yes, your primary instinct is also right. If you can change the class, of course you would want to do it. Where you can't change the class, then you have to train the child to avoid these. How would you make the child conscious?

So again, I assume this is the 5-year-old child learning bad words. Ideally, we would want a society which is healthy. Then this problem would not happen, because all the parents would be of a, the same grade. These children who are using bad words are obviously picking them up from their parents or from the cinema that their parents or they are watching indirectly then. It's not their own obviously, they don't come up with bad words. When they repeat the so-called ‘bad words’, they don't know it as bad words. They're only imitating what their adults are doing. It's not their fault. Isn't it?

For you, it's a bad word, for them, it's what the adults do. Isn't it? So, first of all, you don't chastise them in, to make them feel guilty. You just explain to them: ‘Look this word is actually used in those circumstances which are extremely crude, coarse, and they are used by people who are of a very ordinary, vulgar or sub-ordinary kind. We, our attempt is to refine ourselves and grow into something more healthy, more beautiful, and for a beautiful flower this kind of filth does not fit.’

That's what you'll explain. No blame. No criticism. No shouting, scolding. Explaining. Because it was not their fault. Show the level, grade of consciousness, the meaning that it has, and the way it would, it's crude and coarse and ugly, and it's not worthy of us. If you have already cultured the child for sensitivities from before, this will be easy to do.

If you have not, then you will have a tough time there, but you just start from where you are. Explaining. Understanding. And then: ‘You will hear those words but we don't use them because of what they represent. We want to grow into more beautiful vocabulary.’ And give them a vocabulary then. Now here is the problem: The other side uses a word, what do you do? You have no words to speak back. Give them a vocabulary, what can you say in such a situation where you want to say it? And then it works. Isn't it?

(1:35:26):

So, Shalu is asking about whether there are workshops for parents.

I used to do those in the past, and I don't think now I have the time, but what I will be doing in the next few months, I intend to put up some of the video recordings from those workshops which I had done in the past. They are somewhat old, they are limited to that context but I think, they catch, they cover all the principles and with good examples.

And then there was a book which was derived from which I am currently revising, so eventually that book will also come. But that's about all I can say for now. So that's enough for today.

We will, there are a few questions which have been pending which we will take up next time. There was also some comment from last time's viewer-comments that enough of the education and parenting. So I will probably shift the title but we will continue on the theme of education and take a different aspect of the education over the next few sessions. In particular, there are three things pending:

One is the question regarding the damage and how we can correct it in adult life.
The other was the distinction between the girls and boys and men and women in their patterns of growth and learning and what way we can complement and assist this.
And the third had to do with individualisation.

So I will see how I sequence these, but we will cover all three, hopefully in the next few sessions. I think we can take a moment now to centre ourselves. Keep in mind in a quick summary that:

The prime drivers to all growth, including us as adults: is Nature from outside which has already put certain instincts within us and then working from outside to awaken and guide those instincts like the flowering and the petals and layers of petals; and then from within, from the centre of the flower which is the Psychic being, backed by the Self which is the source of all knowledge and which is the centre of the harmony of the flower. And so the more we are able to align ourselves to this centre, the more its influence can bring back harmony, awaken harmony, set in realignment that which has gone out of alignment, and even draw out, reveal, reflect, all the knowledge and all the right impulse, inspiration and impulsions of a higher intuition with which we can act, replacing the instinct which was nature's base to begin with. And so such would be the shift we will make in our journey in life as we grow older. We can take a moment in concentration in this aspiration.

Namaste.

Alina (1:38:55):
Namaste.