EWS #166 Introducing Spirituality to Children + Q&A

June 17, 2023

Alina (0:00:31):
Namaste. Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste.

Sraddhalu (0:00:42):

Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.

Alina (0:00:45):

Today you have a special session and we will be “Introducing Spirituality to Children”. As usual you may ask your questions during our conversation directly on our YouTube channel in the chat box or you may send beforehand your questions at our email ID: integralstudies.in[at]gmail.com.

We will go through some questions that we received already. Revati: “I seriously started turning towards the Divine a little late in my life. It's deeply nourishing. When should I introduce to my child the inner cultivation of practices like meditation?”

Sraddhalu (0:01:44):
Yes, this is such an important question that we have been waiting for many weeks to take it up as an overall theme itself for discussion. I have already in the past in response to a question of why so much time for children's education, I had already given a response there, highlighting the importance of children and their education as literally defining the future humanity.

It's the reason why when the circumstances came up in this way, the Mother started the School at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and her attempt was as if to try to raise the new humanity, cut-off from the old world, entirely based on the new values of a new consciousness, within the environs of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram itself, where not only that consciousness was being built up with an intensity, but there was a community living or at least trying to live by those values. But having already discussed those things I won't repeat. I will share rather a more personal angle, a selfish interest so to say, that I would have for highlighting, especially here the introduction of spirituality, meditation, and other practices to children, because as I have repeated many times, the world circumstances today are very different and some of it will get worse for a while at least before it gets better.

But within these circumstances which are almost entirely inimical to an awakening of a healthy spirituality what can one do? And to invest time, energy and resources in this, there is a specific purpose which is also selfish, that is, I would put it this way and it should apply to all of us: When you come back in a new body, after having shed this one, whenever that is, what would you like as the circumstances, as the culturing, as the spiritual nourishment, that you would need in order that having physically forgotten everything, you could recover as much as possible of all that you have gained in this lifetime, not necessarily a physical memory but in terms of values, in terms of culture, in terms of knowledge, experience, as a living experience? What would you like to have when you come back in a new body in a very different world?

And, thinking of what you would like, what advice would you leave to the parents who will give birth to you or who will raise you and the people around you? In what way would you like to be helped? So I am placing this in a very selfish context, for each one of us equally selfish perhaps! To that extent it becomes then collectively selfish, and therefore selfless! But think in these terms. The idea being, if all of society is largely hostile to the spirituality, what is it you would require so that your spirituality could be awakened, nourished, protected, and allowed to flower in a healthy way? Think in these terms and then see what you can transmit. So I am putting the importance of this question in such a context.

(0:05:36):

So Revati says, she has started turning towards the Divine a little late in life. But I would also point out something important: The turning in a conscious way was perhaps late, but an innate sensitivity was already present.

What is it that prevented that innate sensitivity to flower out sooner? Observe: what were the hurdles, what were the distractions, what were the, even hostile influences, and what were the elements of confusion.

Sometimes the element of confusion or even a reaction towards spirituality comes from something that is attempted to be taught perhaps with good interest, with positive interest, intent, but which provokes a reaction, either in the way it is taught or in the content of what is taught. So a lot of people, for example, have a strong reaction to the religious indoctrination of God and especially when parents try to use the concept of God as a way to manipulate children with reward, punishment, or some such combination, and it creates immediately a strong reaction. Although the content of it may have also positive elements, but this manipulation is what you are reacting to, and in the process you may want to have ‘nothing to do with all that’.

You know that's the reaction which often causes great delay. So observe. Look back. Because you could not have this turning even though you call it ‘late in life’, you could not have this as smoothly or joyously as you have it now if you did not already have some sensitivity in the past. And so what prevented? What blocked? What distracted? Etc. Or, distorted? Observe that. Make sure you do not repeat those things, at least with your children.

Now what those are, each one of us will have our own very interesting stories, some of these we will briefly touch upon in soon to be next session where we will discuss healing from a damaging education. But for now, having looked at that of what not to do, observe: What are the things which nourished you? What drew you? What made you feel that the spiritual contact was worthwhile? What, what you have described as “deeply nourishing”, observe the essence of that, not the form of it.

For example, it may happen to somebody, let's take Sri Aurobindo's example, his formal turning to spirituality was when he was fighting for India's freedom, and then there was an uncle who was sick with high fever, there is this mendicant who comes to their house asking for alms, and when he hears that there is someone who is sick, he says, ‘Bring me a glass of water’, repeats a mantra, does a ‘cross’ over it with a knife, gives it to them and says, ‘Make him drink it’, and on drinking it, this man is cured. So Sri Aurobindo's first thought, “Aaha, if I can get that kind of a power to use for India's freedom that would be worthwhile, so let me see what practices can I do’, and he starts with pranayam and other things.

So now you will not say, ‘Okay, because it worked for him‘ or ‘Because such a thing happened to me’, uh, well, it was, I think, Amal Kiran, he bought a pair of shoes, and in the newspaper that wrapped the shoes, there was this article about Sri Aurobindo. It does not mean, I'll make my child go and buy a pair of shoes and open the newspaper and pushing it to the ridiculous extreme to prove a point. It's not that. It is the fact that you touched something, which awakened, which had a deep resonance. And so observe. And then you notice, you have a certain temperament, your child may be similar or may be different. Observe what to his or her temperament would resonate, would provoke that kind of a vivid, deeply nourishing contact. At first simply observe, and then certain things will begin to fall into place. As a parent you have this intuition, that instinct, which is Nature's gift in which certain things will begin to be obvious, ‘Ah this way, not that way’, and you will be guided.

(0:10:00):

So this being a broad framework of how you would go, you would proceed, I will now go to specifics of what I might describe in a more structured way. But take it in the spirit of, let us say, ‘indicative guidelines’ and see how you have to adapt it to the context that is applicable to you. So first of all, already by this time, your child, Revati's child, will be of a certain age, so rather than addressing that specific age, I will cover a kind of a sweep of various age-groups and various types, again as indicative only.

So according to the age, you will address differently, even if the goal was to have them experience a touch of something deeper or to understand some deeper concepts, the way you would approach it to a 5-year old, to a 12-year old, to an 18-year old would be very different. And innately you must recognise, whatever you do, ultimately it's not what you say, maybe how you say it is more important, but even that is not it; it is the resonance you will provoke with the soul's aspiration and its values. Irrespective of what you do, if you can tap into that, get that resonating, the inner being turns, with this joyous flowering of its aspiration, and it ripples through all the layers of the personality, compelling the rest of it. Even where the inner being is half asleep, just that stirring is enough to create the ripples.

Your greatest strength, your greatest power in convincing, in awakening, in nurturing, nourishing, is this focal point, the soul, the soul's aspiration, within the child. Now what in you will provoke the deepest resonance? Your soul's aspiration. So if you really want to transmit, if you really want to help the child, you will begin with first centering yourself in your soul's aspiration as deeply as you can.

I remember, sometime it was regarding somebody, there was some conflict, and there was somebody that this person respected very highly with a spiritual respect, and a friend of mine said, ‘Oh, tell that person that if they continue like this you will report them to’ ex-spiritual person that they respected. And my first reaction was ‘Never’! I would never do something which would bring-in a sense of fear or hesitation in meeting someone or something that they respect spiritually. Never. Because that would be a, like putting poison in a stream of purity. So you have to be very careful there. Do not ever allow this kind of a manipulation. It will not happen if you're centred within in your soul's aspiration, but there will always be that tendency.

You've tried to get your child to do something which you think is good, ‘Finish your homework’ or whatever, ‘Sleep early’, ‘Be nice’, and the child refuses for whatever reason.

In frustration you will say, ‘Oh, but’, and then depending on the background of the religious or other traditions, you may say, ‘God is watching’, or ‘You will have to pay the consequences’, or, immediately you have brought-in either a fear, threat, a reward, desire, values which are fundamentally contrary to the soul values. And if you have done that once, you can be sure it has had the effect of creating some reaction. Hopefully, if you have done it as a mistake, you correct for it, you move on, and it will be fade into the past. But if you are conscious, you will never allow such a thing to happen. This is extremely important. Even if in your family tradition, these ideas are common, you must make sure, this is never allowed to poison. The relationship that the child will have with everything that represents the Divine, the soul, and the deeper and higher spiritual values, and especially with you.

If you are going to help them to awaken to that, as long as it is within that domain of interaction, you will never exercise any kind of manipulative use of power or domination, you will be a soul in evolution with another soul in evolution, the difference is only of the external personality and age, you will be equally children of the Divine Mother as long as you are at least in that interaction.

(0:15:05):

Now this makes the interaction a bit complicated for a parent because you often have to play multiple roles, and so it is helpful if between two parents you so to say switch those roles or during that interaction at least eliminate all the other kinds of interaction, other kinds of roles. So that's why I said, start by centreing yourself as deeply as you can and then engage with whatever it is your interaction will be.

Second, although I said, according to the age you will approach differently, you will find occasionally some children are far more mature than their biological age. So their psychological age may be much more or sometimes less, but they may also have a spiritual dimension which will be far more mature, which is quite interesting, and often the two tend to be connected. When the spiritual dimension is much more mature, the personality also tends to reflect that maturity. And sometimes we see children even in 5-, 10-years old and there is this depth in the personality and you can see ‘Ha, this is a very mature soul’.

Sometimes it comes out in unusual words, in unusual behaviour, or some kind of a deep sense of equality, they are not flustered easily, or they are equal with everyone and everything, always looking at something deeper, more positive, less selfish-perspective, many variations to it. So, notice particularly this aspect of the inner maturity and what I would call ‘the soul’s readiness’. So, in rare cases, the soul may also choose, ‘I don't want to get into this too soon’, or ‘I want to finish something else and then I will commit to this’.

I'll give an example which I came across recently. This is somebody, and I spoke to him of it recently, so I can also share this more freely; I came in touch with somebody who grew up very close to the Ashram but in a family which was not connected with the Ashram. And, then he said, at the age of 12, he saw in his grandfather's cupboard books of Sri Aurobindo and among them The Life Divine. He looked at that and he said to himself, ‘This I will study when I am 50 years old’ and then he put it away. He went through the whole journey of life. Somehow circumstances pulled him back to this, to back to his home. He wandered all over the world. He was pulled back. And at the age of 50, something woke up and he took these books and started reading and said, ‘Wow, this is so fascinating’.

I said to him, my view, that he was actually a, in the Ashram, in the previous incarnation, took birth in that family because the physical proximity to the space and the  influence, but the inner being chose, the soul chose, that it wanted to develop certain aspects of its outer personality. And although the spiritual turn was always there, throughout the life, its overt form in terms of a deeper commitment, consciously pursued with an exclusive focus, was kept for later, by choice. And yet, that initial, let's say, moulding or influence of the spiritual values would stay, irrespective of whether it involves a total commitment of some kind or not.

So, this is the part where I say: Observe the soul's readiness. Necessarily, every child, and that would include all of us when we reincarnate, would want to use that period of growth also to develop all these other faculties and layers of personality, particularly layers which we could not develop in this life. It's essential, it's part of the whole point of reincarnation. But the idea is, you don't want to lose this [gesturing heart] centre of aspiration and you want all that development to be, so to say, centred around this spiritual opening and aspiration.

So, still the priority externally may seem to be as if more important while this is still there. So, don't be disappointed if as a parent you find your child respecting, even engaging with the spiritual dimension, but wanting to engage with other things with, let's say, greater enthusiasm. If that's happening, either it's soul's choice or you're doing a bad job about introducing the spirituality. You'll have to see which one it is, and maybe a combination of both.

So observe also the distractions which are pulling the child from the external education, as well as the surrounding life, and media, and so on. And you must watch carefully. Where necessary, counter it. For example, if you see a value coming in from outside which is contrary and the child is of course swallowing it unconsciously, you have to say, ‘Look at this, that's what they say, but it's not like that, this is how it is’, you must correct it. And the child will sense if what you say is more true, they'll sense, ‘Ah-yes, okay, that’s, that makes sense, that's right, I understand now’. But then, why are they saying that? And you may have a discussion or not.

(0:20:29):

I remember, at the age when we were about 20, at the Ashram School, for some reason the teacher had put up a cinema on the video screen. We were watching an American movie where there is this famous actor Sidney Poitier that time who is speaking to his father who has, who was a postman, and the father said, ‘I spent all my years while raising you, walking for hundreds of miles, working hard to earn money to give you the best education that I could afford, you owe me this much at least’. That was the father's claim. And the son now, a young adult, tells the father, ‘Well, since you brought me into this world, it was your duty to do all that you did and I owe you nothing’. And the film message and the director's message was backing this position.

And as we were watching, there were 21 of us, as we were watching this, the moment this scene, this statement was said, I cut-away. It felt like a falsehood, instinctively I cut-away, ‘No, I am not going to swallow this’, and cut-off from identification. And I looked at everyone else, the entire class with the exception of one boy, entire class was glued, just drinking, swallowing blindly, unconsciously. There was only one boy who was shaking his head, disagreeing, but still hypnotised.

I am giving this as an example, it's an old example, but this is just one tiny bit compared to all the junk that's coming in today. Almost everything shown in cinema today is highly commercialised for the maximisation of the vital-grip to excite, to shake and move passions, and to drag you into whatever world it is required that they want you to be bound-in, as a consumer, as a puppet to the larger machinery. You have to speak.

And observe these distractions and speak, describe, and say, ‘These are our values’. All this is still preliminary to the real spiritual thing. When you choose a school, observe the environment and the atmosphere. That is far more important than the, the standards of academic education. You can have the highest academic education with the poorest, grossest, crudest, values or environment, and often this is the case with some of the elite institutions.

The reference for you will be: As you walk into the school space, as you interact with the teachers, as you observe the children and their interaction with the teachers, would you love to be there?

If you do, that would match the values that you want to communicate for your children. If being there you feel, ‘No, this is something not quite comfortable’. or ‘It's not the way I want to grow, these are not the values’, don't put your child there even if you are tempted, ‘Ha, this is a famous school, it's an expensive school, it's renowned, it will give higher marks, it will have higher pass percentage, you get better job opportunities’. Your child will get all that if the base is strong, the rest will follow inevitably.

But if your base has been compromised, you may get a high-paying job, but you will be miserable, and you will have lost your direction. So the question really coming primarily for this purpose that you want to inculcate and transmit the spiritual values. Do not compromise there. It's better your child grows up in, especially in the early years, in a safe, spiritually nourishing atmosphere, and then later once the formation is complete, you can enter any domain including a hostile domain and you will manage your way without getting swayed.

If that initial individualisation phase has been done in a healthy environment, and the individualisation healthy enough. So this should be our immediate goal. Then do not compromise on the school, education, environment, and atmosphere particularly, and the teachers, the quality of teachers. If you have a choice, go for a Montessori School generally, for the simple reason that it will allow this individualisation in a healthy space in a healthy way.

Now all that being said about external things, what do we do at home? Catch particularly the early formative years when the child instinctively turns to you and wants to absorb your example, when anything you say will be accepted with full obedience, with full trust, those years, whatever number of years they are, depending on variations of maturity, all children anyway, even those who are very highly individualised and mature, will still have this tendency to open to you with trust, and if you have maintained that relationship of trust, you can do a lot simply by saying it, showing it, or sharing your experiences. Use that chance. Build that relationship. Deepen it.

(0:25:51)

Do not make the mistake of assuming that all the values will come in school. No, they won't. You will have to give that time, and ideally both parents, but even if one does, that's good enough to begin with. Then, as we interact, observe carefully the temperament of the child, and then learn to adjust in your content, in your interaction to that. Now in these guidelines, I have summarised a lot of the content we have discussed in going back 10 or 15 sessions where we have discussed education, early years, raising, etc. But all this is a quick summary.

Now, three things we will discuss: methods by which you will transmit those values, what are the perspectives you will transmit, and third will be what practices.

Now the tendency for most people will be to go straight to the practices: ‘Okay, breathe like this’, ‘Concentrate like this’, ‘Do this or that’, ‘Repeat that mantra’. That's not going to work. If it does work, it's uh, fortuitous, but it's not the best way. The most important thing you must recognise is: the mechanism of transmission, and the values you transmit, and upon that the practices would have meaning.

For example, you make them repeat a mantra, ‘Do this prayer every day’, they will do it, because somewhere inside there is this idea, ‘Oh-yes, this is’, they sense intuitively, ‘Ha, this will be good for me’. And every child has this feeling that ‘There are, there is some power behind the scenes and if I can feel something good doing this, perhaps it will give me the good luck that I need’. But implicit in all this will be, ‘I do this for the benefit that I get’. You have missed a major part of the spiritual education which is why you are doing it.

So let's look at these things in sequence of priority first: What are the methods you will use for transmitting? And based on age. And based on maturity. One of the most powerful will be narration of stories: Stories from the Mahabharata, stories of heroism, idealism, selflessness, soul values, stories of growth, self-control, self-mastery: in all these, the child spontaneously, instinctively, turns to the highest values and identifies with it, especially if those are the values of the hero or heroine, the protagonist of the story. So, if you don't find good stories, make up your own story. Sometimes when the child is very small, you can give the protagonist the name of your child. So, you name your child as the hero, and this child now going and doing this, which helps for the identification enormously. And you describe the passages of danger, and how he holds courage, calls for the Divine helps, makes a prayer, and becomes selfless in his effort, and so on.

By describing those qualities, your, the child is experiencing them as evoked by identifying in, with the character. So something which will never happen in physical life, where you enter a danger zone, you enter a dark forest, someone is in danger, you want to help, you are afraid, you overcome your fear, you pray, you ask for help, if your value at that point is to transmit a mantra which is a mantra of protection, of strength, of courage, well, then your protagonist now repeats that mantra or calls this name, whatever it is, and all this will be just soaked in.

Always it should point to some higher value, something ideal, and that will be the reference for the rest of the child's life. Be very careful about the importance of this. The child is young, maybe 3-, 4-years old, but it is at these ages when the child soul identifies with this ideal and catches it, and it stays for life. In fact what happens generally is the soul's ideal, what the soul aspires for, when those things come up, the child, the soul resonates, and it comes forward and imprints itself in the surface personality.

(0:30:20):

You may say ‘Ha, because I heard the story, I caught the ideal’. Actually, because the ideal was seated within, it came forward to catch an imprint in the personality. So, I have already discussed the method of narration for immersion. I won't repeat. You have to be the example as far as possible for whatever you want the child to be able to do but starting with example of yourself, you show better examples from history or ideal examples from history, mythology, or imagination; it doesn't matter. But the example is one of the most powerful means the child will say, ‘Ah-yes, like that’. And then, you will use methods of interaction. As the child grows older, you will interact, you will do things together. Let's say, you do asanas, you do exercises together, the child sees you doing everyday a pranayama or Surya Namaskar, and instinctively the child will want to do with you. Let them.

And then you show them how to do it correctly. Teach them, ‘Ha, while you do this movement, you breathe-in, while you do that you breathe-out’. Maybe they have already observed, now you make it more explicit and tell them the benefits of this: ‘As you breathe-in, when you bend forward in the Surya Namaskar, you feel the pressure here, you feel the stretch there and observe what it does, it squeezes these organs, it makes this part of the body stronger, it improves your health in that way.’

So by starting with you as an example which the child wants to imitate, you have a possibility of enormous, communication of content. But these are real-life interactions, real-life experiences, upon which you can build a lot. When you have discussions, touch the emotions depending on age, touch the inspiration and intuition, and that can go quite at a young age also, and make it more rational as they grow older. So it demands of course a lot on your part. Where you don't have an answer, which will be often the case for certain very complex questions the child may ask, you say: ‘Good question, I'm not sure how to answer that although I know what's right, but I need to give you an answer that will be for you  rational, and so let's see if we can figure out together.’

So either you go through a discussion process or you say, ‘Let's ask X’ or ‘Let's look up Y’, ‘textbook’, ‘video’, whatever it is, but the goal is to work together to find an answer where you don't have it yourself. You don't have to be a know-all. You just have to feel what's right and say, ‘Look, to me instinctively, intuitively, this thing feels right, but I can't quite articulate in a logical way, let's see how we could justify it’, and maybe have the child find his own justification. So you will have those rational discussions also. You will use media, such as books, discussions, lectures, videos, workshops, interactive, etc., depending on age groups.

Now all these I have put in a very different category. And I put a very different category for comics, cinema, and soon we will have 3D immersive goggles and other technologies, those I put in a different class and I would say, ‘Minimise the use of that’. I'll explain why. When I narrate a story, either reading from a book or narrating, the child's mind is creating his own visuals. When we have a discussion, the child has to think, interact, etc., even in a lecture. But the moment you go into comics, cinema, or 3D immersive, the images are given to you with their associated vibrations.

Why is this important? Because it's not so much the picture, it's the vibration behind which is going to, which you are going to catch and be hooked to. Now, very topically just now there is a cinema which has just been released in India which is a remake of the Ramayana. There is a very strong power of the Bollywood industry which wants to ram it down and make it profitable. And in fact they took up the Ramayan because they just found that, that was one theme which would probably make it successful. But the actors, the directors, the team behind it comes with a value system which is quite perverted. And so in the characters of Ramayana, they are not even conscious how they have perverted it, the characters are warped. So Rama becomes like a comic superhero, all-powerful, all-strong. Hanuman becomes, talks in a loose, street language, smarty, smart language, rude, crude. Whereas the essence of the Rama, Hanuman, or other beings in the story, is of certain values of refinement of culture:  Rama is the ideal man, literally that he represents the type, he builds the type of an age,—he is not a comic book superhero with strong muscles,—it is the values by which he lives, to speak the truth, to do what is right, to be selfless in the right action. Hanuman is the epitome of the devotion and love in the heart. He is not a street thug who talks like a street thug. So you've taken the forms, but the content which is the underlying message is totally false.

(0:35:52):

Now it will be interesting to see how the audience responds to this in spite of the pressure of the media to pump-up this movie as a success. I suspect, it will fail, or they may hype-up some of the numbers, but I don't think it will last long because of this disconnect. If it does become successful, I will say ‘Oh, it's a sad day because people have missed the point’. I'm giving this specifically as an example, because when you look at comics, and cinema, and, or 3D immersive, what will happen is the content of the vibration behind is what will be absorbed and will remain,—not the names, not the figures, those are stories,—it's a vibration coming through.

And so when you narrate, you are transmitting a vibration or the child in his creative world fills it with the vibration that corresponds to his aspiration. So even though you are narrating a story, the images I create are what I need. So I am putting books, discussions, lectures, videos, workshops, in a different category from comics, cinema, 3D immersive, etc., those have value, they are very important, they are very useful when you want to show real life. You want to show them something in a different part of the world, a particular ecosystem of nature, certain animals, that's perfect. But when you want to touch higher ideals or deeper truths, and especially for spiritual teaching, mmhhm, you may have to be extremely careful. Even if somebody did it with a spiritual vibration, it will still not be your soul's aspiration, which might need something more deep, it may fall short somewhere.

So, observe, use rightly the tools and the media suitably. Now, having said this, what is it that we want to transmit? There again I am going to lay a broad foundation describing the values.

Primarily, the spiritual values or spiritual perspectives of life that you want to convey.I am making a list which to me feels important, but you may have your own variations to the list. Certain perspectives literally change the whole sense of life.

The Mother narrates how in the, in Europe when she grew up, the idea of the Divine within was something totally new, it was radical. And so when someone said, ‘Oh, the Divine is within you’, she said, ‘Oh, my God, I never thought of that and let me find it’. And of course she did find it within, I don't know, it took her a year or something. But she was telling this to the children in the playground, that: When I was told that there is this secret to be found within me, it was something so thrilling! I could not stop till I had found it. And she said: But what is it that you are looking for? What is it, how is it you don't have that kind of interest or curiosity to find, to know?

She was disappointed with that, but that's the inertia she had to deal with. But there are certain seed-ideas like this which may not be present in the society in which you grew up, or they may be, but still you may want to convey them explicitly and with clarity. So, what are some of these? And I am going to make a list of what I consider important. All of these can be introduced at a very early age, literally from the point the child is able to communicate with you, but you will do it in different ways at different ages: more rationally when the reason pops up; more emotionally or intuitively when it is the heart opening, not yet for, the reason is not yet formed; or, at a still earlier level in the identity that you feel with the child or the child feels with you, you speak, and the words don't matter so much, but what is put behind the words is felt, and caught immediately.

So, first, most important idea that the Divine is within you And then that the Divine is also above you in a vast embrace of the whole universe. And third, the Divine is everywhere in the universe as a Presence, conscious. These three things in that order for me would be most important, and this can be said in these so many words.

(0:40:26):

You say, ‘God’, maybe the idea because God will correspond with a lot of religious connotations, so you may use a vocabulary, or in your own native language you may say ‘Bhagawan’, whatever form it is, but make this idea always the basis for everything else, whether you repeat this multiple times or not, in your mind at least it will be your reference for everything else.

Next, the recognition that you chose to take birth,—it's not an accident,—that you are growing, you as a soul are growing across lives in an evolution. You have worked for many-many lives before to come to this point, and this life is extremely important, and after this you will continue the work of your growth. What is that growth? What is that purpose in this life? That you will know, you already know deep inside. So critical idea: You are not here by chance! Life is not by chance! You are not born by chance! You didn't come to us as parents by chance.

You see in the west, that's something for me which was always very traumatic as a child to be.. when I heard that in the west, they said this: The child asks the parents, ‘Where did I come from?’, and the parents say, ‘The stork brought you’. And this is traumatic to a child. Because that ‘Stork flying’, and they have a picture carrying the baby in this cloth bag, ‘could have dropped me into any house, I might have been in the neighbor's house or in those, those parents, oh, my god It's traumatic, and I'm here by chance, are these really the parents I want?’.

Not very helpful! But if you say ‘We prayed, we prayed for a child who will be the most wonderful, who will love the Divine, who will serve humanity, who will do something beautiful, who will grow to fulfill whatever he chooses, she chooses to be the best of her aspiration’, whatever it is, ‘we chose, we prayed for a special soul, and you came to us’ or ‘the Divine gave you to us’, that builds the spiritual bond with the child. And if you say this early enough when the child is really small, it seals that spiritual relationship. If you have not had a chance to say it yet, well do say it whenever they are older, when you get the right chance, and there will be occasions where you will have a closer, more personal time.

And if you don't have that happening, well, make for that time. You have to cut time out from your busy schedule and their busy schedule to be alone together where there is no cell phone and no television and nothing to distract. And if that does not happen, create an opportunity like this: ‘So this evening, this weekend, all of us will be together’, ‘It's your birthday’, ‘It's your birthday eve’, whatever occasion, or, ‘it’s this special sacred’, uh, mmhm, ‘sacred day’, ‘and so today we will do justice, we will be together, we will share something deep, personal’.

And you start by telling the child, now he is older, you say, ‘We have never told you this, but this is how it is, this is how we felt, and this is how you are, you are very precious to us, and say it, say it in so many words, build this as your spiritual bond. And in that sense you can even, again as they are older, you can explicitly state ‘We are equally children of the Divine Mother, you are our child, you are our gift from the Divine Mother, and we will grow with you, you will grow with us, maybe we have advantages in some other areas, there are other areas where you will teach us’. But make your relationship with the children on this basis. So, ‘You are not here by chance, the stork didn't bring you, the Divine gave you to us because we aspired, we called, we asked for you’ or ‘someone like you’, okay? ‘and therefore your life has a purpose, and what that purpose is in this incarnation you chose to take birth, you came to us because you felt something special here and that's the line in which you have to grow, everything else will be around this, this will be the centre of it’. Say it in so many words.

Next, because the children now having this [gesturing psychic] aspiration, being conscious of this, they still feel pulls and pushes. You make them conscious, ‘We are made of all this machinery, all these layers’, depending on the age, you will talk about your three layers, ‘kosha’, as we say in the yoga, the body, physical body, vital body, mental body, and explain how these things work and each of these layers has its own tendencies and each has its own strengths and limitations.

(0:45:20):

Observe what you find is not so developed, work to develop it. When you see somebody else able to do something better, you say: ‘Wow, what can I learn from that Can I also do that?’ Not necessarily exactly the same way but at least grow in that direction. And so then the whole point of this life, and especially of this early stage of your life, is: to learn, to grow to evolve, with every opportunity that comes your way. And so this is a very powerful message. There is nothing that you cannot use as an opportunity to somehow learn or grow in some way. And the distinction between growth and evolution you see: in growth, ok, you developed the skill, the capacity, you grew; but in evolution you actually shift in grade, in quality of consciousness. So all of these things can be, should be said explicitly.

Vocabulary will vary according to age. And I don't think it's very difficult even to say at a very young age of 6, 7, 8, that you see how the difference of grade of consciousness between, let's say, animals that they know, dogs, and us, you see they have all the feelings we have, they even sense and know, but they cannot speak like us, they cannot irrationally think out, there is an instinctive reason but they cannot irrationally think out the way we play with logic. You see this gap. That's the only thing which differs. Ok. All the rest, they have the same complex emotions in fact, they suffer the same ways as us.

And from this there is a higher grade to come where even your capacity to know and the consciousness in which you will live will be of a still higher grade. As the human is to the animal, so will be the divine-being to the human as a next step of evolution, and we are here for this! Say it. What that means, how they understand, doesn't matter. According to the age, according to the readiness of the mind, they will understand it the way it makes sense. As they grow older, that understanding will be revised, as it happened for all of us. Isn't it? So, but say it.

You must give life a clear sense of higher, deeper, long-term purpose as a continuity of prior lives and into next lives, and they must know that we are all in the same game, so: ‘You are younger than me, I am your parent, but I am in the same game, I am going through the same issues, I have different problems, but the same growth, the same purpose of growth.’ So knowing that there are multiple parts in us, we understand that these parts need to be developed, they need to be integrated and aligned around who we truly are deep within.

Again this needs to be said. ‘Who you are’ is none of these things. Your thoughts, your emotions, your body, your name, your family lineage, all that is acquired. It's not you. What you are is deep within as the centre around which all this falls into place and makes sense. You forget the centre, all these fall apart and get into conflict. Say it. Explain it. And if you can also relate it to an experience, point out, ‘See in this state, we are much more close to our centre; in that state, when we are upset, when we are agitated, when we say things that we regret later, we have lost our centre’.

Make them notice. ‘Observe, how centred are you, can you come back to your centre, centre yourself more deeply and then we will speak.’ When you are upset, you say, ‘I'm sorry I went off-centre, let me become quiet, let me centre myself’, and you say ‘Okay, now I'm better, let's discuss it’. So you cannot be teaching something which you're not yourself practicing, obviously, especially in spiritual matters, information is irrelevant here, experience is what we're looking for.

Now all this being like a base in terms of values that you want to communicate. There's still a couple more that I will come to. Within these are values which are closer to the moral, ethical, etc. Now I won't dismiss these, morality and ethics, yes, they are all very important, but in the spiritual context they acquire a different higher grade of sense. And so I am going to touch upon some of these, what kinds of values. And you will see, it’s not about ‘Do good because you will get rewarded’ or ‘Because it’s good and that is bad’.

(0:50:06):

I am going to something more deep. So I’ll, I made a list of some of the values which I would consider to be of great importance, for example.  And again you may make your own priorities: follow the temperament of the family, the values, the lineage, the context, the culture, the national-soul, child aspiration, whatever it is, we have discussed all that.

So one is: Recognise that consciousness is everywhere, everything is conscious. Just because it can't express itself the way we can does not mean it's not conscious. So the example is: When a child, when someone, you are asleep, or when I am asleep, and you talk to me, I don’t, I can’t speak back, I may not even remember what you said to me when I wake up, and yet somewhere inside everything you say is being registered and somewhere inside something feels hurt if you say something that will hurt, but in my surface awareness when I wake up I don't have the memory of it but I will have the hurt which I don't remember but which is there as a pain.

And so it is with inanimate objects. They cannot move, the consciousness is asleep, but it is hurt. And it responds in ways which are not always obvious to us. So if you love this machine, you take care of it. In this case it could be your mobile phone, it could be a little gadget, it could be a little mixie in the house, it could be a paperweight, it could be a pen, you care for it, you love it, you treat it with respect, it responds, it will last longer, it will not break down, it will give you good service, etc. But if you disrespect it, it feels hurt, and it doesn't know why, and at some point that hurt breaks it, the way if you keep abusing me, if someone keeps abusing me, at some point it will break something and I say, ‘No, no more, I don't want to have anything to do with this person’, and I stop functioning, I stop cooperating. Well, that happens to inanimate objects because everywhere there is consciousness.

And then in plants that consciousness is more expressive, so the plants will grow more healthy or less healthy, depending on how you relate to them. They can't speak, they don't have vocal cords, but they do feel intensely, and intensely they feel love and joy, and they want to give you, they want to nourish you and help you. Make them, make the children conscious of this. So you don't pluck a leaf at night because the plant is sleeping! You don't pluck just uselessly because the plant is, that's, that’s its nourishment, the leaf! But also it's giving you the leaf as a medicinal value. So if you have to take the leaf, you tell the plant, ‘With your permission, may I please take this leaf for this purpose?’, whatever it is you are going to do, and the plant will happily give because the plant genuinely feels care and love for you, and if it's for medicinal purpose, it will amplify the effect of the medicine, even that you take.

So you have to bring this awareness, everything is conscious.

And then animals who are more conscious and with them they have complex emotions, they feel enormous pain far more intensely than us of abandonment, of neglect, of insult, of.., and they go into deep depression, some of them can just die, like dolphins can die of depression if you don't give them love, if you scold them, and so you make them conscious that they feel, just because they can't speak does not mean they don't feel, and so everyone, everywhere, everything underlying is conscious, never disrespect, hurt, or abuse! And if you do, you say, ‘I'm sorry!’.

So in the Indian tradition, for example, at least in the slightly earlier phase, if you hurt somebody, if you kicked somebody by mistake, your foot hit even a rock, you would say ‘Sorry!’. And you still find some of the older people, they will bend down and do a pranam and say ‘I'm sorry, I didn't intend to’. So somewhere this thing has to become immanent in your consciousness in every activity that everything is conscious. It's not difficult, you start early. But the problem is many of us as parents don't have it because that was not transmitted, we lost it somewhere along the way. Well, start, living it, and transmitting these.

Next, you make effort when interacting with others: to understand their viewpoint, to understand how much effort went into it. So when my teacher shared this, M.P. Pandit, he shared this that when he was asked to write a review for a book, he wrote something which was critical, and his teacher Kapali Sastriar said, “Don't do that, you are not conscious of how much effort that author has put to bring out this book, be aware of that, and then whatever you do as a criticism, you take into account this perspective”, and for my teacher it was important. After that he was very careful. He never gave anything which was just, critical for the sake of criticism. If it was criticism, it was constructive or informative.

(0:55:23):

And so you make effort consciously. When somebody says something, does something, or they have a different viewpoint, you try to understand why, what is it they are coming from and recognise the effort that has gone into whatever it is they do. And this—training yourself to try to see, feel, know, from someone else's perspective—can be done very early on. And again a lot of all this what I have described now can be done if a child is small through stories. So as the protagonist goes into the forest, he asks the first plant, ‘Which is the way?’, and the plant shows, ‘Like this’, or, the tree communicates this.

Or, he is tired, he hugs the tree and says, ‘Give me energy’, and the tree embraces him with energy and nourishes him and he wakes up from the sleep refreshed. Many ways you could say that. Or, from the other point of view, you will say: Okay, so this protagonist now thinks, ‘What is behind this behaviour?’, and he understands, ‘That person having gone through all those experiences of life now is hurt here or afraid of that and therefore his behaviour is like this’. So, ‘What can I do to form a bridge?’. And so because this is part of a story, the child now says, ‘Ah-yes, that's the way to think, that's the way to understand’.

You don't need to preach. Through the story it just comes in automatically as something to be done or which can be done, and the soul pops, catches, and immediately puts that into implementation. Of course, if you're older, you will take a different approach.

So, what I am describing here in terms of the values and attitudes, how you transmit, we have discussed, but according to different ages, there are many ways in which you could transmit.

Next, a very important value system is, recognising and it is a continuation of this idea: We are all in it together. We are one big family. Humanity is one big family. And over the lives we may have taken each other's places. So we've been on various sides, and if you have a border where you have a conflict, I've been there, you've been here, and we've exchanged sides. We've been across at various times, perhaps in different cultures, or faced similar things in other cultures. Just because we don't remember with this [gesturing brain] physical memory does not mean that it's not there.

And so you never criticise somebody for whatever it is they may have as a limitation or incapacity or ignorance. You've been there, you've been through the same issues. Rather, what would you have wanted when you were in that state? You would have wanted somebody who knows better to show you, hold your hand and help you, and so that's what you do, because you were there once, now you should understand better because you were there, so the idea that we are one big family and we have all these different kinds of experiences across different cultures, across the ages, and we are all here to help each other as part of this huge awakening of evolution.

In terms of the efforts you make: To do your best always.

These are deep-rooted values. To do your best in spite of or irrespective of praise or consequence or recognition, everything you do, you always do your best, with full concentration, and use it as an opportunity to grow. Now this is one of the values which has been sadly lost in the, let’s say, younger generations where the opportunistic character has become more common. But those who are less formally-educated by the modern education often tend to have this quite spontaneously, and to the child automatically there is a resonance with this value that: always you do your best given the limitations of time, energy, or other circumstances, within what's possible, you always do your best, and not for praise, not for consequence, but because that's how you do it, and that's your value system.

So, also recognise with all this, I have put a one-sided view that you do your part, but what happens when you deal with others who don't share those values? So you also also explain that: Not everyone shares these values, there are those who are still half asleep or still living for narrow self-interest, they will outgrow it at some point, but right now it is this, and you must know how to interact and protect yourself when needed.

So there are two words I use, and while we would say that to children, I am going to say, all of this applies to all of us as adults also that we have to learn, so I am going to speak of these two words, and I use this very often when discussing certain problems people have with others who don't share their values, so these two words in Sanskrit are:

auchitya (औचित्य) and

adhikara bheda.

I will elaborate.

(1:00:17):

Auchitya – uchit, that which is the right thing at that moment. So, in any given situation, there is a right thing to be done at that moment which is the true action, true speech, true thing to do, Dharma at that moment! The moment changes, circumstances change, perhaps it requires a different response at that moment. But there is something which is ‘appropriate’ would be the translation of the word for that moment, for that circumstance, in that instant sometimes. Try to feel what is appropriate and do what is appropriate for those circumstances, always. This should be a constant effort on our part in everything we do: the appropriate response required.

The second term is the distinction of competence, that's how to translate adhikara bheda, what value, what worth, what competence, one person has is different from somebody else, and you have to take that into account. So when you have made an appropriate action, the appropriateness also will be modified by who is on the other side. So in the Bible, I think, is this phrase, ‘You don't throw pearls to pigs’, they don't value it, but you would give pearls to those who would value it, and to the pigs you would give the things that they would value.

Right? So there is a distinction of their competence, of their value system, or of their readiness. And so you have to give or do what is appropriate for that distinction, and then upon that comes this appropriateness: How much do you give? So somebody asks for help, let's say, it is food or finance, you have the means, maybe you don't have, you say, ‘I am sorry, I am unable to help’, but I will do something else. But when you can, you say, ‘All right, you want this’, now depending on the temperament and the need, you will say, ‘But is that all or do you need that?’, he says, ‘Yes, I need that but I don't dare to ask you’. ‘Okay, I give you that, maybe I can afford.’ Or, you realise, even if you give him what he asks for, it is going to be misused, then you give less than what he asks for. That's the appropriateness.

Sometimes you will give more than they ask for, sometimes you give less than he asks for, sometimes you give exactly what is asked for. And that comes from that appropriateness of action and the particular balance of the competence or worthiness of the situation or the person. Now these are two terms one has to always review and learn to find the right balance, and this is a lifetime journey. For many of us who tend to be too idealistic, we make lots of mistakes and learn the hard way. But once we begin to be conscious that there is such a thing, we start making an effort, and we are helped always.

So, a right moment to find the right…So, all of this is about: giving. In terms of balance of give and take, there is a right moment and there is a right action, you should know how to take, receive, or whatever it is that is required, sometimes seize an opportunity before it slips; and all of these are part of a cluster of values associated which are related to action.

And then another very important value system that you have to bring which is part of the spiritual context is: In all this, when you don't know what to do, what do you refer to? Textbook? It will fail you. Person?- sometimes helpful, sometimes not. But within you is a Presence, a Divine Presence, and a deeper knowing, and it's not always explicit, it does not always come with ideas or words or even specific form of action. But when you refer a particular action that you want to do, you will feel comfortable or uncomfortable, you will feel right or wrong and deep inside, very deep, and you learn to refer to that, that within you is always the true knowledge held, not always explicit, but you will know when it feels right or wrong, and learn to refer to that to assess whether something is right or wrong.

Sometimes you say, ‘I want to do this’, it feels right but it feels half-right, then you need to change, adjust something, maybe adjust the form of the action or maybe adjust the attitude of the action, ‘I am doing it in disgust or in anger or in upset, I need to change that, I'll still do that action but now with an equality or with a compassion’. So you will try to feel what is it that's feeling uncomfortable and correct.

(1:05:04):

So this reference to the inner as your absolute measure, ultimate measure, and all else reason, etc., are there to assist, but they can't give you a finality, they can't give you a certitude as this can: this needs to be said, and this can be said very early on. You observe what you did, what did you feel within you as you did it or as you were about to do it, and the child says, ‘Ah-yes, it doesn't feel right’, you say, ‘Okay, never betray that feel, that will always tell you what's right, what's wrong, learn to trust, but learn to listen to it, refer to it, every time, that you have to do something’. And then, as a consequence of this, comes another important idea that: Every time you do something which feels right, you're drawing out some potential; Every time you have a challenge and you overcome, you're drawing out a capacity and building, creating, growing.

So this key-idea here is: Within you like in a seed, the whole tree is held, all your capacity, all the potential that you will become one day or you could be one day is held like a seed.’ And you give the analogy of a seed: You see the seed, you plant it, and then after 20 years there's a big tree, the seed actually holds that big tree, not just that tree but an infinite variations of the tree, but the essential quality of the tree is held. So you are right now as a child a seed. What will you grow to be depends on how you nourish, how you grow, how you develop your full scope of potential. So recognise that already within you the capacity is there, and each time you overcome some difficulty, each time you make a little bit of effort, you're drawing from an inner strength and growing by drawing out the strength. So key-ideas from this come whenever you don't know what to do, whenever you feel a situation demands more than you can, turn within to draw the knowledge, strength, compassion, love, whatever is required, creativity, and drawing from there as you make it explicit and give form, you grow, you begin to flower like the tree.

So this, as idea of the inner potential already within you is extremely important. But as you are doing all this, you are not alone, there is a higher power, there are higher powers, even deities, divine beings, who look for to the earth and say: Well, who is ready? Who is awake? Whom can we help? And unfortunately most people are half asleep.

So in India there is this very interesting occasion which is called ‘Mahashivaratri’. It is the great night of Lord Shiva. And the story as it is narrated, and it is very useful for children, is that Shiva and Parvati in that night, because it's the night, they are going all over the world saying, ‘Who is awake?’. So it's the Purnima, it's the full moon night, and it's Kojagiri, ‘Who is awake?’, the name of the Purnima is Kojagiri, and, so, ‘Who's awake?’, ‘Who's awake?’, and they're looking around, and most people are asleep. Now people take it literally, they try to stay awake the night. The idea is not so much that, it's about the awakening of the aspiration.

And this idea is there, and you need to bring it, that up there, there's a whole new world waiting to manifest with extraordinary possibilities. What today is compared to a thousand years ago is barely a millionth of what can happen in terms of not only inner consciousness but external growth. But that world is waiting, not receiving enough people who are awake. Everybody is busy doing their own thing having forgotten that there is something more beautiful waiting to manifest. So if you turn in aspiration and ask for the help, you are given by those powers, but they won't give you a help to do what the junk that's being done from the past, they will give you help to create something more beautiful, more true, more real, more complete, which corresponds to the values of the higher world.

So, ask for help, but for something where you commit yourself to a higher purpose, not just repeating or doing some silly, foolish thing, there also you could ask for help when needed. But always ask for help. And according to the height of your aspiration and ideal and purpose is the power of the help that can come to you. And of course you have many stories for these things, and so on. So the idea that not only you are not alone, not only the Divine is there, but there are active beings who are there, whose job it is, to help us, help human evolution, and they are looking for people who would be, who they would, who they could help.

(1:10:10):

So all this is, as you can see, quite comprehensive, and each of these ideas are life-changing, and I have packed them all together over the years in steps, bit by bit, you may unpack them, reveal, share, discuss, let them mature as ideas. Critical to all this is your concept of the Divine which will then define your relationship with the Divine and then give you the opportunity to rely on the Divine with complete faith and complete reliance.

Now, this I will not go into, we had a whole discussion about this probably in the series from number 82 onwards, there is one session which is titled, I think, “Concept of the Divine”, if I recall right, but I have discussed that in great detail so I won't go into this, and it relates to that whole idea of the ascetic life versus the affirmative spirituality. So all of those you can look back and see how to implement. But this is going to be critical. Because if we take the more superficial religious idea of concept of the Divine as somebody sitting up there with the judge's stick ready to reward and punish, it makes the relationship one of fear or transaction of a kind of a blind servitude or obedience, not a really one of a nurturing, loving, joyous self-giving.

So, it's important to not separate the Divine from the world but to consider the world itself as the expression as formed of the very substance of the Divine Consciousness and we are a part of the awakening of the Divine that is taking place, but there is the aspect of the Divine always above pouring all possibilities and helping us to grow, and so on. So this is very important, with it will be the relationship of the Divine.

Now I'm going to come to something very specific and narrow to those who are devotees of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother but you could generalise it to any context where the form in which you worship the Divine is specific to either the child's aspiration or your family tradition, but always recognise, it's not the same thing. As I mentioned last time, there are specific aspects which are deities, and they are aspects, and they are known to be aspects. When you worship an aspect, it’s fine, but you realise, it’s an aspect. When you conceive of the Divine as the source, the origin, the One, but with a different name, but it's still the One, that's a different story, then you can use different names, and you say, ‘Ah-yes, my family worships Vishnu’, someone else worships Shiva, someone else worships Divine Mother as Durga or Mahakali or Lakshmi, or whatever, but you could again reduce that to your mind's conception or view that as an entrypoint to something wider.

So somebody says ‘Virgin Mary’, yes, you could have the historical one or the Divine Mother, and that's a different Virgin Mary. You could say, Lakshmi as the one who gives wealth, mmhm-yes, or there is Mahalakshmi which is the very plenitude and opulence and plenty, the power of plenty in which the Divine pours out. And so there  are differences. Wherever possible, as far as possible, let that be an entrypoint to the highest and most complete conception of the Divine. So you may have the historical Krishna, but Sri Krishna is the Lord as he presides over the whole universe, as the Master of the whole creation. And so this needs to be communicated.

You say that: ‘These are symbolic gateways, sometimes they are physical incarnations of That, but still through this we relate to That which is, who is everywhere, who is in everyone and within your heart and in each one's heart’, and so on. But here because we, for us this is the form in which we relate most easily, we open our heart, well, that's the entrypoint”.

But this distinction needs to be made, and so the concept of the Divine, the relationship you set, etc., will flow from there. Again depending on your family traditions, you may have certain rituals or relationships. As long as the child finds it helpful, beneficial, for the growth, it's wonderful.

Having said all this which was specific to the values and conduct and ideas and relationship with the Divine, the sense of life purpose, so the child will still say: ‘Ah-yes, my friends are doing this, I was asked what will I do when I grow up, uh, so and so they are going to go for this job, that business, etc. What is it I am here for?’.

(1:15:14):

This needs to be stated again: ‘Yes, you may do this job or that business or that skill or that line of work or excellence or creativity, knowledge, courage, whatever. But all of those are incidental to something else or they are a means for something else, which is what? Observe yourself, organise yourself, master yourself, and evolve in consciousness to your full potential.’ This needs to be said.

Then: ‘You will do it this way or that way or the other way and maybe a combination of various ways, no problem.’ And finally, two important concepts which are essential: ‘One, that there are inner and higher worlds, entire worlds of which physical world is a very-very tiny part. And it is our destiny to experience all these worlds and to engage with all of them and even to wield a kind of a mastery in all of them, and looking back within our world, the perspective of an evolutionary history.’

‘So history is not about what happened, when it happened, but in what way consciousness grew through those events. So that's evolutionary history.’

‘A spiritual history, in what way the spirituality has evolved, and what are the stages it has been through. And, depending on the culture and national space in which you are, either the human journey of awakening, the, or the specific national journey, in India specifically what form that would take or other civilisational or cultural space in which you are, and how that has grown and then link it to the larger journey of humanity.’

All of this, create the context, the worldview in which the basis and purpose of the spirituality is now applied, practical, real, and linked to your purpose of life, otherwise it falls into the old religious mould: Oh, you do your prayer so you get your good luck, pass your exam, get a good job, get a good marriage, get healthy children, or overcome ill health. That’s not spirituality, that's transaction. At best it's a religious turn which is preparing you for a spirituality. Okay.

But since the question is really about a living spirituality, without this larger context, spirituality is separate from life. And this is one of the biggest errors of human history. Even in India, where the entire civilisational turn was to integrate the spiritual with life in practice, with the turn to asceticism, the spirituality had to be as if kept separate, although parallel, and deeply respected, but separate. It came with the ascetic phase. And now there is again the affirmative spirituality, and the two have to meld. But in what way? What’s the basis? What’s the place of spirituality in life or lives in spirituality? Well, all this which we discussed is that.

Unless this is there, whatever you may do as practices will again be cut off from life. It's like the businessman, every morning he gets up, does his prayer, puja, sometimes for an hour, repeating several chants, then he goes into his business and does exactly what's required for the business the way he has been trained or is opportunistic, and when he gets his profits he says, ‘See I do my prayers so I get my profits’. And maybe there's a truth to it because those prayers and japa and build a certain power, and if he has a strong vitality it can act to amplify certain attractive forces, even of wealth. But did you change in consciousness? No,  you just wielded a greater power to do exactly what you are able to do right now, in consciousness terms. The growth in consciousness happens when this becomes the purpose of the work you do; the work you do becomes the means for the growth. Isn't it?

And so all that I have discussed now in my view will be far more important than the actual form of practices. Having said that, now that you have understood, maybe you will start with one-tenth of what I discussed. Start with small steps. But start. And set this context. And then the practices will have meaning. And so now I come to the practices themselves, which is perhaps for you the most important, but for me will be the culmination of this background. You see, the perspective of life will come first, the form in which you put into practice to accelerate is what now we look at.

(1:20:06):

As a child, the familiarity with the Presence by exposure will be most important. So little baby in arms you hold in a state of prayer or meditation, and the child is then drawn into the meditative state. As they grow slightly older, you are doing your prayer, concentration, meditation, let them sit with you. Tell them: ‘You sit as long as you like, after a while if you need to go, you can go quietly, but receive all that you can and stay in that.’ You say it. What they may do is up to them. But if they feel you, if they feel the Presence, if they feel the atmosphere, they'll be drawn in.

One example comes to mind: there was a child who was at the age of five, they would say, ‘All right, let's all meditate’. And the parents, family, would close their eyes and meditate. Having done their thing, in 2 minutes it's over, they open their eyes, the child is still in meditation, he would stay on for as long as he wanted. He was doing the real thing, for them it was just, ‘I meditate, close your eyes, daydream for a while, repeat your prayer, go away’. He actually got into it, did it, so he stayed much longer. And that also happens, it depends on the maturity.

But that familiarity with the Presence will be your most important thing, because having felt that Presence, you don't need to say later, ‘Oh, within you there is the Presence’. ‘Oh, I know, of course it's there, you just remind me, ah-yes, of course, that's what you're speaking of.’ But if you have not felt it and someone says, ‘Oh, within you there's a Presence’, they don't get it.

So it happened in our school, I was, when I was teaching, some, it must be now 15, 20 years ago, there was this, sometimes I would speak just like that in passing, say something, so the idea was there, the seeds were there. And one day this girl comes, she was sick the last time so she missed a class, she said, ‘I was really I wanted to come to the class, I was so eager but I was in fever and I couldn't come, so I prayed and I prayed and I prayed to get well but I didn't get well’. So you know, here's a very subtle point, if you, you might lose faith. So I said: “You know when you are praying like this, like this, that was in the surface part of you. The real prayer, the most direct, is behind that, there's a part which is very quiet, and that's where you feel.”

And as I was speaking, I shifted myself, and I watched her, and she became quiet, her consciousness turned in, and then suddenly her face bloomed and she said: ‘Oh, it feels so good!’ And that's it. The point of contact was made. She knew. She must have been at the age of 11, I think, ‘Oh, it feels so good!’, and the whole face lit up. That's it. So simple. You catch that moment and give that nudge. But if the familiarity is there, you can just say, ‘Ah-yes, just become very quiet, behind your emotions, you can feel it’. What is that ‘it’? It's familiar, and when I know it, when I find it, I know it, that's it. So, that ‘familiarity’. From as early on as you can. In the house, there's a Presence, or you have a prayer space where there's a Presence.

Second, as you describe experiences, use a vocabulary which conveys the experience and not jargon. I had one teacher from a school with whatever influence of Sri Aurobindo, he decided, he had to teach them spirituality, so he made them learn by heart so many definitions, and he says, ‘See, my school is so great, my children can tell you the definition of evolution: ‘Here you child, tell me what is evolution?’, and the child goes ‘Evolution is the progressive emergence of the tata-tata-tata-tut’ ’. And you could see, he had understood nothing, he had learnt by heart the words. You can see how useless that is.

But if you had gone through an experiential explanation, ‘You see, how the seed draws the soil, recasts the soil to become plant, plant tissue is nothing but soil which is evolved’, and so on, you can make them go through, see, experience, interact. ‘Ha-yes, that’s evolution.’ Same thing will happen with our body, not just our body, our consciousness, our mind itself, the consciousness, the awareness, you have of your mind will become of a higher grade. And what will it be able to do? It will be able to experience oneness with everything, it will be able to experience all knowledge, because it will feel everything inside-out, and know everyone, and everything inside-out, ‘Yeah, that makes sense’.

So there are ways you can transmit depending on the ages, but avoid jargon, use a vocabulary which describes an experience to help them get to it and then say, ‘This we call ‘evolution’ ’. And why do we use that word ‘evolution’? Well, evolution is the same ‘evol’, ‘revol’, ‘unfold’, so there is as if a folded thing which unfolds revealing itself like the seed unfolding. So there are ways you can communicate that makes it real and living.

(1:25:23):

We have still not come to practices. So now we come closer to the practice aspect. Naturally you use according to the temperament of the child, the action, ‘karma yoga’, heart-devotion, ‘bhakti yoga’, or knowledge, ‘jnana yoga’, as starting points. And depending on their nature, so let's say as a family, ‘Well, every weekend we go and do our service for this, we offer service there’ or ‘Every day we will do this as a service to the Divine’ and some activity whatever it is that you do, you call it as an ‘offering’, as a giving of yourself. You say what is required, what's the attitude with which we do, and do that with a concentrated way as a service to the Divine.

And depending again on the cultural context, let's say you are in a beautiful uh, environment of nature, then you conceive of nature itself as this temple of the Divine, where the beauty of the Divine is revealed in full richness and complexity. And as you do this, you are going to offer this to the Divine in nature. So nature is not the Divine, the Divine in nature. When you are helping somebody, you will do it as an offering to the Divine in that person or to the Divine in the universe, etc.

So some form of active service to the Divine, or it can be without a physical dimension, just the devotional self-giving, or in the mind, the sense of consciousness opening, giving itself to the Presence and receiving the influence. Observe what works for the child and start with that which works, depending on temperament, one or more even simultaneously could be done. Then in the actual implementation of integration of these, these practices with life, before you start anything, you: pause step back, concentrate, centre to feel the Divine Presence within you or invoke the Divine help from above, and then holding that, linked to that, you start doing the work. And when you finish the work, you pause again, and offer thanks for all the help, and offer the work you have done and say ‘This is yours’.

As a practice, start and end with this brief concentration, and you say, what you do during the concentration, and you do it yourself. The result is that the child feels the help, feels the benefit, feels the result. And the days when he has done without concentration, you notice. And the days he did with concentration, you notice the difference. The evidence, the experience leads to this. And you can say, if you think others are going to laugh at you, you can do it quietly, you don't have to even close your eyes, with eyes open, you centre yourself, concentrate, feel, connect, invoke, then you turn and fully immerse in the activity and flow with it. If you feel at that moment you are too tense, you do it before. So let's say you are going to do some performance, some gymnastic, at that point you need to be fully concentrated, before you go, at home you sit, concentrate, ask for the help, then you go and do. When you come home, you sit, concentrate, offer thanks, etc.

This practice initiated early on, because they feel the result, becomes the basis automatically for so many more things to open out. So this key of concentration before and after, even if it's done at home and the work itself done elsewhere, no problem. But make that a very important starting point. From this now you extend to sit in deeper concentration, deeper immersion, and this becomes the meditation. So now we will enter in that concentration, and enjoy that immersion, with full immersion in the Presence or the love or the joy or the gratitude or the self-giving and deepening it until it completely encompasses you. And that's your meditation. As they grow older, you may become more explicit in what is done, or as a child you say it, ‘This is what you do’ and then in whatever way they do, as they are older you will speak of how that can be deepened.

(1:30:03):

But now the essence of meditation has begun, and we will describe it in terms of, let's say, four things you could do, you could do any one of those four or do all of those or any combination of those.

So first, you open yourself to the Divine. You already got your concept of the Divine which was discussed, without that, the Divine is not this little person, little object with this photo in front of you. It is much more. And depending on your temperament, it is the Divine as the Lord or Divine as the Mother, whichever, or simply Divine as an indescribable presence or joy or love, whatever you feel. So first movement is opening yourself to the Divine, so you feel the Divine with that opening.

And then you give yourself, ‘Here take me’.

Third, you receive what the Divine fills you with, ‘Fill me with your love, with your light, with your joy, with your peace’, and you say this explicitly, ask to be filled with whatever you need. You need knowledge, well, open and ask for the light and the knowledge to fill you, and literally the Divine Force will work to increase your brain cells and neuronal connections to make you capable of the greater knowledge which comes, but that will come irrespective of this anyway, it will actually amplify your intelligence,—we had a discussion last time about the Gayatri Mantra for the receiving of knowledge,—with or without mantra, directly focusing on this.

You are in distress, you need to be soothed by peace, by love, well, ask for that peace and love. But first, you must open yourself, otherwise you cannot receive. You must give yourself before you can receive fully. You can still receive, but my cup is small, so I open and I get a little bit of peace. If I open and give myself, then it's as if I widen out to That, to which I give myself, now the peace that comes is vast, deep, intense, permanent.

And this, so: opening, giving yourself, receiving.

And then the fourth: losing yourself in the immersion, now you feel the peace, you feel the joy, you feel the love or just the Presence, indescribable,—doesn't matter,—and you forget yourself in it as if dissolving into it.

And again, this is effective if you have got the background that we are only a part of the Divine Consciousness, so to say, the tail end, the tip of infinite consciousness, never really separate and so losing our littleness into that vast, we grow, we are lifted, we are changed, we are transformed.

So all of this makes sense because that background is there, but then the experience itself is the evidence. And to different degrees, these four, one or more of these are in combination, in sequence, the child will experience. You describe it and say, ‘We'll just do this and stay in this and enjoy it’. Sometimes you may ask, ‘What did it feel like?’. Sometimes the child will spontaneously say, sometimes you'll see it on the face in their behaviour, in their change state, it's good enough. So this would be really in essence the meditation. Now to this you could give many forms, you could say, ‘Ah-yes, repeat this mantra’, ‘Now sit like this’, ‘Do this prayer’, ‘Do this ritual’. They're all good, they're all useful perhaps, sometimes they help to create an external focus when you do an external ritual, but it would have value if these four components are part of it, otherwise you'd be doing a mechanical thing and your mind would be elsewhere. If you do it with this feeling, you can do an external ritual also with this feeling.

So, for example, when I would have to travel with some people who were used to going to temple for specific things, they buy flowers because that's the thing to do, I was not particular, if they gave me the flowers, I would do it, If not, I would say, “I don't need flower, I am myself the flower”. So I go there, I give myself. And I would tell them the reason: “The flowers you are giving are symbolic of your own consciousness which you are offering”. So either you do it symbolically or you do it in your own way. You give yourself. That's it. And maybe there you have that deity which is your favourite form or your preferred temple, but remember, that's a gateway to the One who is all. And so, when you give yourself, you concentrate here, but through this you open to the One, etc. You can nudge, if you, if you are in a tight ritualistic framework in the family tradition, use these as entry points to something deeper.

And then practices wise, I am going to add one more dimension which will relate to a discussion about other worlds and other possibilities. Now depending on how much you know, otherwise you may share videos or texts in which describe these things, make the child conscious that: everything we are today is just the beginning of so much more that has still to be awakened within us as capacities and potential; there are deeper layers of a reality within you as there are worlds within and around you and above you. And so to become conscious of these and conscious of interactions which we are having all the time without knowing, because we are deaf, dumb and blind on those levels.

(1:35:47):

And so: to speak of them; to speak of these worlds; to speak of these potential; speak of the power of intuition by which you can know anything you choose to, because the power exists within you, you are just not conscious of it, but it creeps through, it sneaks through, through cracks in your mind, through gaps in your mind, where your mind pauses briefly, ‘ploop’, something drops in; to be able to empathically feel and know things; to be able to telepathically sense, to receive intentions or trends even of circumstances, before something happens, there is a whole build up of energies and to be able to sense ‘Ha-yes, something is not quite okay;

These are profound ideas, and you will see, very interestingly some of the most successful cinema have actually caught these or rather the cinema became successful because they caught these. One of them is Star Wars, the original series, I don’t know the new recent uh, series that was built further but in the original three at least, when you had the Jedi Masters, the Master would say, ‘I can feel there is some disturbance in the force’. Well, literally that's how it is. So by the way the person who wrote the text of the Star Wars was familiar with the Mahabharata, took many concepts from the Mahabharata and particularly that evil is nothing but good which has been perverted and so they can be released from its evil if it is undone, and so on. All those concepts are there which is what made it such an extraordinary inspiring movie because it touched deep spiritual truths and made them accessible through these very superficial symbols or forms and events.

So we can go much deeper because you have greater knowledge and tell the child ‘You should be able to sense it’. Or, I will go so far as to say: ‘You already have the ability to sense it but you have to pay attention, you are not paying attention, you are too busy focusing on your physical senses, pay attention to that deeper sensitivity, and you will sense things.’ And I will even say: ‘You already sense things but you don't pay attention, you don't give it the importance you should, and then sometimes you sense things in a mixed way, and you must learn to discriminate and distinguish, and, particularly, then you should be able to feel at that inner level and have the communion with the plants, with the animals, even with objects, and of course with the Divine. Isn't it?’

So all this you speak of and say: ‘You must develop these things’. And I'm going to add one more thing which is out-of-body experiences. ‘You should be able to eventually even step out of your body, go around, experience higher worlds and come back. Eventually in your body opening to the higher realms you should be able to perceive, or interact, engage with them while being in the body. ‘So all of these are part of our potential, but start where you are’, and say it, and where needed, narrate stories, we have many incidents narrated by the Mother, by Sri Aurobindo, in other traditions, the theosophical literature is full of these kinds of fascinating uh, occult stories, and so on, draw upon all these to the extent needed, again, depending on the temperament of the child, but through these you open to the underlying deeper ranges of reality and don't stop with the superficial appearance.

You get them to begin to value the experiences and perceptions they already have, the dreams they have, make them, tell them: ‘You can be conscious in your dream, you can recall your dreams, develop the awareness, as you sleep till the point you wake up, build continuity of awareness, all this’, you should say, ‘can be done, should be done’, and then you also put it into practice and tell them how did it work for you, ‘last night I was able to do this, How are you doing? Why not start sharing?’.

So, now all this, if you see, is a very large scope to a very simple question: How do I introduce the spirituality to the child in a cultivation practices like meditation?

I have taken it to a much broader scope, because, as I said, just a mere practice would be a very superficial and narrow goal, but you open the whole world: their inner, the outer, inner layers, potential, purpose of life, across lives, and everything else. How much? What sequence? Let it happen. If the child has already grown a little bit, start from wherever it is, engage.

(1:40:30):

If the child is very small, well, do it very early on through stories and through other experiences. Even you can, if you have read some of Mother's stories, how she was, when she was a child, she would practice going, as if projecting her consciousness to see what's happening in the next room. So her brother was working, I think, in some, he had his own workshop and she was sick at that time in the bed so she couldn't get up, so she said “I want to know what he is doing”, so she visualised the whole thing and projected her consciousness and tried to sense what he was doing, see it, and then check with him, “Was it correct what I sensed?”.

Just that as a story, as a child having done it, the child says, ‘Ha-yes, I should be able to do it’ and will start trying. I used to try some of these things because I had read them or heard them from the talks of my teacher M.P. Pandit. But one of the things which I learned from him or I heard in one of the talks, “You should be able to quiet your mind”, he said. And we were in the School in the age 10, 11, 12, I think. And we had every morning the music, and most children close their eyes daydream because that's what the teachers are doing, and I was daydreaming, and one day I said: Why am I doing this? Why not I use this for some better use? I should be able to stop my thoughts. So I started practicing this to stop thoughts. I found it so fascinating and I kept doing it until I got to a point where I could stop my thoughts for 15 seconds, 20 seconds, half a minute, and then it was too strenuous. Of course, that's one way to do which is strenuous, there are better ways.

But you could do that at that age, because your mind is just beginning to grow and you can catch that ride, the growth, and develop faculties as you grow. Isn't it? But you must have been told these things, ‘Ha, you should be able to stop your thoughts and hold your mind completely silent, without a thought’. How long can you do it? Let's see! So tap this potential as early as you can, nourish, and then let it flower out in whatever way natural. I hope, I have given an answer which is complete enough. Maybe it's too complex, but when you review it, re-re-view and make notes, and then see what you can implement, and finally let the child be your guide.

As you begin to interact, you will be surprised at how quickly the child catches these things and even leads you and engages you. I'll take a quick look at the chat box. Uh, so, Anupam is, .. wait! Akhilesh is asking: “Is it possible to rewrite your destiny and astrology of a person with spirituality?”

Yes, you must tell that to the child: ‘Destiny is not fixed, destiny is what you make of it, or rather what you choose from the soul, that's your destiny. Astrology is only rhythms of nature-forces, you can ride the waves. You see, if there's a tidal wave, you can ride the wave and the wave will carry you or the wave will drown you or the wave will break you, depending on what level you engage with. From a spiritual poise you can ride any wave to any outcome, so you can be master of your destiny.’ And you must say this to children.

Anupam is asking: “In case of my daughter, when I am trying to narrate a story to her, she refuses and says, ‘Let's play’. Even if I convince her to listen to the story after a few minutes, she becomes restless.”

What's her age? I would want to know that ideally for a useful response. But then it could be that the child is too young to have the imagery that your story is or your story is too abstract for the child's value system and accessibility. So match the content to something which the child can get. If she asked to play, then let the play be the story, so, ‘Let's play, you are going to be this character, I am going to be this character’, and you are narrating a story through the play. You don't have to reduce the story to just an imaginative thing, because she wants something more physically sensible, play that. Or, if she is playing with dolls and toys, you play them out. You are going to narrate the story of Ramayana. And so ‘Rama set up his army like this, Ravana set up his army like that’, and then many ways you could do that. Of course, this is not for your daughter, for her it would be a different story, but you can set up objects or draw images as you narrate the story or have her draw images. The images can be very crude, don't worry. It's rather the sense of the, the narration.

It's also very likely that when she's saying she wants to play and not have stories, it means she wants contact with you. Is it that you are not getting enough contact with her Is it that you come home and she has been waiting for you a long time? She is craving your energy, and your affection, and your love, then the play is the way that you are going to interact, ‘inter’ literally, exchanging energy. So then observe what's the kind of play she wants, throwing things back and forth, exchanging, doing things together, observe what she needs, and first fill that need and then you will find, you can direct or guide that need to something more deep. Of course, I still don't know the age, so I can't say very precisely, but I think you get the idea.

(1:46:00):

Michael says: “Many of these aspects apply to horses like children, something to play, to pray for.”

I am not sure I caught this.  That you could apply in your training of horses the same principles? Yes, I, if that's what I have understood correctly, yes, that is true. And what I have described in terms of training are universal principles and so you could apply them even with other pets or animals and in the way you build the relationship with them, etc. Of course these concepts you may not communicate, but you can build the relationship on the basis of these principles.

RG is saying: “It's very sad that there is a very big gap between one aware person and the whole family and with fully closed doors.”

Yes, if that is the case, doesn't matter. Sometimes a soul chooses to come into a family just for one person, and it can be a grandparent, because that's the spiritual link, and then you have the responsibility, you have the greater responsibility, and there are ways to do it in which, you help the child manage the closed doors in the family.

I remember, there was one case which I knew personally, I know personally very closely where the child actually came because of one grandmother who was in the family. The parents were very good, very cultured and good people but totally closed to the spiritual, and this child had a very deep rich inner life. So one day he narrate, he shared with me this, he said: ‘I was on my bed, and I was drawing, drawing ॐ, and my father came and said: What are you doing, drawing ‘3’, ’3’, ’3’?  And so I said: What did you do? He said, ‘I just went, ha-ha-ha’. So he knew how to deal with his parents. They didn't like him being interested in spiritual things. But being with his grandmother, he could open his world and flow with all that. So you have to see what, what you can do to help the child and nourish and give them the tools, equip them to manage these other contrary influences or closed doors.

Vivek is asking: “Any way to rescue my child who is now an adult? How can I help her go to the Divine?”

The same thing what we have discussed, at the level of principles is what we have discussed. Now you have to see how to engage. What is it that is her priority? So perhaps she is now as an adult, she is engaging with life and obviously facing difficulties as everyone does. So you say, ‘Look, I know you are going through this difficulty, I found great help, great solace in these things’, so: ‘in asking help for the Divine; in starting my day with a concentration; in offering thanks at the end of the day; or offering the work; or when I struggle with success and failure or tensions at work, if I do it in the spirit of consecration, I do my best as an offering to the Divine, I come away with less stress, and then I am able to do better my work, or I feel fulfilled rather than stressed at the end of the day’. So now engage with what she is looking for, what she needs.

Now obviously it may have a tendency which I have criticised earlier as a transactional religious relationship, but initially that's an entry points. From that you say: ‘You realise, it's such a joy to be in that state of immersion and then you choose to grow in that much more. But initially you start by transaction where you feel the help and that's how you're going to build the relationship and the familiarity with the Presence. So whereas as a child you didn't need transaction to become familiar with the Presence, as an adult you may need that’. Or, take them to a space where they feel peaceful, and so on.

But observe carefully what the child needs, what your daughter as an adult now needs, and then see where you can find a point of contact, where a practice or an opening to an experience can become the starting point.

Ah, Anupam says: ‘6-year-old child.’ Yes.

(1:50:02):

Dhruval is asking: “How to know the Divine will? How to take any decision when we are not conscious of the Divine in ourselves?”

Okay. I'll put it in the context of the present discussion, because the child may ask the same question, ‘I don't feel very clearly, I don't know’. And I put it in the context of this discussion, not broader context. So, when you are going to take a decision, first become conscious of the aspiration within you, that you have, even if you don't have the direct awareness of the Divine Presence. In the aspiration that you have, the love that you have, the joy of relating and self-giving to the Divine that you feel, or the closeness and intimacy that you feel with the Divine or the Divine Mother, come to that centre, hold that. From there feel the Presence to whatever extent, maybe you don't feel anything but you just feel that joy of the depth of contact. Fine. Stay with that or feel the Presence. And then, place before you the problem. From this perspective when you look at the problem, often it will be obvious what you need to do. Sometimes it will say, it doesn't matter what I do, but the state in which you are is what matters.

So: I can do it with anxiety, I can do it with pain, I can do it with anger; or, in the state where I am fulfilled, I can still do the same thing, no pain, no anger, no anxiety. The state,—not the action,—is important. Sometimes the action: this: no, this feels wrong; that feels right. So from that poise, you look at the situation, it will be obvious what you need to do. And so it will be the same with children. You say: ‘When you're about to do something wrong, you will feel somewhere within you a deep discomfort; and when you know you're doing right, even if everybody criticises you for it, somewhere inside, you know, ‘I will not regret this’, deep,—not superficially,—deep inside, and then you know that's the right thing to do.’ And this applies to all of us, even as adults. Isn't it?

So, I would still suggest, you review, because it's very multi-layered and multi-dimensional. Review this. Start with the elements which are easiest to apply, but as you put into application you will also get a sense of it and build gradually, bit by bit.

So there we are, and now we apply these principles to ourselves. What will you say to yourself? What's the guideline? What's the advice you would give to yourself? Think about that.

What should be your next step in life?

What should be your next priority in life?

What should you be doing now?

Think about this.

What is it you're lacking that you feel the need for most? Review that. And then, take one tiny step in that direction. ‘I don't have time, but I can take 2 minutes for this thing which I need, which I feel most important now’: make those 2 minutes and slot it in the morning routine if you can. You have your shower, you put on your clothes, you sit down and do that thing which is for you, the thing missing or the most important thing you need to do, do it even if it's for 2 minutes. End of the day you might be too tired but this is one time you can always slot it in, put it as a routine, and that's one way to force yourself. And then the rest of the day, if you have done this even a little bit, the rest of the day you'll feel the benefit of it. And so you'll want to do it more often, maybe repeat or reconnect to that concentration, whatever form it takes.

So let's take a moment all of us to remain in this concentration, in this aspiration and think of how you're going to reshape or what little step you're going to take in your life and align yourself to this.

Namaste.