Four Primary Principles of Conscious Childrearing

Chapter Two

Discipline Is an Act of Love
within the Culture of Expectation

Adi Da: Only true, spiritual, and moral community provides the human functional basis for the continuous testing and schooling of human qualities. When people exist outside the cultural bond of community, all the forms of anti-social and self-possessed aberration appear, and, once having appeared, they cannot truly be changed unless the individual is restored to the condition of community. Therefore, devote your freedom to community. Put your energy into human things. (Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House.)

Session One

A Review of the Instructions on Discipline

This session is a review of the published literature on discipline. It begins with "The Initiation of the Challenging Force" from Ice Cream & Shoe, the toddler manual. This consideration of the artful application of the challenging force is included here because it does not only apply to toddlers. Can your child receive and always respond to a clear demand to go beyond himself or herself? The challenging force is best initiated and the positive response to it established at the toddler age, but if this has not taken place, then it must be done at whatever age spiritual life is embraced. Also addressed in "The Initiation of the Challenging Force" is the dynamic of challenge-nurture, "the two-man con." This also does not merely apply to the toddler age but should he understood as a principle of growth throughout a lifetime.

Adi Da has said that students must not be afraid to "discipline and love one another"—in other words, to serve one another as we have been served by Him. True discipline is love. It arises out of the compassionate regard for all others that is awakened in students when they "hear" the Teaching of Truth and "see" the Spiritual Master.

Children do not have the will or understanding necessary to choose a spiritual Way of life apart from our consistent offering of that choice to them. It is part of our Practice to create a culture that actively expects that children will live this Way of life. Apart from such a culture, they cannot mature spiritually.

Adi Da: Children are simply incarnate human beings at a very early stage of development. They do not enjoy responsibility of a very sophisticated kind at all. Thus, they require and depend upon the human cultural environment around them—not just the natural environment—to come to the position of responsibility in which they can live as mature human beings. (unpublished talk)

All practitioners are called to "discipline and love" the children of our community through a "culture of expectation" that is alive at all levels of maturity. If the demand to practice is presented to children only by the parents or only by the teachers, rather than being universally present in the culture, then it is much more difficult for the child to learn the necessary lessons of life.

The "culture of expectation" is coincident with the "expanded sphere of intimacy." Thus, true discipline is simply the obligation of relationship. It does not arise from any politics of power that the parent may assume by virtue of age or size! Such politics only threaten children and create reactivity. True demand comes culturally. It is benign and diffuses the one-on-one dynamic of parent and child. Adi Da speaks further of the primacy of the cultural influence in developing the child's capacity for self-transcendence:

The true community makes demands on children for socialization, and the parent is allowed another role altogether. Apart from community, the parent or teacher is attempting to get the child to do something. He or she is failing to orient that child to the circumstance of community, in which these demands are made by the community as a whole. When demands for socialization are made by the community, it is much more amusing and interesting for a child. It is also necessary. If a child is to truly socialize his life, he must adapt to the demands that are communicated to him through many intimacies, through the agency of community—and not simply to the demands communicated by a parent who for some apparently arbitrary reason wants him to do such and such a thing. The parent or teacher should be an agent of the community's demand. At some point the child must begin to recognize and value the sacred community. All the people who in one way or another make demands on him should be viewed by the child as agents of that community. In that case, his relationship to them is much more humorous. In other words, the whole field of individuals in which he lives and matures is then understood by him to be a kind of game of development. When he sees himself in relation to a game of development, then he can play it. It is no longer merely an arbitrary demand for control. Therefore, what you must do is literally to displace the "parent game," the exclusive bond of intimacy and authority that leads to characterize the parent-child relationship, and orient children toward community life. In that case, the disciplines that are required are much, much easier to maintain from the child's point of view. It is not a dilemma. (from "Childhood as a Game of Development", 1975)

There is much understanding and healing, self-inspection and blessing, that must occur in order for this culture of expectation to come alive. A community of devotees actively involved in making cooperative agreements in relation to the children's culture creates a cultural structure wherein children do not need to resort to the unhappy strategies of the separate self. Instead, they can turn to the structure and Wisdom provided for them.

The vision of cooperative community is the truly humanizing and ultimately spiritualizing structure of human life. In traditional cultures in which children are characteristically happy, emotionally strong, calm, and sensitive, what stands out is the community's embrace of every child, as well as the culture as a whole valuing intimacy above independent achievement. In such cultures children are not regarded as an independent segment of the culture, and therefore there is no distinction enforced "between authority (or the adult world) and children (or those who are supposed to be followers or duplicators of the ideal)". ("No Praise, No Blame") Only such an integrated structure of culture—one that recognizes the inherent enjoyment of intimacy with children and allows for emotional vulnerability, bodily intimacy, and free exchange of Life-Force among all members of the culture—can humanize children and so prepare them for a spiritual Way of life.

Ice Cream & Shoe

The Initiation of the Challenging Force

Adi Da: The growth process is one in which the individual is progressively differentiated and granted his or her independence, but not presumed to have that independence completely until he has also demonstrated the concomitant responsibilities. We must familiarize the child with the world as he grows, and look to place him in a position of sympathetic contact with the total world more and more every day. When you see that the child is established comfortably in that level of contact, then allow it, grant it, presume it. At the same time, expect and demand that the child behave responsibly within that sphere of contact with the universe. You must give children lessons as well as freedom. ("Children Must Be Liberated", 8/5/78)

If our service to them is to be more than conventional child care, it must be founded in recognition of their inherent spiritual nature. Our children depend upon us for instruction in and demonstration of the devotee's disposition of Blessing, the personal disciplines, and meditative and devotional practices. If we provide this demonstration, they can be naturally and gracefully attracted to the happy life of Communion with the Spiritual Master in God.

The toddler stage, which generally takes place between eighteen and thirty-six months, characterizes that part of the first stage of life in which the child needs to differentiate physically from the mother. It is the time when energy and attention begin to be loosened from the child's preoccupation with dependence on the mother for sustenance and begin to become available for intimacy with a more expanded sphere of relations. It is therefore the time during which adults must introduce the simple beginnings of morality in relationship—responsibility for love in the toddlers' actions in the world.

Adi Da points out in His essay and commentary, "Education, or My Way of Schooling In the Seven Stages of Life," that "Spiritual Communion, Communion with the Living Force, is based on individuation, on your knowing that you are there participating in and surrendering into it." Prior to the first year and a half of the child's life, he or she will have been almost exclusively exposed to the nurturing or sustaining force of life, primarily via the mother. Adults have not expected the child to take responsibility for his reactions to life's frustrations. However, at about eighteen months the child enters a new stage of expansion, accompanied by a growing sense of separation from what is not self. In the beginning, this awakened sense of individuality may cause the child to react by randomly or regularly waking up at night crying, or even screaming, for no apparent reason. Also, the child discovers "No" as an expression of his independence. This emerging willfulness and sense of self coincides with the child's exploring and socializing capacities.

Adi Da points out that willfulness, while clearly the sign of a developing ego, and a more independent being, can be a regressive movement in a child, one that works against his real responsibility for himself by placing him In the "omnipotent infant" position:

There comes a time with children, somewhere in the neighborhood of two and a half years of age, when you must present a will to them stronger than theirs. Otherwise they will become omnipotent infants, and will actually regress. Their willfulness is not progressive, but regressive, a way to preserve their infantilism, the mommy-baby level of existence. Willfulness is a way of standing off and it works against their real growth. Therefore, you must propose a will that is stronger than their own, you must require things of them. This does not mean to suppress them. Never suppress children, but do become more strongly willful and make demands of them. Particularly at this age, break them out of the omnipotent infant game which they will tend to animate. This helps them to move on, to grow.

Children are always naturally expanding from the egg level. They are becoming more and more socialized, more and more capable of expanded relations and expanded functioning, expanded activity. One of the liabilities of the usual mommy/daddy game that we play with children is that it prevents them from expanding, from socializing, from breaking out of the infantile mode. Thus, we must grant our children the freedom of engaging relations outside the parent bond. One of the virtues of living in community is that there are many individuals with whom our children can associate—many talents, many qualities. Thus, we must not "own" our children. We must be sensitive to them and let them be free and not create the neurosis that all of you are obliged to deal with in your twenties, thirties, forties and beyond. Even In the best of circumstances, everyone will have these frozen characteristics, the problems that belong to infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Nevertheless, our motive should be to create the most ideal circumstance possible for our children. They have their own karmas, you see, so you can not perfect them no matter how well you raise them, but your basic intent should be to provide them, through real sensitivity, with the best or the most optimum circumstance for their continuous growth throughout their childhood and adult life. (from an talk, 11/27/82)

Adi Da describes the toddler age as a time when parents must begin to release the child into association with the larger culture:

At the age of two we really begin to observe this socializing tendency. That tendency is a reflection of the sense of independence or self-consciousness that the child has, the sense that he no longer must be identical to the mother—he does not need the mother as he did as an infant. He has a relationship to the mother, but also on a certain level he is free, and therefore wants to become familiar with other things and people. The age of three is another important moment, in which children begin to say things quite spontaneously and parents begin to remark about how mature the child looks and so forth, how they suddenly seem to have grown up. You begin to have a feeling about them sometime around this age that they are independent in a way they never were before, and you are not in the mood any longer to indulge their infantilism. You may have the sense that they should be a lot more grown up, even though it is not quite true.

These are all signs that the child does not need you as a parent in the same way he did before. He needs a different kind of relationship to you in which he has more freedom but also more responsibility. You must make the lesson of responsibility at that age, when the moral growth of the truly human character should begin. From that point the child should be granted more contact with a larger society in the best of circumstances, where many women share responsibility for children. There should be a more formal approach to his learning and also a more formal approach to his responsibilities in relation to other people and in relation to the things with which he has contact. At the age of three, then, children need more demands placed on them, while at the same time they need acknowledgment of their relative freedom from the mother-child game. ("Children Must Be Liberated", (8/5/78).

When the child does awaken to a felt sense of individuation at the beginning of the toddler age, he or she may engage behaviors which psychologists call "rapprochement," or "re-approaching" of the mother. The growing sense of separation and individuality is disorienting, and the child seeks reassurance from the mother. The mother should certainly give the child the assurance he or she needs, while not insisting on giving more mothering than is actually required. In this way, room is made for the father force to enter the child's life and mature him. This in no way means that the motherly or sustaining force should be removed from the child's life. Adi Da points out that "children need intimacy as the constant occasion of their existence." The nurturing force should be full, but the responsibility to be Happy, and to resort to relationship, must begin to shift from others to self at the toddler age. The agency of this transition is the father force. To the degree that the parent is not free of his or her own childhood wounds, he or she will tend to reinforce the sense of separation and bondage to the parent cult by trying to console the child, rather than requiring self-transcendence and resort to inherent Happiness.

Adi Da: Women and men must grow up spiritually and humanly, and then relate to children rightly and not make a self-indulgent neurotic connection with them. Women tend to have relationships with children that are expressions of their neurosis. A woman, in her feeling of being unloved, becomes attached to her child in the same way that little old ladies become attached to their poodles. She feels there is an inherent bond of love. The child loves her, and that feeling is more important for the woman than the fact that she loves the child. She loves the child, but that love is largely dependent on her receiving signs that she is loved by the child. Women particularly use their relationship to the child in this way. They feel inherently loved by the child and indulge him or her in various ways merely to keep the child in a mood in which the child expresses the signs that the woman interprets to be love. Thus, the woman, who basically has a neurotic problem about feeling loved, indulges in this relationship with the child, who she feels loves her. She does not really serve the child's development into adulthood. She keeps the child in a rather infantile, animal-like state, like the poodle. She indulges the child and does everything she can to keep the child in a good mood, attracted to her as mother, shining innocently at her, and so forth. She rarely considers what the child needs for his or her development. ("The Dynamic of the Two-Man Con", 4/18/84).

Adi Da also compassionately explains the origin of this lack of service:

You must love everyone, but you are in love with only certain people with whom you enjoy a special intimacy. When we fall in love with children we feel an extraordinary passion. This is why people fail so often at being parents. They do not rightly serve the future of their children because of this love-connection. They do not relinquish attachments.

Parents—both mother and father—are inherently in love with their children. The mother Is especially in love with her son or daughter. There is no question about it. The child might as well be a stranger, you see. The child is a stranger who fell out of her body. But she is in love with this person. In Love! Just as she is with her husband. It is not sexual. It is a profound love-connection. Parents must know what serves their children so that they will relinquish the clinging tendencies of this love-attachment for the sake of their children. ("I Love Everyone with This Passion", 5/8/84).

Thus the toddler age is the time in which the dynamic of "two-man con" or the play between nurture and challenge, which is the principle of growth, is set in motion via the introduction of the challenging or fatherly force.

Adi Da: I have spoken about the "two-man con" in the world of salesmanship. My father used it, in fact—not at all to swindle people, but simply as part of the process of persuasion.

This is how it works: Two men with entirely different qualities approach the people they are trying to persuade. One plays something like the feminine role of being on the side of the people to whom they are making the sale. He is very sympathetic with them, communicating a sense that he might be able to influence the other guy, who plays the male role, hard-line, hard-edged, pressing them to make a decision.

Although this dynamic is frequently used in salesmanship, the principle is taken out of life. This same dynamic is what persuades us, moves us on, makes us grow. It may take the form of conflict, but it is intended to work creatively. These two principles are present in every aspect of our lives. One is nurturing, supportive, and connects us to everything, makes us feel loved, makes us feel familiar, and evokes the loving, radiant disposition in us. The other makes the demand, frustrates us, evokes the capacity in us to overcome an obstacle, deal with ourselves, deal with what is difficult, move into new areas of experience and so on. ("The Dynamic of the Two-Man Con").

The father force must be a consistent factor in the child's life, but it must be brought artfully and sensitively. If the father force is brought too soon or too suddenly the child will interpret it as unlove, but if it is not brought strongly enough, growth is stunted. The transition from dependence on others for sustenance and nurturing to the capacity to receive and accept challenge, a "non-negotiable" demand, without collapsing into the mood of betrayal, begins around eighteen months and can mature at the age of four, if the demand has been brought to the child consciously, compassionately, and consistently. In other words, a child may be capable of receiving an absolute demand without feeling unloved and betrayed by the age of four if he or she has been rightly disciplined.

In the beginning, the adult will have to attract the child into consenting to receive the demand for practice. Once a two-year-old was sitting at lunch with her mother, surrounded by other ladies, one of whom was a teacher at her school. When the teacher pointed out to the girl that she was not eating the cauliflower she had been given, the girl replied, "I don't like it. It doesn't taste good." The teacher tried coaxing the girl, in effect focusing the girl's attention on doing something she didn't want to do. Then, remembering the Master's injunction to draw children into the love-relationship, the teacher began to invoke the girl's feeling-service. She pretended to listen to the cauliflower, and told the girl somberly, 'The cauliflower says she'll cry if you don't eat her." Just then, the girl's mother finished her lunch and was getting up to leave. The girl called out, "Wait! I have to eat this cauliflower!" and promptly ate it happily.

There may be times when a child needs to be drawn into the challenge through negotiation, i.e., your help in exchange for their cooperation. For example, if a child has been asked to finish a plate of food he doesn't like, and he will not consent immediately, it is fine for the adult to step back from the demand and offer help In deciding which of the foods he definitely has to eat and how much and if he can then have an extra bite of something he does like. The point of stepping back from or softening a demand you have already forcefully made, or making a "deal", is to allow the children to feel their relationship with you, and to allow you to re-initiate the challenge at the highest level at which they are able to receive it and actually practice. Such a gesture also communicates the graciousness of God. If the force of the demand has been too strong because you forgot to exercise humor and compassion, feel free to change the situation and to assert your own vulnerability. Children react when they have lost intimacy. Let them feel your love so that your demand doesn't come off as an impersonal decree that they don't know how to cope with and will tend to collapse in the face of.

Adi Da reminds us: It is not easy for a child to recognize what is valuable in the midst of the bombardment of experience which anyone encounters during childhood. If we are to help children to realize that intimacy is the primary value, then love must prevail in the child's life. Only in this way can intimacy be brought into the foreground of his or her experience If the pleasure of intimacy is absent, if love is not freely given, then the child is automatically reduced to manipulative, reactive efforts to attain love and attention. (Look at the Sunlight on the Water, p. 66.)

Summary Points

1. The growth process is one in which the individual is progressively differentiated and granted his or her independence, coincident with demonstrated responsibility.

2. You must propose a will stronger than the child's. Otherwise, regression results.

3. Children need intimacy as the constant occasion of their existence.

4. At the age of three, children need more demands placed on them.

5. Prior to the toddler age, nurturing is the only force actively brought to a child.

6. With the event of the challenging force in the child's life, the dynamic of the "two-man con," nurture-challenge, is set in motion.

7. The father, or challenging, force must be artfully and sensitively introduced and increased. This is to be done consistently, constantly, and compassionately.

8. A non-negotiable demand can begin to be given at the toddler age and, if applied artfully throughout ages two and three, can be fully received by age four.

The Culture of Expectation

based on a talk, 6/20/82, (Look at the Sunlight on the Water)

Children must be "up against" themselves. They must be involved in self-transcendence. Unless parents begin to educate their children according to the principles of this Way in the early years of life, they will turn out to be the usual rebellious adolescents. Most of the time teachers and parents let the children "off the hook." Almost all children have a complete self-orientation, pursuing their own amusement, their own vitality, except when adults demand a little bit of them now and then. The discipline of self-transcendence must be obliged constantly! It is frequently being abandoned by children because parents and teachers abandon it themselves. Because the adults do not consistently bring the discipline to their own lives, they also do not bring it to the children. They tend to think that every child's life must be play, amusement, and pleasantries, but that is just the usual life of Narcissus.

The children's condition of existence must be one in which they are obliged to live with sensitivity. They must be obliged to be relaxed, they must be obliged to practice service in all relations, and they must be sensitive to and mindful of one another. They need to learn to serve others consistently as a real responsibility. Children must only occasionally be allowed play that engages their vitality vigorously. Of course, it is not that they should never have physical activities or play. But the kind of play in which they are allowed to be just little vital creatures should be available to them only like an occasional "dessert." As with adults, so with children. If adults do not enter seriously into the process of spiritual practice, then they will not oblige their children to do so either. Thus children tend to be happy little superficial egos who cannot be responsible when they are confronted with the real facts of existence. As soon as children begin to feel our demands or feel that life itself is a demand, then there is nothing but reactivity from them.

Children should express a feeling, quiet energy. Therefore, adults must introduce a "culture of expectation" for children and maintain it. And it must be maintained to be effective! They tend to think they are supposed to make life casually pleasant for children. This is not true. Every time a child dramatizes his or her particular strategy to gain the attention of others, he or she should be confronted with a definite expectation—an expectation that is not superficially enjoyable, so that the child will be made to see his or her own Narcissistic activity. Children must come to understand that they may be required to do things that they may not want to do. In other words, children must be given the structure in which to learn about both pleasure and pain. If children only lead a life of play, they will never be impressed by truly moral circumstances, nor will they be impressed with the total world of the Divine Reality. They will not see significant things about themselves—except their vital game—and this does not serve them. The being grows through confrontation, difficulty, and demand. Children are very repetitive. They repeat the same vital games day after day. Where are the new signs of their adaptation, where is their higher growth?

We must be consistent in our service to children all day long. There must be this true or moral demand. Never step aside from it. If we consistently change our expectations of children, they will not change! Introduce requirements and discipline children if they do not meet them. Do this in the midst of a life of loving intimacy, for intimacy is the healing principle. Children must learn to be calm all day long, whatever they are doing. Adults make them stressful by allowing or encouraging them to lead a self-oriented vital life, and in this sense their play is disturbed. Calmness is pleasant, whole-body feeling is pleasurable. Children's wild, vital play is actually disturbing them, and they become dependent on feeling disturbed. They feel it is necessary for happiness, whereas it is a calm, balanced, feeling life that is truly pleasurable. We must help children become sensitive to other people and teach them how to cooperate and serve in all their relations. Also, children should learn to bring feeling and sensitivity to the meditative exercise, as given in What to Remember to Be Happy, and to other devotional practices appropriate to their stage of life. These activities serve the process of the child's relationship to the Mystery of existence.

One child recently boasted, "I am supposed to remember the names of the characters in the Disney book One Hundred and One Dalmatians." Children should not be given such trivial education. An assignment such as this is the equivalent of junk food in the diet. Thus far, their diet is actually better than their moral training. This random moral instruction of them is the equivalent of junk food, whereas they should be talking about spiritual life, about the Mystery. They should be talking and learning about spiritual Teachers, and studying moral, religious, and spiritual stories. Children should be introduced, constantly and all day long, to a non-ordinary way of life. Find a way to make their lessons be aligned to the Teaching of Truth and with this spiritual Way of life. Their lessons should have moral and spiritual significance, and children should not be instructed in a way that merely impresses them, but that truly awakens their understanding.

Another common misunderstanding relative to children is that parents and teachers often think children are supposed to feel that they are the center of everyone's life, almost to the point where they begin to think

they are the center of the universe. There is no reason why anybody should have that tendency reinforced. Even at a very young age there is no cause for children to think they are the center of everyone's world. They must be brought into relational force with others. They must be served to move out of their independent self-involvement into the condition of relationship.

My Teaching as it applies to education has been available for many years, but it has not been used. The situation of children in the community is the same as that of the adult practitioners. The instructions are very clear, but nothing changes. Parents and teachers will sit down with their children and talk to them every now and then, and have occasional serious considerations with them, but they never communicate to them a consistent cultural expectation. Thus, their moral teaching is only "dessert" to the children and is not really taken into account. It is only a momentary diversion from the child's life of vitalizing.

In the usual life of children everything is play, and they are very lazy when it comes to service. There is an inconsistent demand placed on them without proper consequences for their actions. They are constantly involved with their superficial egoic dramas, instead of being calm, considerate individuals. In a traditional setting children would attend a brahmacharya school and live a completely regimented life under very severe discipline, with play as an occasional diversion. In modern American society, play is a way of life. The ultimate ideal is to be totally self-involved and even make your living out of being self-involved.

In traditional spiritual societies, however, play was considered a "dessert." Teachers and parents fail to understand this. They constantly return to the "life-as-play" idea. Because their demands are not consistent, the children escape the edge of discipline necessary for true human growth. Children should not be permitted to casually leap around and vitalize. That kind of play should be a "dessert." The basic life of a child should be quiet and sensitive. It should be a learning process, an intuitive life of positive feeling and free energy and attention. If children's intuitive capacity is developed at an early age, they will not suffer from, and have to deal with, the usual self-centered orientation in their later lives.

There should not be a lot of wild, vital play. Children do not know anything about true play! We have to consciously introduce them to play. We have to teach them in a way that is a balanced expression of whole-body equanimity. Otherwise children use play as a form of self-possession.

Unfortunately, parents and teachers bring this kind of discipline to children only occasionally, whereas it must be maintained constantly. It must be obliged all day long. A child's life should not be anything that adults are committed to in their own childish and adolescent strategies. Adults as well as children are committed to vital stimulation, amusement, and distraction; this is the way most people are driven to live. It is already a big deal for people to put aside an hour for meditation. Therefore, meditation cannot serve any useful purpose, because as soon as the hour is over they either return to their stressful life of "getting things done" or to their self-indulgence of random vitalizing. Thus, no real energy is brought to the practice of spiritual life or to the creation of true community.

If adults fail to bring this discipline to their own lives and to their children, then they give their children no gift. If there is no discipline of expectation for children, then adults are performing a total disservice to them. In the life of every child there must be calmness, sensitivity, and behavioral appropriateness. And the key to the fulfillment of this expectation is to vigorously maintain it all day long, every day, throughout the childhood years. Only then is the child's energy and attention free to feel and participate in the Mystery of existence.

There is a basic principle that should be the underlying structure in the life of every child: Strict cultural discipline, maintained consistently for a very long time. During childhood that is basically how children should be served. Their casual play and vitalizing should be restricted in a disciplined culture of expectation, while they learn to fully adapt to the responsibilities of the second and third stage and the laws of mature human life. People have to make a turnabout relative to the way they serve their children and what they expect their lives to be. If you were to maintain this discipline over many years, you would see a profound change in the children—but it has to be maintained. If people would seriously approach this Teaching and use the wisdom that is given, then a very different level of maturity can emerge in the lives of their children.

Unfortunately, people do not want to deal rigorously with themselves. They want life to be a constant diversion, not a discipline. And when they choose a life of discipline, they tend to spend most of their time with their reactions. People have to learn how to generate discipline from their own Place. Instead of being hyperactive and exploiting life, they have to become sensitive, calm, and observant. This is the best way for an adult to live, and likewise it is the best way to raise and educate children. Establish a disciplined spiritual culture of expectation, and oblige children to its demands and responsibilities. Otherwise, by the time they are twenty, they will only be self-involved chippies and punks, like every other self-centered adolescent, suffering and screaming their brains loose. Why bring them up for that?

Summary Points

1. Children must be constantly obliged to transcend themselves. Otherwise, they develop a self-orientation that leads to conventional adolescence.

2. Children must be obliged to be relaxed, to practice service in all relations, and to be sensitive to and mindful of one another. If children only lead a life of play, they will not see significant things about themselves, and they will not grow.

3. We must be consistent in our service to children all day long. If we consistently change our expectations of them, they will not change.

4. Children should be talking and learning about spiritual teachers and studying moral, religious, and spiritual stories.

5. Children should be served to move out of their self-involvement into the condition of relationship.

6. Because of our conventional life-as-play idea, children escape the edge of discipline necessary for true human growth.

7. If children's intuitive capacity is developed at an early age, they will not have to suffer the usual self-centered orientation in their later years.

8. Children need to be instructed to play in a way that is an expression of whole-body equanimity. Otherwise, they use play as a form of self-possession.

Session Two

A Disciplined Life Is about Enjoyment

One of the reasons we tend to shrink from discipline is that we ourselves do not want to submit to a disciplined life, and thus we have the idea that a formal, disciplined, orderly life is dull, gloomy, and restrained. And we pass this idea onto our children in subtle and overt ways, letting them "off the hook," just as we indulge ourselves. Discipline and order, however, are simply the right context of ecstasy, the environment in which energy and attention are free for intimacy, true pleasure, God-love. Spiritual life is not about being "neat, skinny, and right."(I Am Happiness, p. 55.) It is about the "infinite pleasure of love." In this session we will continue to consider the necessity of a disciplined life for children and its means.

Spiritual Discipline as the Structure of Life

(excerpts from a talk by Adi Da, 12/12/81.)

I notice that children often do not show signs of real interest in anything in the universe. They often act very dull, as if they are completely uninvolved and unenthusiastic about anything in the universe at all. This is a sign that they are only involved in dramatizing their egoic dilemma. They must become involved in studying and doing something that is of great and challenging interest to them. Otherwise, they are all just a bunch of "low-brows." And children should not be confined in their discipline—their life must be about something. The difficulties children express are not always a matter of a lack of discipline. What you must do is put their attention on something other than themselves and their problems. You must begin to attract them into other areas of existence and oblige them to stop dramatizing their egoic psychology. Discipline should be the structure of life—that is all there is to it. Children have to know where they stand, and they have to know what is expected of them. Any child who dramatizes a rebellious, punk, egoic strategy must be served immediately. It is not to be permitted. They must know that anything contrary to the discipline of true spiritual Practice is not acceptable. A disciplined life is not merely not doing certain things, but it is about enjoyment. It is about enjoyment with people and things with which they are interested. You must divert children from vital, ritualistic, imitative games of jealousy and power, in which they are merely reinforcing a worldly psyche that will only make them conventional adolescents when they enter the third stage of life. They must very clearly understand what the disciplines are. In fact, write the disciplines that they are responsible for on charts on the wall and make sure they know exactly what their responsibility is every day. They should know exactly what they have to do, and they should just do it. They must be taught that the root of discipline is Happiness, Ecstasy, and God-Communion, and they must learn how to express their life as enjoyment through the disciplines. Children should not always be with adults. When I was young, from about age six on, I was hardly ever around adults. It is true that children need supervision, they need help, and they need the discipline and guidance of adults, but part of the problem dramatized by children is the lack of ability to live freely. Living freely, however, must take place in a structure of understanding and sanity. Thus, granting them freedom to do new things should be part of their education. Part of your acknowledgment of them is that they can be responsible for themselves. They are given freedom only on the basis of living the moral and practical disciplines of their spiritual life. Thus, the more disciplined they are and the saner they are, the more freedom they can have. This freedom is not about children wandering around together whenever they want, but it is about being able to spend time alone, being able to do different things by themselves where they are not always observed. Children should not feel that they are always being observed, perpetually under the eye of an adult. They must understand that if they show the signs of responsibility and live the disciplines appropriate to their stage of development, they can be given access to such freedom. The activities that children enjoy should only be allowed when they show the signs of this responsibility in their disciplined life. Thus, their life is fundamentally based on the incidents and activities that they enjoy, on a life of intimacy and happiness, but it is also rounded on a life of structured discipline. If they are not disciplined, then the enjoyable aspects of their lives are not granted. This is a very basic psychology in serving children. This is the way they must begin to live.

Summary Points

1. Dullness and lack of enthusiasm in children is a sign that they are only involved in dramatizing their egoic dilemma. They must he involved in study and activities that are interesting and challenging.

2. Discipline should be the structure of life. A disciplined life is about real enjoyment. Children must be taught that the root of discipline is Happiness, Ecstasy, and God-Communion, and they must learn how to express their life as enjoyment through the disciplines.

3. Children should understand that freedom is granted on the basis of responsibility. The activities they enjoy should only be allowed when they are founded in a disciplined life.

Discipline Is the Means of Adapting to the Laws of Life

(excerpt from a talk, 1/5/76)

Student: Adi Da, we tend to be afraid to discipline our children. We think that it's going to stunt their growth or that they are not going to be free and able to express their freedom.

Adi Da : Individuals have a negative idea of what discipline is, as if it were always a matter of preventing a child from doing something. Real discipline is the providing of conditions through which children may adapt to the laws of life. It is not hand slapping. Punishment is one form of discipline. Punishment, however, is only useful when you already have the love and confidence of a child. In that case, stopping them from doing something works as a discipline because they feel the possibility of separation from you. The basis of such discipline is natural affection, not their dislike of you or your dislike of them. When discipline is not based on love, a shock is created between the child and the adult so that the Life-Force cannot flow between them. If that occurs, you must temporarily remove the child from the situation and allow him to be in a restful, easeful condition. When there is real conflict between an adult and a child, basically you must take them out of one another's company for a little while in order to serve them.

Children and the Vital Dimension of Life

(based on conversations with Adi Da)

All relationships are forms of spiritual Practice. All relationships, all experiences, are conditions in which to understand, conditions in which to fulfill the obligations of spiritual life. It is useful to learn how to deal with children because they represent something in you that you are reluctant to encounter and transcend. The vital dimension of life is what you are reluctant to deal with, and children are very vital beings. They do not fundamentally represent much else. Whenever the opportunity arises to interact with the vital dimension of life, we usually become complicated and disturbed. Where the force of life is manifest to us, we are required to make choices. When we confront a child or a forceful person or a dramatic event that demands response from us, we are put in contact with the vital dimension in ourselves and all the complications that it represents. Learning how to live with a baby or with children is a great lesson, therefore. It is not simply the lesson of tolerating the disturbance they can create for you. It is a matter of really learning how to live with children. In the process you will also serve the undoing of the point of view of vital shock in your own case. All relationships are useful conditions for spiritual Practice because they all bring you to life, whereas the discipline conceived in isolation as a self-effort leading toward a goal does not involve the confrontation with life, does not involve the undoing of vital shock. Rather, it involves the exploitation of your need to escape the implications of vital life.

Summary Points

1. The vital dimension of life is what we are reluctant to deal with. We usually become complicated and disturbed when the force of life is manifest to us and we are required to make choices.

2. Learning how to live with a baby or with children is a great lesson. All relationships are useful conditions for spiritual Practice because they bring you to life.

Self-Transcendence Is a Necessity from the Beginning

(from a talk by Adi Da, 11/23/80)

Many of the so-called games that children play are ways of reinforcing attitudes and behaviors that are relatively negative. If you watch children playing spontaneously, you will notice that they usually play and are animated by power games and neurotic self-ideas. A great deal of what we call spontaneous play on the part of children is really not spontaneous. It is rather mechanical exploitation of the problems they have. Therefore, the most useful form of bringing up children is one that constantly helps and obliges them to bypass neurotic patterns of self-involvement. In traditional religious communities, therefore, the upbringing of children was relatively formal. Formality, however, does not eliminate the possibility of spontaneous, happy play. It does require children to deal with formal demands and adapt to them rightly, rather than blithering along "spontaneously." Children must deal with real conditions, real demands, and overcome their own limitations.

I can observe karmic personality characteristics in an infant. I am sure you all can observe these characteristics, too. They are there from the very beginning. These qualities are not acquired through the child's social life or through their childhood experience. Their childhood reinforces those qualities, adds a certain emphasis here and there, but there is a karmic personality present from the beginning. Therefore, from the very beginning of a child's life, a useful education is one that enables him to transcend himself. It is not that you are obliged to overcome yourself only when you are older. The karmic limitations of personality are there to be overcome from infancy. That is why I have spent so much time considering with you all how to rightly educate children in the first three stages of life and help them to overcome limitations, require them to adapt, to really grow, so that when they are adults, they are not the usual neurotic individuals who must seek from scratch for the meaning and force of existence.

In the case of an individual who is uncommon, highly developed spiritually or psychically, there should be signs that you may observe in them relatively early in life. For them the same education that is appropriate for all children in the religious culture is appropriate. However, your observation of them will cause you to serve them in a somewhat different manner, perhaps, to encourage the sensitivity you have observed. When you notice a child with a certain dimension of spiritual qualities—and the freedom that represents—you will not want to suppress those qualities through conventional demands for certain kinds of behavior or personal qualities. There are some individuals—tulkus in the Tibetan tradition, for example—who are actually in the stream of helping in the world in some fundamental sense, who have transcended the ego base already. They are inserted into this lifetime, therefore, for a fundamental spiritual purpose, rather than the conventional, mechanical purposes of an ego. If someone is observed to have these qualities, then serve the development of the life that they are here to live. Whenever we notice an individual of this type, we will consider what should be done differently with them.

In any case, all the children should be brought up in the essential formality of true culture. You must be sensitive to them as individuals to see what neurotic patterns we must help them work beyond, as well as what exceptional qualities we must draw out. Exceptional qualities might appear in terms of ordinary human capabilities, and if we observe those in children, we will help them to develop these capabilities. Likewise, ask all the children about their dreams and about their visions. The "eyes and ears" exercise in What to Remember to Be Happy, in which the children practice inversion and seeing things at the level of the psyche, should not be merely a game in which they make up things to tell you. Children do see all kinds of things and dream all kinds of things. You can condition them to not see certain things, to believe that certain things are unreal and to have a Westerner's state of mind about it all, but if you do not implant them with that limitation, you will observe them communicating about a psychic life.

It is true that before puberty the being often has more of this free, psychic life. At puberty a certain force of physical existence begins to manifest, and the psychic life recedes, but this is not to be viewed as a negative event. It is simply a characteristic of our development. It is generally true that the state of the psyche changes at that time, and the glandular system operates differently. At puberty, the pituitary body, the sexual hormones, and all the related growth mechanisms begin to come very strongly into play. Previous to that time the subtler features of the endocrine glands and the pineal body are in dominance, and thus there is more free psychism. Therefore, it is true that children, if you avoid conditioning them in the limited terms of conventional Western thinking, have a kind of psychic life that they can communicate about. The exercise in What to Remember to Be Happy is intended to enable children to be communicative about their psychic existence. When children are communicative in that way, you have an opportunity to observe their characters in a way that you could not perhaps otherwise observe. In this case, you have the opportunity to discover which among the children have more of this extraordinary dimension active in them, and you can acknowledge it and help to support it throughout their lifetime.

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