It is said that development and change are the laws of nature. Among all the living species, human race has the highest possibility of progress and transformation at both inner and outer levels. We keep on progressing from childhood till old age.
While this progress mainly comes through circumstances, our ideals and role-models also play an important role in bringing this change. People who are a part of our life also serve as precursors and sometimes an epitome for transformation.
Children – Inspiration and Teacher for Parents
While it is a general notion that our role model should be a person who is more advanced, knowledgeable and mature than us, in reality anyone, whosoever forces us to question ourselves and motivates us towards advancement can become our ideal irrespective of their age.
It is true that unless and until some exceptional situation or circumstance in life compels one to transcend the limits of one’s natural psychological-emotion-mental makeup, most people remain slaves to their outer nature that has been in turn shaped by their life experience and circumstances. This tendency is more prominent in grownups as compared to children. Kids are flexible in nature and can be much more easily moulded.
And sometimes a child can also become the reason for the desired change in the parents and others.
While we seek for inspiration outside, we forget this simple fact that with the birth of a child the whole atmosphere of the home gradually begins to change. The nature and behavior of parents as well as other members of the household start changing. The presence of a child becomes a blessing in disguise.
I am reminded of what the Mother says:
Children are very absorbing creatures. Everything must be organised for them, everything must be arranged in view of their welfare, and the whole aspect of life changes. Children are most important personages. When they are there, everything turns around them.
~ CWM, Vol. 5, p. 287
Children help parents and others who come in their contact to get closer to their own true nature. Taking care of children, and sometimes even being around them can invoke the qualities of the heart and of the psychic being like tenderness, compassion, love and humility.
Children can also point us in the direction of original thinking. Speaking of the innate imagination and creativity with which young children are often blessed with, the Mother says at one place:
The lover of the idea knows that it can come to him from the mouth of a child as from the mouth of a learned man. [. . .]
~ CWM, Vol. 2, p. 83
. . . if the thought of a child cannot have the precision of the thought of a man, neither does it have the fixity which results from laziness of habit and which in the adult prevents the thought from expressing itself whenever it does not belong to the categories which are familiar to him.
Thus we can learn from the child, how to think. As the Mother tells us, adults can distort or manipulate their thoughts to such an extent that this distortion stops the idea from expressing itself.
A child also teaches parents and other grownups to smile in all circumstances and to be happy at every moment.
Children are the promise and the glory of the future.
~ The Mother, CWM, Vol. 2, p. 155
Children — Dreamers of a New World
A child is honest, with truth shining through his eyes (except in some cases where some form of perversion has entered even before the birth of a child or later in its nurturing). Cheerfulness, generosity, patience, perseverance, and goodness are some of the qualities that come most naturally to young children.
Being in their company can help parents and other grownups un-learn some of their fixed habits of mind and old patterns of behaviour. Only then they can begin the path of re-learning how to prepare themselves to receive the light and grace of the new transformative consciousness.
The Mother reminds us “that it is among the children that will be found those who can begin the new race. Men are… crusted over.” (CWM, Vol. 11, p. 252)
Children can be conscious of the divine presence but cannot express themselves. Their innocence and selfless smile are generally their only forms of expressing their inner joy and a kind of complete reliance on the inner guiding presence.
When one is very young and as I say “well-born”, that is, born with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration, which for its child’s consciousness is a sort of ambition, for something which would be beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, a goodness without limits, and a conscious, constant success, a perpetual miracle. One dreams of miracles when one is young, one wants all wickedness to disappear, everything to be always luminous, beautiful, happy, one likes stories which end happily. This is what one should rely on. [. . . ]
Usually parents or teachers pass their time throwing cold water on it, telling you, “Oh! it’s a dream, it is not a reality.” They should do the very opposite! Children should be taught, “Yes, this is what you must try to realise and not only is it possible but it is certain if you come in contact with the part in you which is capable of doing this thing. This is what should guide your life, organise it, make you develop in the direction of the true reality which the ordinary world calls illusion.”
~ CWM, Vol. 9, p. 162
This reliance leads to greater and deeper discoveries within oneself. With right upbringing and education, specifically right environment and influence, the inner flame gradually grows and lights the child’s path to a conscious adulthood.
Another important way in which children can help parents grow is by mirroring their parents’ nature, specifically their defects and flaws. When parents see their shortcomings and defects of nature in their child, it acts like a shock and makes them realize the work they need to do upon themselves. Children thus provide some of the best opportunities for adults to progress, inner and outer.
Read:
The Mother on True Maternity and Conscious Parenting
~ Design: Raamkumar
