OUR CHILDREN

In conversation with fellow parents reference is often made to the "sacrifices" of parenthood. As parents we do make great sacrifices for our children, of time, energy, emotion and, of course, spirit. And although, ultimately, Love is not in itself personal, we do also seem to make sacrifices of love, too.

What one rarely hears, and which can be greeted by parents with exclamations of surprise, is the higher truth that whatever sacrifices we may make for them, our children sacrifice much more. With the inexorable passage of time from the moment of birth, the child will sacrifice its proximity to the Godhead, its innocence, vulnerability and intuition, its sense of wonder and, not least, its wisdom. We have all made these sacrifices, I know. We all must take the journey from the womb into the world. But no one seriously believes that, excepting realised individuals, any of us retain our child-like perfection much beyond puberty. Such is God's design, ineffable in its perfected symmetry, but as parents and, synonymously, teachers, it behooves us to consider at length what precisely the sacrifices made by our children for us signify.

Fundamentally, a young child, say up to the age of five, exhibits one primary characteristic that is a key to understanding the state of early childhood and its unique, fleeting gifts to us all. This is its inborn, unlimited capacity to give and receive love. Previous to the conditioning that will, in little time, lower barriers in consciousness that limit and distort this capacious loving, the young child is able to accept and return enormous amounts of love. Love, being itself a force of nature, essentially impersonal, seeks and finds and exploits in the child its capacity to transmit and receive love openly. Confronted with this capacity for love and loving, we as adults must feel chastened. What it intimates about our own loss of innocence is quite devastating. What this realisation requires is every effort to meet our children in love, and in so doing challenge conventional wisdom that holds that the unconditional loving sacrifices of our children are to somehow taken for granted and dismissed as merely an inevitable stage, rather than the crucial interface between spirit and matter, space and time, reality and illusion they really are. You see, the child feels love in much the same way we might believe God does: free of limits, united, unbound. Its access of space is relatively unburdened by time, its access of reality is comparatively unclouded by illusion. Given that time is a human mental construct, it is also true to say that children are, spiritually, ageless, as are we all. Their seeming age is a purely subjective, and in spiritual terms irrelevant. In essence, a small child is, in its capacities, a cipher for the Divine. The humility of the small child is extraordinary and, as has been said better elsewhere, its ability to accept what it does not understand equally remarkable. Children suffer a great deal, and yet they not only rise above, but also beyond their suffering, by virtue of their inborn loving.

The time before our children enter full-time education, before, as Krishnamurti once said with characteristically blunt acuity, we "throw them to the wolves", is that time when we can appreciate to the full what sacrifices they make for us and what they have to teach us. As a parent, I am certainly not alone in having spent years seeking genuine spiritual teachers and teaching before finding, in children (and I must add, partner), spiritual teachers of the highest caliber. Indeed, children are not just superb spiritual teachers, but masters, whose closeness in time to pre-natal states of existence makes them factually not far removed from the Godhead and therefore carrying afresh that wisdom and even realisation we are on this path of life to attain.

I had this graphically illustrated when, at three, my eldest daughter exhibited knowledge of the after-death state sufficient to finally convince me of the reality of reincarnation. Her transmission of inborn wisdom, intuition and extemporal knowledge astounded and intimidated me. Before her soul certainty I stood a veritable neophyte. Similarly, when once my middle daughter stated that the sun is God's face" I could but agree: what more concise and elegant expression could be made of a central, mysterious truth? And what of the time my eldest, having never before been exposed to Bhuddist teaching, responded to my request for a cover illustration for my copy of The Heart Sutra with a drawing done in minutes that captured not only the essence of the beauteous Sutra but life itself: under a blazing sun, on a softly round hilltop captioned "Life" two children play catch with a heart captioned "Love"? What inborn, timeless mystical wisdom produces such a response instantly?

I use these anecdotes not only to celebrate the spirituality of our children but to point to an important fact: we cannot truly educate our children until we allow them first to educate ourselves. Our children will, if given opportunities, teach us much. Even to regard children as our "greatest natural resource" is to demean them: these are the words of politicians and educationalists for whom all the challenges of childhood come down to ways and means to packaging power they cannot understand and are unconsciously ignorant or fearful of. Children are not a "resource", and to so designate them is to intimate the exploitation they already suffer and endure at the mercy of the educational establishment and, despite its pale protestations, the political establishment, with its perverse and transparent fetish for mediocrity as a guarantee of servitude. After all, what politician speaks volubly about the education our children can give us? What educationalist stakes his reputation on proving the same? And note I say "giving", as opposed to the forms of taking we dignify at our peril as "education".

Indeed, the entire concept of education as a thing given to those not completed is criminally misleading. When we educate a child we merely augment the peripheral, perishable surface consciousness of an intrinsically, indivisibly whole, perfected and, in a sense, inviolably empty being. We must be surpassingly circumspect as we begin to interact with and educate a child. In its newly incarnated form, the mysterious entity we regard as a child is in fact in constant contact and interaction with realities and spiritual dimensions we as adults have generally been distanced from to the point where we doubt their existence at all. Our education of our children must run parallel to their natural wisdom and intuition, complement and augment but never trespass, devalue or dismiss same. Our children come to us to rescue us from the ravages of time, not crystallise it. They come to surrender freedom but to explain it. They are the greatest lateral thinkers, and the deepest. Their simplicity is awesome, their insight unforgiving. We ignore their lesson and, more importantly, their love, at our utmost peril. In the mind of child, in its seeing, in its bountiful heart and soaring soul we find mirrored the Divine principle: creativity, diversity, unity. Our responsibility is to be soul miners, not soul underminers. Life is the door, love the key.

So where to begin? Long before our children enter full-time education (and let us agree that not all children can avoid it, no matter how loving and enlightened their parents or carers) let us affirm and expand in them their inborn, unbounded spiritual lovingness. Let us speak not down to them, but with them. Let us let ourselves be taught. It has been my experience that in loving, the action of children is similar to that of water in nature: it will always take the path of least resistance. It may take time but eventually, in almost any given situation, patient observation and self-honesty will show us that a child seeks always to find the path least resistant to the expression of love. Not his love, or her love, but Love in its Divine, impersonal sense. The Love, therefore, of God. What our children come to teach us is that at birth we begin a journey not to God, but from Him. We will, of course, return to Him. But as we grow up, we will also sometimes be very far from Him indeed. Let us allow our children to see that their bridge to God, their love, is not built in vain, built from incarnations too many to count, from love too great to quantify. In conclusion, let us ask ourselves an important question: when the Christ spoke of "the little children" was He speaking not of inferiors but equals.

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