For a better tomorrow

Piyush: Today, everyone wants their child to be better than the others. What suggestions would you give to people to try and bring a sense of balance into children?

Sadhguru: Parents in India are pushing their children towards a certain educational qualification because survival is still a strong motivating factor. Except for a thin layer of society that has gone beyond that, in most Indian families it is, “Somehow get into engineering; get into medicine; get into IAS; get into IT” – because the survival mode is still strong. When your survival is in question, everything is done by compulsion.

The dictates of survival will largely determine what you can do and what you cannot do. But once you have gone beyond the dictates of survival, you should consciously choose. Creating another level of compulsiveness is sheer madness.

Our education systems are still in that mode. They were created for you to become a cog in the larger machinery. Reducing a human being to a cog is only significant as long as survival is in question. Once that is taken care of in a society, creating cogs should not happen anymore.

First of all you must understand that children don’t belong to you. They don’t come from you – they only come through you. You must always be grateful and see it as a privilege that another life passes through you and becomes real. . It is not for you to fulfil your unfulfilled dreams through your children. It is not for you to drive them or harness them in any particular way.

The moment a child arrives, a whole lot of parents think it is time to teach. I want to ask you a simple question. If your child is below 10 years of age, who is more joyful – you or the child? The child, isn’t it? Then who should be a consultant for life – the miserable one or the joyful one?

In the process of the so-called growing up, people have become so rigid. You hardly hear simple, joyful laughter anywhere. When a child comes, without knowing why, you laugh, you crawl under the sofa, you learn to throw a ball properly. It is not for you to shape and twist them and make them like you or not make them like you. Your business is only to protect them from other influences. This is the best thing you can do.

People keep asking me, “Sadhguru, how come you can do a whole range of things?” The thing is, I remained uneducated, which is not an easy task. From the moment you are born, your parents, your teachers, just about anyone in the world is trying to teach you a whole lot of things that never worked in their lives.

They think they know everything, but they don’t know a thing about themselves. If you could keep your children just the way they were born – an active intelligence, no conclusions – you would be doing the best thing for them.