Eeshan, 10, in London, is of 4th generation in my worldwide spiritual family. He is my mantra-initiate and meditates daily. Daily he goes to the Swami’s picture to do pranam before he leaves for school.
Recently he came to see me with his parents.
He expressed himself thus:
I have three wishes to fulfil in this life:
... Third wish is to go and see the ice caves in Antarctica
Second wish is to visit outer space.
First wish is to become enlightened.

I told him in that context that when the Buddhists in Korea part from each other, their parting greeting is, “may you be enlightened”.

Dear Parent Reading this, what wishes have you cultivated in your child?

Dear Readers All, what are your greetings when parting from friends or family?

Swami Veda Bharati

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Children and Family Life

by Swami Veda Bharati

December 2002, The Meditation Center, Minneapolis, MN  

You know the sad thing about, I shouldn’t start with sad things but it’s there.  The whole question of family and yoga and family and meditation and family and spirituality and so on is that some time I get much too critical with all this talk.  A professor from ____University, very well known and published book on comparative religion.  I used to know him.  There is a series of programs on religions in different parts of the world and did some programs for BBC and that was shown here oh more than twenty years ago.  Pardon? No, no, Huston Smith is American.  He is British and so he was, this was still during the communist era and he goes into Bulgaria and asked them if you have Sunday schools?  He says what’s that?  Sunday school for teaching religion to children.  Why would you want to do that?  So he attended a church service and video taped.  Children were all there.  They were not put away separate.  So you can sit here and talk about how to bring the spirituality to children and then send them to a Sunday school in the basement somewhere while you are having your holy time.  That’s got to change.  It’s the adults who are responsible for the generation gap and they do it for their own convenience because they don’t want to be bothered and there is no opportunity for children to interact with that adult spiritual world and religious or spiritual teachings are not something that is taught.  It is something that is caught and you don’t give your children the opportunity to catch it from you but you rather teach it to them.  We have Saumya from Columbia she will tell you support the same because the attitude in South America is very different from the attitude here, you see.  Children participate and so that’s something that requires on the part of the adults the adjustment.  There are cultures of billions, and billions of people who are horrified to hear that a European or American child is put to sleep in a separate room from the parents.  You cannot imagine that babies sleep between the parents and they are not punished for coming and waking up the parents in the morning but oh that’s too much sacrifice and that’s where the problem is.  The separation and I don’t know what the solution is because it requires readjustment, whole readjustment.  Everybody is trying to write books and everybody it trying to read books and everybody is trying to discuss this all from the head.  They are changing the feelings of the participation of adults and children as becoming co-participants in the spiritual and religious experience.  It doesn’t matter if it is Catholic or it’s Lutheran or it’s Baptist or it’s Meditation Center or whatever, you know.  That’s what I want to point out and there are only three, four, five people.  Whether three, four, five people can make a change in their life or the lives of their daughters or their granddaughters, you know. 

Religion in the older culture is passed on by mothers and by religion I mean whatever form you want to say spirituality or anything, you know. In countries where still fifty percent of the population is illiterate and cannot read the Ramayana or cannot read the Bible or cannot read the Koran or whatever how do they pass it on?  And there the religiosity is much stronger and spirituality is much stronger because all those texts are remembered and recited by heart and mothers hold the babies in their laps and sing the text or chant the text or recite  the text and tell the stories that way not in some Sunday school but the problem is economic. The whole economic structure in these so called advanced societies it has become such that everybody has to work in order to remain poor.  Everybody has to work otherwise you can’t keep the family.  You can’t keep the rug under your feet and you can’t keep the roof over your head and so you have no time for your children.  Until you get back home the children are alone on their own.  So the sense of security and emotional security and so forth, you know, that you find in poorer cultures that are economically poorer countries is missing in economically richer countries. 

The cohesion, the togetherness and then people have taken all these sacred symbols and have made them into so much commercial things.  Here you have Santa Clause drinking Coca Cola.  I don’t know whose invention that is.  Right.  When people in India think that oh I am lucky to be having such close contact with America because I must be very, very rich I tell them, please forgive me, will you forgive me for what I’m going to say.  Probably.  I tell them America is the poorest country in the world.  No, no I am not talking spiritual I am talking economically.  Nobody owns anything.  In poorer countries people work hard and they buy a small house but then it is there house.  This credit card culture started off in India.  I was twenty years ago picked up somewhat in the cities and then people abandoned it because in those counties to be indebted is a dishonor all the way from Japan to Cairo.  The house you own belongs to the bank.  The car you own belong to the bank and the credit card company.  The clothes you are wearing belong to the credit card company.  You have nothing.  Why are you working so hard and children are unhappy and you are working so hard for them.  You still have got to go and spend that thousand dollars at Christmas otherwise the kids won’t be happy.  The kids will be very happy where they take a small little tin can and top.  Tin can top, make a hole in it, pick up a stick from somewhere, prick, put a nail and imagine it to be a chariot or a vehicle and play with that year after year and they are happy and they laugh.  It requires a complete overhaul of the thinking process but sometimes I get very pessimistic because I don’t see how that overhaul can take place without a mass movement, without a Gandhian mass movement.  We are all caught in the trap set by the richer segments of the population who pay no taxes and you are enriching the credit card companies and the banks.  I bought that house two blocks from here in 1974 for forty four thousand dollars, sold it in 1995 because we couldn’t keep up with the payments and from 1974 to 1995 on the house purchased for the overt price of forty four thousand I had already paid ninety four thousand dollars.  Everything is connected.  To pay ninety four thousand dollars and still not having finished paying on a house that was actually forty four thousand.  You have to neglect your children.  You have to send them away to day care.  You have to send them away to baby sitters.  You have to keep them apart.  You don’t have time to memorize psalms of David and croon those to them having them sit in your lap.  Be it the Ramayanya or be it something in China on the sutras in China and Japan or be it Psalms of David.  How many people here can recite the new testament by heart?  I know people who recite the whole of the Bhagavat Gita to their children by heart.  In the old days of education you used to have people reciting from Shakespeare.  How many people can recite from Shakespeare?  You can?  Good.  Oh, I see, ok, ok.  Pardon?  But it’s gone this generation, present generation can’t do that.  It’s a trap.  The whole society is in a trap.  All the declarations of war and security and this and a tax on America, everything is interconnected, is related.  Nothing is apart, nothing is separate and it requires the kind of movement Martin Luther led by following Gandhian principles.  A completely different movement needs to be led by someone of great spiritual strength and you just need to start giving priority to closer interaction, closer contact between these adults and children from the time they are in the womb.  Those who are not in child bearing age will have to make it possible for their daughters and daughters-in-law and I know the role the grandparents play is great in this country, you know.  It is still quite limited. 

I just started talking impromptu because these things have been bothering me, troubling me and I feel tortured inside me sometimes over these things, to see the society coming apart.  It can be changed by raising people’s consciousness, it can be changed.  It can’t be changed by somebody writing a big book and giving another how to bring spirituality back into the children of America, books won’t do it.  Someone of great spiritual strength would have to lead a movement and the only way we can secure your children’s future is by reducing your wants.  I keep saying ten percent, twenty percent reduction in the light bill, twenty percent reduction in your Christmas bills, twenty percent reduction in the size of your car, twenty percent reduction in the size of your TV screen.  It could be inversely proportional in giving feeling of security in the children so they want to listen to you.  Sitting down and preaching at them, forget it.  Children, small family, when they are small they love to sit down at the dinner table at the dinner time but if you look at the percentage of families who actually whole family eats their dinner together, you know, I don’t know.  I have a European, in Europe I have children, young men, young women who come on exchange programs.  They go back and they even up to now in Europe at least dinner time for the family is sacred.  It is sacred here among the older generation but it is not possible the way the economy is.  The way you have to carry the social, financial and economic obligations and the only way is to become less of a participant in everything, the credit card companies, you know.  It, as I said, can be done.  So many changes have occurred in American society within the last thirty years. 

When I first came toward the west I came to, when I left India in 1952 my first stop was in Africa then I came over to England.  Vegetarian, what’s that?  Now twenty percent of the US population says they are vegetarian.  They’re not but at least they say. The change has occurred.  Feminism has gone through several phases and is balancing out now into less of a confrontational and more of a participant thing between the genders and so those changes have occurred.  These changes can also occur.  It’s just a matter of raising the consciousness and changing the concept of what the family is.  Is it merely a fulfillment of certain instincts?  Is it merely keeping the sexual urge confined to more manageable proportions?  Is it merely the desire of the genes to perpetuate themselves?  I look at those thing and I read those things and I, what is this?  You create children because your genes want to perpetuate themselves.  Is that all there is to it?  What the genes do is the how but what about the why?  Just go home or shall I read something from my little booklet.  I write out these things, an urge comes, I’ve got to say this.  I don’t know how many people read it, you know.

This is a little booklet titled Yoga Polity, Economy and Family.  I just inquired today’s program, today is Thursday, on discussion on family, gate crash.  On the banks of a small tributary a jasmine shrub dropped a white blossom into the river.  Unbeknown to this jasmine shrub, in some other forest, a marigold was similarly dropped.  The two followed their own fated path flowing down the forest streams.  Somewhere below, the two forest streams merged their identities into that of a larger river.  The jasmine and the marigold, happily rippling down the course of the streams, took met, joined together petal with petal as though old friends from many life times.  Their stems became entangled with each other.  Bonded, they flowed together bobbing up and down, sometimes nearly drowning under a heavy wave or in a whirlpool, sometimes almost skimming over the placid water. So merged into each other were they that they forgot how far apart their origins had been.  In which two forests, by which little streams?  Stem by stem joined, petal to petal united.  As though from the beginning of eternity.  As though till the end of infinity. Ever to be there.  No one could tell their fragrances apart, so absorbed were they into each other, having submerged their identities into each other’s.  Forever, so one would think.

Along the way many a bit of pollen fell into the same river from diverse shrubs on the banks.  Many a stem.  Many a leaf.  Little twigs.  Seeds of many varieties.  Each from its own source.  Each with its own fear when it was first separated from its accustomed security of a lap.  Each assigned to some wave, to some ripple, to some whirl in the water.  Wafted, pushed, pulled; now submerging to certain death, but, no, now emerging to breathe again.  Carried along by the force of the same wind that was its breath too.

Some of these strangers, souls floating along the river of space and time, even clung to the petals and intertwined stems of our jasmine and the marigold.  Forever joined – or so one would think.  The river has no end.  More rivers join it.  IT changes its name.  It widens.  It becomes a bay, a sea, an ocean, a cloud.  Rains.  Into a mountain forest.  Flows down.  Stream again.  Tributary again.  Again a river.  The family intertwined floats along through trepidations of unruly rapids.  Through tremblesome fear of banishment to the very shore which had been their very source.  Through blossoming joy of a sun-filled day.  Through the threats posed by dark night.  Through moonlit pleasure scattered over the entire span of the river.  Every now and they  wised their petals to be wings to fly up to the moon in that distant blue mystery; they wished their stems to be feet to walk on the solid ground; they wished their tiny branch protrusions to be fins to dive to catch the other full moon that spontaneously appears and disappears in the depths of the river.  (It’s reflecting.)  It certainly cannot have any relationship to the moon up there in that high blue place.  That one remains full while the other one below ripples, folds, unfold, breaks up into pieces.  It definitely arises from some strange dark cave, oh so far, below the river where it is under attack from shadows of sin and darkness – so their philosophical inquiries into the nature of the universe made them conclude.  They “knew” that these conclusions were no less than revelations made to the marigold, empowered by the jasmine’s shakti, who had by now many a prophetic vision of their collective fate.  These visions became their faith, their religion, their source of support and of reassurance. 

And then a storm broke.  Harshly did it strike.  Mercilessly did it toss them about.  Cruelly did it break the bond and separated the marigold from his other self the beloved jasmine.  The Jasmine – drowned?  Broke all its petals?  Was exiled to the ground ashore?  Would rise to dwell forever in the moon on the high?  Dived and merged into the whiteness of the other moon down below?  What happens to jasmines when they are thus snatched from their beloved family?  The marigold was heartbroken, its stamens wilting.  All those who had joined together to form this, what would be a family together forever, were torn apart, forlorn. 

Another storm, another heavy wave, another proudly empowered stroke of the wind’s whip.  By and by the family was no more.  Each of its constituents was sent to its own fate.

A tragic end?  So it would seem, unless we follow each of the above members of the floral family to see what transpired further on.  Each went its way but continued on.  There are other channels in the country of space, other rivers in the land of time,  other streams in the landscape of causation.  There, the being casts to oblivion the past affections, commits to concealment the events gone by.  The self of the being flows on, gathers other alliances, makes other friendships, ties the knots of fresh bonds; this very being does, living happily, forever after –  or so it  assumes, till other storms break to start life all over again in the ten-trillionth cycle (of birth and death and birth and death.)

So goes the saga of mystery that is a family.  We mistake the impermanent for the permanent and become attached to it, as though it would be forever.  Each of us, ever-pure, ever-wise, ever-free being of light has its, our, continuity wrapped between sheets of eternity.  Within this, Mother Eternity’s placenta’s security, we go through all that transpires in the life of a fetus.  We begin, we quicken, we kick about restless, we wince, we grow, we emerge.  We sup of a new mother’s breast.  We toddle.  We lisp a language.  We learn.  We grow some more into youth or maiden.  Jasmine, we meet a marigold.  Marigold we cherish intertwining the stem with that of a jasmine.  Pollen specks… and you have read the story above so why say it all again? 

Is it all senseless, purposeless?  What is the goal of it all?  Here let us understand some deeper schema that runs the universe, and you can read it on your own.  It’s a long reading. 

I’ll just read the last portions therefore, are kindly helping hands in each other’s self-discovery of the internal divine nature.  Each smile reminds all the others that love of God is surging forth in the heart and evoking in us a smiling response. 

The consciousness, this knowledge becomes even more real when the whole family meditates together.  There is a secret to meditation.  It is thus.  Commonly we know ourselves to be individual minds.  But to assume distinctions between minds is like trying to draw demarcation lines between two waves.  All minds are a common continuum especially so within a family.  That is what closeness of the family means.  This closeness cannot be obtained with closed minds, only with open minds.  In the practice of a group meditation, whether in a family or elsewhere, the mind open up, that is, the demarcations between individuated mind disappear.  New channels of silent communication open between family members that are more clearly expressive than the verbal ones.  (Children are more clearly expressive than the word burdened adult minds.)

This union of minds within a family is a step towards realizing, finally, the unity of the entire Mind of the universe which is just a step short of reemergence of the soul into the Supreme Divinity. 

May each member of your family reduce his/her kamic indebtedness.  May your mind become as a honeyed continuum.  Thereby, may you all reach the pinnacle that is the Perfect One in this very life. 

And never again fall in to a stream to be carried along by force of karmic winds and waves. 

The time to teach meditation to the children is three years before conception.  Second phase during pregnancy.  Whatever the mother does with her mind goes into the child mind.  You know it’s not just nutrients that pass through the navel.  Mother’s prana and mind passes through there too.  Third is when the child is being suckled on the breast and after that there is no more need to teach religion and spirituality and meditation to the child.  Done.

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CHILDREN’S SPIRITUAL TRAINING.

Swami Veda Bharati

 

Contemplative Education of Children

These are the excerpts from Visualization Actualization-New Spirituality Asilomar-Contemplative Alliance Conference held in Monterey, California on October 12, 2010

A question came about contemplative education of children.  None is needed.  Contemplative education of parents is needed.  When people are getting married they come to me.  Give us some advice about married life.  Bring forth contemplative children, how?  Something that has been known in ancient cultures for thousands of years and is now finally being proved by science, by science, and it is that mothers’ emotions transfer to the child, to the fetus.  That is where the contemplative education of the child is.  In an anti-woman, anti-family economic system of the world it is very difficult but perhaps it can still be achieved.

What contemplations you do during pregnancy is the contemplative education of your child.  Teach that to your daughters, sons, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law.  My mother and father did intensive Gayatri mantra three years before conception following the ancient system of samskaras.  So I never had to go to school.

The best time to teach a child contemplation as my parents did.  So when I was a married householder and not a swami did with my children whom I raised in America.  Take the child under your meditation shawl.  The child senses your quietness and that is contemplative education of children. I have done it.

The time for the contemplative education of the child is when you are breast feeding.  At that time breathe gently, deeply and do your mantra.  That is the contemplative education of the child.  That is not the subject of this discussion.  I’ve just given you a few hints.

In December, 2011 at my ashram I’m holding a children’s meditation retreat.  Children speaking twenty different languages from twenty different countries of my spiritual family world-wide will be there.  Now how the Russian speaking and Chinese speaking and Korean speaking and Japanese speaking and Italian speaking and Dutch speaking children will learn the meditation I haven’t solved the problem.

Comment from the audience:  Take them all under your shawl.

Swami Veda:  That’s right.  That is what I do actually when I go to my spiritual family and people bring children for blessing.  I just take them and go quiet for a second and they go quiet.  That’s all.

Breath.  Breathe as though you are breathing through their bodies and you’re holding the child.  There are ways to breathe as though the breath is flowing through the mother or father’s body and through the child’s body at the same time. That is one of many methods of  visualization.  It works if you know to be quiet in your breath.  Training is yours, not the child’s.  Children are not taught.  Knowledge is caught by children.

Swami Veda Bharati
Oct. 12^th 2010