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The Company We Keep
By Urmila Devi Dasi
CAN WE MAKE OUR CHILDREN turn out the way we want?
Srila Prabhupada once said, "If you place a child in good association, he will act properly, and if you place him in bad association, he will act improperly. A child has no independence in that sense.... According to Vedic civilization, as soon as a child is four or five years old, he is sent to a gurukula, where he is disciplined."
Anyone who has worked with children knows they are vulnerable to their environment. Yet children also carry from their previous lives a complex burden of good and bad karmaand a particular tendency of character. In fact, the mentality of the parents during conception attracts a particular souls' with particular inclinations to become their child. Because of this, enlightened parents prepare themselves so that they can be in spiritual consciousness during conception. Thus their child will be receptive to the training they will give him. Srila Prabhupada says, "You can mold the children in any way. They are like soft dough." So the mold is essential when considering the shape of the final piece of sculpture. But the quality of the material one puts into the mold is also important.
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Your Children are Different
I recently took my children and some of my teenage students with me to an education conference, where we met with Dave Marks, a textbook author and retired teacher with more than thirty years of experience in public and private schools. He has written a text we use as part of our English instruction. Soon after the conference, he wrote me this letter:
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Crack in the Universe
A little matter that was to the loving father; but it was a great matter to the sensitive son. It helped to shape the son's life ... and it opened up the way for his clearer understanding of his dependence on the loving watchfulness of the All-Father. And to this day when that son, himself a father and a grandfather, lies down to sleep at night, he is accustomed, out of the memories of that lesson of long ago, to look up through the shadows of his earthly sleeping place into the far-off light of his Father's presence and to call out, in the same spirit of childlike trust and helplessness as so long ago, 'Father, you'll take care of me tonight; won't you?'
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Teens and Celibacy
By
Urmila Devi Dasi
CELIBACY IS SUCH an important
part of Vedic education that the Sanskrit word for student is brahmacari ("celibate").
The pressure to give up celibacy begins, of course, in adolescence, the most
dangerous age and often the turning point of one's life. Young adults need
guidance before and during the teenage years to recognize and follow the right
path.
Celibacy trains adolescents
for self-restraint, whether they stay single or get married. It develops their
inner strength, self-control, and good character. It also fosters good health
and a fine memory.
Without celibacy we can never
realize that we are spirit soul, distinct from the body. Sex reinforces the
illusion that we are these bodies. Sexual attraction and its extensions in
family and society are the main knots that bind us to material identification.
Vedic education aims to free the child from these knots so the adolescent can
act on the spiritual plane.
Children, of course, have no knowledge of sex. How
do we train them to value celibacy before they reach puberty? By association
and environment.
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Higher Vocations
Srila Prabhupada Wanted Iskcon's educational system to produce high-class people, high
not in wealth or status but in character. We often describe the ideal character of a brahmana (intellectual) as tolerant and austere, of a ksatriya (civic leader) as heroic, and so on. Yet for the training of our children, Srila Prabhupada also emphasized another quality: independence.
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Divine Consciousness Of a Previous Life
THE BHAGAVAD-GITA tells us that a child with good opportunities for genuine spiritual life must have progressed in yoga, or Krsna consciousness, in a previous life. Krsna tells Arjuna some symptoms of such a child. First, the child will be attracted automatically to the yogic principles, even without seeking them. Second, he or she will be an inquisitive transcendentalist. Third, the child stands always above the ritualistic principles of the scriptures.
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A Taste for the Lords Name
It's after the temple's Sunday feast.
Packed into our van, the children laugh and jostle one another as we head for the gurukulato watch a video of Krsna's pastimes. Nimai, the four-year-old brother of one of our
students, starts singing the Hare Krsna maha-mantra. He sings quietly at first. Then his
singing builds in volume and picks up a clear rhythm and melody. Eleven-year-old Visnujana
starts to play the mrdanga drum he'd brought to the feast. Soon all the children are singing
together. The singing is their pleasure, and they taste the spiritual
sweetness of the Lord's name.
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Do You Force Your Children?
We sit in the Calcutta Airport waiting for an announcement, the flight three hours late. The many ceiling fans do little to refresh the air, polluted by cigarette smoke and hundreds of bodies. My ten-year-old son and I sit by a door, opened a crack but with negligible effect. I talk with a blue-saried nun from Puna who wishes us the best in our spiritual journey. Then I talk with a couple who supervise testing for students seeking admission to European and American schools.
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Pay the Price
As this dark age progresses, so does the philosophy of automatic spiritual enlightenment. In bookstores, seminars, and certainly in the literature of professional educators and psychologists, we learn that children are best left to their own devices. Parents,
teachers, and society may have to invest some moments here and there of "high-quality time," but basically if we leave our children alone they will find the right path. As some put it, the more we help our children, the more they are likely to go in the wrong direction.
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Stepping Out
Students look forward to—field trips! They're a chance to learn by direct experience, a chance to apply or expand what one has learned in the classroom or at home. Actually, whenever Krsna conscious adults take their children or students out, in effect we take them on a learning field trip. By going with adults, children can learn how to deal with the world in practical errands, how to tell others about Krsna consciousness when opportunities arise, and how to act properly in public as devotees of Krsna.
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Your Kids And the One-Eyed Guru
When our oldest son, Madhava, now eighteen, was small, he had few toys—some blocks,
some clay. We never had a television or a video player, so he played with his toys in imitation of what he saw—worship of Krsna, chanting of His names, initiation ceremonies, bathing of the Deity. Today, having grown up without television, he has transformed his childhood play into adult service to the Lord.
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Detachment from Children
Our Dead Son's Body, nine inches long, lay in my hand. For some months afterward, my natural affection - that motherly impulse hard-wired into body and mind - cried for that child.
"What you grieve for is not the child," the midwife told me, "but how you had projected that child into your life."
I had become attached to a desire to have a child to love and enjoy. That attachment, based on the body instead of spiritual reality, was causing lamentation, in spite of my philosophical understanding. Many friends, devotees of Krsna, urged me not to artificially repress the grief, because such repression would lead to illness. I couldn't stop the grief anyway. It was a biological expression of motherhood.
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Revolutionary Cleanliness
Those weekly girl scout
meetings always began with us reciting our vows. "To be clean in thought,
word, and deed," I would say carelessly, eager to begin our project or
camping excursion.
For children being raised in
Krsna consciousness, cleanliness isn't an abstract ideal but an important part
of a progressive spiritual life. Though spiritual purity is the first concern,
physical and mental cleanliness also count. In fact, they are usually symptoms
of one's consciousness, and a clean body and mind help develop a clean
consciousness, or Krsna consciousness.
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Prepared for Death
A cousin with whom I'd had no contact since joining the Hare Krsna movement sent me a card of congratulations when our son married. So I responded with some photo of our family and a card of pleasantries. She then sent me photos of her family and told me she and her husband were about to make a trip with her parents.
On that trip, her father, my mother's brother, died alone when he went to take a nap. Since
my cousin and I were now writing, I took the opportunity to send her a note of sympathy, in which I quoted these words by Lord Krsna from the Bhagavad-gita: "For the soul there is
never birth nor death. Nor having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain."
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Accepting a Spiritual Master
This month (September) we celebrate Srila Prabhupada's one-hundredth birthday
anniversary. To honor Srila Prabhupada, our children can sing his praises, decorate his seat,write homages to him, and help cook a feast in his honor. Honoring Prabhupada in these ways is important, but our children really honor him when they become his students.
The Vedic idea of a student differs from that of the Western idea. The Western student
hears a subject or learns a skill, pays his fee, and then goes his way. The Vedic student finds a self-realized teacher and becomes inspired to take a great vow of lifetime dedication as his disciple. (The child should be at least twelve years old at initiation, so that he or she can take vows with personal conviction. Generally, our children are older than twelve at initiation, but twelve is the minimum age.)
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The Parent - Teacher Partnership
by Urmila devi dasi
For milennia, parents sending their sons to school were also turning them over to a guru, not just to be a student but to be a disciple. The boy was expected not only to complete academic assignments but to serve the guru and live as he ordered for spiritual realization. In the last few hundred years, a boy has often continued to live with his parents after becoming a disciple, but in the ancient tradition the student lived with his teacher, often not seeing his family for months or even years.
When a child's teacher is a bona fide guru, the parents have full and firm faith that their child is properly cared for in all respects. The guru, in turn, teaches the student to obey and highly respect the parents. Lord Krsna says in the Bhagavad-gita that respecting one's parents is an austerity favorable to spiritual advancement. When initiating one of his first disciples, Srila Prabhupada told him to offer obeisances to his mother, who was attending the ceremony.
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What' s a Child to Read?
Parents often write and ask for advice about reading material for their children. They want to expose their children to as much Krsna consciousness as possible (and limit their exposure to materialism), but run into several practical problems, especially: (1) there is a shortage of good Krsna conscious books for children, and (2) many kids will read almost anything they can get their hands on.
So parents wonder what they can do to see that their children's reading fosters Krsna consciousness. How can we exercise reasonable guidance without being oppressive? And, perhaps more important, how can we teach children discrimination when they read?
