Rupi Kaur, a young pop star of poetry, writes in her book Milk and Honey, “We are all born so beautiful. The greatest tragedy is being convinced we are not...” This unfortunately is the experience of most of the children being brought up in a society, which is strangely very judgmental. Most of us have gone through this unpleasant experience in our early life when we were dependent on our family and teachers. With all good intentions they mould the growing child into their idea of perfection. The children are not given an environment of love and acceptance to grow as they are supposed to grow, or to allow their natural potential to manifest. In thousand and one ways, they are made to feel unwelcome if the children are not obedient. The family and society want the children to be blindly obedient. They seem to have some kind of vested interest. It may be their unconscious conditioning.
Osho points out that the educator, from kindergarten to university, is in the service of the vested interests, is in the service of the establishment. His whole purpose is to destroy every child in such a way, to cripple every child in such a way, that he adjusts to the established society. There is a fear. The fear is that if the child is left unconditioned from the very beginning he will be so intelligent, alert and aware, that his whole lifestyle will be of rebellion. And nobody wants rebels; everybody wants obedient people. An obedient child will get more love and respect than the other children who will get rejected directly or indirectly. The rejected children, if they are courageous, become rebellious later on. This happens almost everywhere that the young people when they grow up to be strong and powerful, they become revengeful and destructive. This is what we see happening all around us. It is cathartic.
The solution is that the children need to be helped to be themselves. They have to be supported according to their nature, that needs love and nourishment, and no judgement and condemnation. Osho says: “A real father, a real mother, real parents will be a blessing to the child. The child will feel helped by them so that he becomes more rooted in his nature, more grounded, more centred, so that he starts loving himself rather than feeling guilty about himself, so that he respects himself.” Remember, unless a person loves himself he cannot love anybody else in the world unless a child respects himself he cannot respect anybody else. That’s why all your love is bogus and all your respect is pseudo, phoney. When you don’t respect yourself, how can you respect anybody else? We can remember the words of wisdom of Lao Tzu, the Chinese mystic to Confucius: “All you good people of the world relax and be peaceful. Stop all talks of goodness and you will find that if you are strong enough to let go of goodness also, evil will fall of itself…”
