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THE NATURAL STAGES OF LIFE AND LOVING
People have asked me, what is the right way to provide a loving atmosphere that can help a child grow without interfering in his natural potentiality.
Every way to help a child is wrong. The very idea of helping is not right. The child needs your love, not your help. The child needs nourishment, support, but not your help. The natural potential of the child is unknown, so there is no way to help him rightly to attain his natural potential. You cannot help when the goal is unknown; all that you can do is not interfere. And in fact, in the name of “help” everybody is interfering with everybody else; and because the name is beautiful, nobody objects. Of course the child is so small, so dependent on you, he cannot object.
All the people around are just like you: they have also been helped by their parents, the way you have been helped. Neither they have attained their natural potential, nor have you. The whole world is missing out in spite of all the help from parents, from the family, from relatives, from the neighbors, teachers, priests. In fact everybody is so burdened with help that under its weight, what to say of attaining natural potential, one cannot even attain unnatural potential! One cannot move; the weight on everybody’s shoulders is Himalayan.
All the people around you have been helped, greatly helped to be what they are. You have been helped; now you want to help the children, too? All that you can do is to be loving, nourishing. Be warm, be accepting. The child brings an unknown potential, and there is no way to figure out what he is going to be. So there is no possibility to suggest, “In this way you should help the child.” Each child is unique, so there cannot be a general discipline for every child.
The right way is not to help the child at all. If you have real courage then
please don’t help the child. Love him, nourish him. Let him do what he wants to do. Let him go where he wants to go. Your mind will be tempted again and again to interfere, and with good excuses. The mind is very clever in rationalizing: “If you don’t interfere there may be danger; the child may fall into the well if you don’t stop him.” But I say to you, it is better to let him fall into the well than to help him and destroy him.
It is a very rare possibility that the child falls into the well—and then too, it does not mean death; he can be taken out. And if you are really so concerned, the well can be covered; but don’t help the child, and don’t interfere. The well can be fenced, but don’t interfere with the child. Your real concern should be to remove all dangers but don’t interfere with the child; let him go on his way.
You will have to understand some significant growth patterns. Life has seven- year cycles, it moves in seven-year cycles just as the earth makes one rotation on its axis in twenty-four hours. Now nobody knows why not twenty-five, why not twenty-three. There is no way to answer it; it is simply a fact. So don’t ask me why life moves in seven-year cycles. I don’t know. This much I know, that it moves in seven-year cycles, and if you understand those cycles you will understand a great deal about human growth.
The first seven years are the most important because the foundation of life is being laid. That’s why all the religions are very much concerned about grabbing children as quickly as possible. Those first seven years are the years when you are conditioned, stuffed with all kinds of ideas which will go on haunting you your whole life, which will go on distracting you from your potentiality, which will corrupt you, which will never allow you to see clearly. They will always come like clouds before your eyes and they will make everything confused.
Things are clear, very clear—existence is absolutely clear—but your eyes have gathered layers upon layers of dust. And all that dust has been arranged in the first seven years of your life when you were so innocent, so trusting, that whatsoever was told to you, you accepted as truth. And whatever has gone into your foundation, later on it will be very difficult for you to uncover: it has become almost part of your blood, bones, your very marrow. You will ask a thousand other questions but you will never ask about the basic foundations of your belief.
The first expression of love toward the child is to leave his first seven years absolutely innocent, unconditioned, to leave him for seven years completely wild, a pagan. He should not be converted to Hinduism, to Mohammedanism, to Christianity. Anybody who is trying to convert a child to some religion is not compassionate, he is cruel: he is contaminating the very soul of a new, fresh arrival. Before the child has even asked questions he has been answered with ready-made philosophies, dogmas, ideologies. This is a very strange situation. The child has not asked about God, and you go on teaching him about God. Why so much impatience? Wait!
If the child someday shows interest in God and starts asking, then try to tell him not only your idea of God—because nobody has any monopoly. Put before him all the ideas of God that have been presented to different people by different ages, by different religions, cultures, civilizations. Put before him all the ideas about God, and tell him, “You can choose among these, whichever appeals to you. Or you can invent your own, if nothing suits you. If everything seems to be flawed, and you think you can come up with a better idea, then invent your own. Or if you find that there is no way to invent an idea without loopholes, then drop the whole thing; there is no need.”
A person can live without God; there is no intrinsic necessity. Millions of people have lived without God, so God is nothing that is inevitably needed by anybody. You can tell the child, “Yes, I have my idea; and that too is in the combination of all sorts of ideas in this collection. You can choose that, but I am not saying that my idea is the right idea. It appeals to me; it may not appeal to you.”
There is no inner necessity that the son should agree with the father, the daughter should agree with the mother. In fact it seems far better that children should not agree with the parents. That’s how evolution happens. If every child agrees with the father then there will be no evolution, because each new father will agree with his own father, and everybody will be where God left Adam and Eve—naked, outside the gate of the Garden of Eden. Everybody will be stuck there.
Because sons and daughters have disagreed with their fathers and mothers, with their whole tradition, human beings have evolved. This whole evolution is a tremendous disagreement with the past. And the more intelligent you are, the
more you are going to disagree. But parents appreciate the child who agrees and they condemn the child who disagrees.
Up to seven years, if a child can be left innocent, uncorrupted by the ideas of others, then to distract him from his potential growth becomes impossible. The child’s first seven years are the most vulnerable. And they are in the hands of parents, teachers, priests. How to save children from parents, priests, teachers is a question of such enormous importance that it seems almost impossible to find out how to do it. It is not a question of helping the child. It is a question of protecting the child. If you have a child, protect the child from yourself. Protect the child from others who can influence him: at least up to the age of seven years, protect him. The child is just like a small plant, weak, soft; just a strong wind can destroy it, any animal can eat it up. You can put a protective fencing around it but that is not imprisoning, you are simply protecting. When the plant is bigger, the fencing will be removed.
Protect the child from every kind of influence so that he can remain himself and it is only a question of seven years, because then the first cycle will be complete. By seven years he will be well grounded, centered, strong enough. You don’t know how strong a seven-year-old child can be because you have not seen uncorrupted children; you have seen only corrupted children. They carry the fears, the cowardliness of their fathers, their mothers, their families. They are not their own selves.
If a child remains uncorrupted for seven years you will be amazed when you meet such a child. He will be as sharp as a sword. His eyes will be clear, his insight will be clear. And you will see a tremendous strength in him which you cannot find even in a seventy-year-old adult, because the foundations are shaky in that adult.
With a weak foundation, as the building goes on becoming higher and higher, the foundation becomes more and more shaky. So you will see that the older a person becomes, the more afraid. When you are young you may be an atheist; when you become old you start believing in God. Why is that? When you were below thirty you were a hippie. You had the courage to go against the society, to behave in your own way: to have long hair, to have a beard, to roam around the world and take all kinds of risks. But by the time you are forty, all that has disappeared. You will be in some office in a suit, clean shaven, well groomed.
Nobody will even be able to recognize that you are an exhippie.
Where have all the hippies disappeared to? First you see them with a great force, then they become just like spent cartridges, impotent, defeated, depressed, trying to make something out of life, feeling that all those years of hippiedom were a waste. Others have gone far ahead: somebody has become the president, somebody has become the governor, and people start thinking, “We were stupid; we were just playing the guitar and the whole world passed us by.” They repent. It is really difficult to find an old hippie.
So if you are a parent you will need this much courage not to interfere. Open doors to unknown directions to the child so he can explore. He does not know what he has in him, nobody knows. He has to grope in the dark. Don’t make him afraid of darkness, don’t make him afraid of failure, don’t make him afraid of the unknown. Give him support. When he is going on an unknown journey, send him with all your support, with all your love, with all your blessings. Don’t let him be affected by your fears. You may have fears, but keep them to yourself. Don’t unload those fears on the child because that will be interfering.
After seven years, the next cycle of seven years, from seven to fourteen, is a new addition to life. The child begins to experience the first stirring of sexual energies. But this is only a kind of rehearsal.
To be a parent is a difficult job, so unless you are ready to take that difficult job, don’t become a parent. People simply go on becoming fathers and mothers not knowing what they are doing. You are bringing a new life into existence; all the care in the world will be needed.
Now when the child starts playing out his sexual rehearsals, that is the time when parents interfere the most, because they have been interfered with. All that they know is what has been done to them, so they simply go on doing that to their children. Societies don’t allow sexual rehearsal, or at least have not allowed it up to now, and that too only in very advanced countries. Now boys and girls are at least educated in the same schools. But in a country like India, even today in most places coeducation starts only at the university level. The seven-year-old boy and the seven-year-old girl cannot be in the same boarding school. And this is the time for them—without any risk, without the girl getting pregnant, without any problems arising for their families—this is the time when they should be
allowed all playfulness. Yes, it will have a sexual color to it, but it is rehearsal; it is not the real drama. And if you don’t allow them even the rehearsal and then suddenly one day the curtain opens, and the real drama starts! The actors don’t know what is going on; not even a prompter is there to tell them what to do. You have messed up their lives completely.
Those seven years in the second cycle in life are significant as a time for rehearsal. Children will meet, mix, play, become acquainted. And that will help humanity to drop almost 90 percent of its perversions. If children from seven to fourteen are allowed to be together, to swim together, to be naked before each other, 90 percent of perversions and 90 percent of pornography will simply disappear. Who will bother about it? When a boy has known so many girls naked, what interest can a magazine like Playboy have for him? When a girl has seen so many boys naked, I don’t see that there is any possibility of curiosity about the other; it will simply disappear. They will grow together naturally, not as two different species of animals.
Right now that’s how they grow, as if they are two different species of animals. They don’t belong to one humankind; they are kept separate. A thousand and one barriers are created between them so they cannot have any rehearsal for their sexual life which is going to come. Because this rehearsal is missing, that’s why in people’s actual sex life foreplay is missing. And foreplay is so important—far more important than actual sexual contact, because actual sexual contact lasts only for a few moments. It is not nourishment, it simply leaves you in a limbo. You were hoping for so much, and nothing comes out of it.
In Hindi we have a proverb: Kheela pahad nikli chuhia. “You dug out the whole mountain and you found one rat.” After all the effort—going to the movies and going to the disco, going to the restaurant and talking all kinds on nonsense which neither you nor the other wants to do, but both are talking— digging the mountain, and in the end, just a rat! Nothing is so frustrating as sex.
Just the other day somebody brought me an advertisement for a new car, and in the advertisement they had a beautiful sentence that I liked. The sentence was: “It is better than sex.” I don’t care about the car, but the advertisement was beautiful! Certainly if you look around you, you will find a thousand and one things better than sex. Sex is just a rat, and that after so much huffing and
puffing, so much perspiration, in the end both feel cheated. The reason is that you don’t know the art of sex; you know only the middle point. It is as if you see a film just in the middle for a few seconds. Naturally you can’t make any sense of it; the beginning is missing and the end is missing. Perhaps you simply saw an interval where there was nothing going on.
The man feels ashamed after sex; he turns over and goes to sleep. He simply cannot face the woman. He feels ashamed, that’s why he turns to his side and goes to sleep. The woman weeps and cries because this was not what she was hoping for. This is all? Then what is this whole drama all about? But the reason is because the rehearsal part of your life has been canceled by your society. You don’t know what foreplay is.
Foreplay is really the most satisfying part in sex. Foreplay is more loving. Sex is simply a biological climax, but the climax of what? You have missed everything that could have made it a climax. Do you think you suddenly reach the climax, missing all the rungs of the ladder? You have to move up the ladder, rung by rung, only then can you reach the climax. Everybody heads straight for the climax.
But most people’s sexual life is nothing but a kind of relief. Yes, for a moment you feel relieved of a burden, just like a good sneeze. How good it feels afterwards! But for how long? How long can you feel good after a sneeze? How many seconds, how many minutes can you brag that “I had such a sneeze, it was great.” As the sneeze is gone, with it goes all the joy, too. It was simply something bothering you. You are finished with that botheration, now there is a little relaxation. That’s the sexual life of most of the people in the world. Some energy was bothering you, was making you heavy; it was turning into a headache. Sex gives you relief.
But the way children are brought up is almost butchering their whole life. Those seven years of sexual rehearsal are absolutely essential. Girls and boys should be together in schools, in hostels, in swimming pools and beds. They should rehearse for the life that is going to come; they have to get ready for it. And there is no danger, there is no problem if a child is given total freedom to explore his growing sexual energy and is not condemned, repressed. But that is what is being done. It is a very strange world in which you are living. You are born of sex, you will live for sex, your children will be born out of sex—and sex
is the most condemned thing, the greatest sin. And all your religions go on putting this crap in your mind.
People all around the world are full of everything rotten that you can conceive, for the simple reason that they have not been allowed to grow in the natural way. They have not been allowed to accept themselves. They all have become ghosts. They are not authentically real people, they are only shadows of someone they could have been.
The second cycle of seven years is immensely important because it will prepare you for the coming seven years. If you have done your homework rightly, if you have played with your sexual energy just in the spirit of a sportsman—and during those years, that is the only spirit you will have—you will not become a pervert, and all kinds of strange things will not come to your mind. Instead you will be moving naturally with the other sex, the other sex is moving with you. There will be no hindrance, and you will not be doing anything wrong against anybody. Your conscience will be clear because nobody has put into your head ideas of what is right, what is wrong: you are simply being whatever you are.
Then from fourteen to twenty-one, your sex matures. And this is significant to understand: if the rehearsal has gone well, in the seven years when your sex matures a very strange thing happens that you may not have ever thought about, because you have not been given the chance. I said to you that the second seven- year cycle, from seven to fourteen, gives you a glimpse of foreplay. The third seven-year cycle will give you a glimpse of afterplay. You are still together with girls or boys, but now a new phase starts in your being: you start falling in love.
It is still not a biological interest. You are not interested in producing children, you are not interested in becoming husbands and wives, no. These are the years of romantic play. You are more interested in beauty, in love, in poetry, in sculpture, which are all different phases of romanticism. And unless a person has some romantic quality he will never know what afterplay is. Sex is just in the middle. The longer the foreplay, the better the possibility of reaching the climax; the better the possibility of reaching the climax, the better opening for afterplay. And unless a couple knows afterplay they will never know what sex in its completion is.
Now there are sexologists who are teaching foreplay. A taught foreplay is not the real thing, but they are teaching it; at least they have recognized the fact that without foreplay sex cannot reach the climax. But they are at a loss how to teach afterplay, because when a man has reached the climax he is no longer interested. He is finished, the job is done. For afterplay to happen it needs a romantic mind, a poetic mind, a mind that knows how to be thankful, how to be grateful. The person, the woman or the man who has brought you to such a climax, needs some gratitude: afterplay is your gratitude. And unless there is afterplay it simply means your sex is incomplete; and incomplete sex is the cause of all the troubles that a human being goes through. Sex can become orgasmic only when afterplay and foreplay are completely balanced. Just in their balance the climax turns into orgasm.
And the word “orgasm” has to be understood. It means that your whole being
—body, mind, soul, everything—becomes involved, organically involved. Then it becomes a moment of meditation. To me, if your sex does not become finally a moment of meditation, you have not known what sex is. You have only heard about it, you have read about it; and the people who have been writing about it know nothing about it. I have read hundreds of books on sexology by people who are thought to be great experts, and they are “experts,” but they know nothing about the innermost shrine where meditation blossoms. Just as children are born from ordinary sex, meditation is born out of extraordinary sex.
Animals can produce children; there is nothing special about it. It is only man who can produce the experience of meditation as the center of his orgasmic feeling. This is possible only if from the ages of fourteen to twenty-one young people are allowed to have romantic freedom.
From twenty-one to twenty-eight is the time when they can settle. They can choose a partner. And they are capable of choosing now; through all the experience of the past two cycles of their growth they can choose the right partner. There is nobody else who can do it for you. It is something that is more like a hunch—not arithmetic, not astrology, not palmistry, not I Ching, nothing else is going to do. It is a hunch. After coming in contact with many, many people, suddenly something clicks that had never clicked with anybody else. And it clicks with so much certainty, and so absolutely, you cannot even doubt it. Even if you try to doubt it, you cannot, the certainty is so tremendous. With this click you settle.
Between twenty-one and twenty-eight—somewhere, if everything goes smoothly in the way I am talking about, without interference from others—then you settle. And the most pleasant period of life comes from twenty-eight to thirty-five—the most joyous, the most peaceful and harmonious, because two persons start melting and merging into each other.
From thirty-five to forty-two, a new step, a new door opens. If up to the age of thirty-five you have felt deep harmony, an orgasmic feeling, and you have discovered meditation through it, then from thirty-five to forty-two you will help each other go more and more into that meditation without sex, because at this point sex starts looking childish, juvenile.
The age of forty-two is the time when a person should be able to know exactly who he is. From forty-two to forty-nine he goes deeper and deeper into meditation, more and more into himself, and helps the partner in the same way. The partners become friends. There is no more “husband” and no more “wife” that time has passed. It has given its richness to your life; now there is something growing that is even higher than love. That is friendliness, a compassionate relationship to help the other to go deeper into himself or herself, to become more independent, to become more alone, just like two tall trees standing separate but still close to each other, or two pillars in a temple supporting the same roof—standing so close, but also so separate and independent and alone.
From forty-nine to fifty-six this aloneness becomes your focus of being. Everything else in the world loses meaning. The only remaining meaningful thing is this aloneness.
From fifty-six to sixty-three you become absolutely what you are going to become: the potential blossoms, and from sixty-three to seventy you start getting ready to drop the body. Now you know you are not the body, you know you are not the mind either. The body was known as separate from you somewhere around the time when you were thirty-five. That the mind is separate from you was known near the time when you were forty-nine. Now, everything else drops except the witnessing self. Just the pure awareness, the flame of awareness remains with you—and this is the preparation for death.
Seventy is the natural life span for human beings. And if things move in this
natural course then one dies with tremendous joy, with great ecstasy, feeling immensely blessed that life has not been meaningless, that at least one has found his home. And because of this richness, this fulfillment, one is capable of blessing the whole of existence. Just to be near such a person at the time of death is a great opportunity. You will feel, as the person leaves the body, as if some invisible flowers are falling upon you. Although you cannot see them, you can feel them. It is sheer joy, so pure that even to have a little taste of it is enough to transform your whole life.
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