Three
Talks by Avatar Adi Da Samraj
About the Love of Children
and the Essence
of Spiritual Practice
These three talks were previously published in the
Vision of Mulund Institute's
Conscious Childrearing Series, Booklet One: Love,
Wisdom, and Happiness in the First Three Stages of Life (1995).
I.
Serving
children is a passionate affair. In the following talk, given on May 8, 1984,
Avatar Adi Da Samraj exquisitely describes His profound love for children.
Adi Da: Children are wonderful. I am in Love with children.
A very strange thing that only parents know is that you actually fall in love
with your children. You do not merely love your children. You fall in love with
them. You are deeply in love with your children, and you cannot imagine ever being
separated from them. Your relationship to your children teaches you about love.
You
think that love is connected to sex. When you have children, you realize that
love does not have anything to do with sex. I have always known this, but I think
it is something others learn only in the circumstance of childbirth and serving
children.
I Love everyone with this passion! I Love
men, women, children, walls, and frogs with the same profound intensity. I simply
have a different kind of relationship with every being. I am in Love with children!
I mean deeply in Love with them. I have a profound love relationship with
them. [Turning to a devotee seated nearby who has a young daughter] You
have your daughter. You love her. You are in love with her, am I right?
I mean in love with
her. Is this not true?
Devotee: Yes,
Beloved Adi Da. I am in love with her.
Adi Da: I Love these children. I Love their faces. They smile at Me.
We are profoundly in Love with one another. It is extraordinary. I have observed
this in My relationship with many people. You all perhaps only observe this when
you suddenly realize that you are in love with your children. It is an extraordinary
acknowledgement. It is really extraordinary that you find yourself in love with
your children — literally in love with them! Your children
have occurred through the childbirth process, seemingly arbitrarily, but you are
profoundly in love with them. Isn't it wonderful, the love you have for your children?
Of
course, this is why people find it difficult to release their children. They are
involved in this native love-relationship. there is simply this profound love-relationship.
What a wonder, these children.
Devotee [a
teacher in one of the Adidam schools]: Beloved Adi Da, Your Play with
the children is very, very wonderful.
Adi Da: Yes. Do you who are teaching children fall in love with the
children?
Devotee [another teacher]:
Yes, absolutely. My intimate partner and I don't have our own children, but
the love-relationships we develop with the children in the community of Your devotees
is incredible.
Adi Da: You
are not even a father, but you are in love with the children, are you not? And
you [indicating another teacher, a woman] have never been a mother, but
you have been so intimate with children that you know how you fall in love with
them. What a wonderful relationship! It is different from merely liking them as
children. You are actually in love with them.
You
see, there is no sex involved with the connection of love. You can love all kinds
of people, and you have a different relationship with all of them. Sex is not
the basis of love. Love is universal. You must love everyone, but you are in love
with only certain people with whom you enjoy a special intimacy. When you fall
in love with children you feel an extraordinary passion. This is why people fail
so often at being parents. They do not rightly serve the future of their children
because of this love-connection. They do not relinquish attachments.
Parents
— both mother and father — are inherently in love with their children. The mother
is especially in love with her son or daughter. There is no question about it.
The child might as well be a stranger, you see. The child is a stranger who fell
out of her body! But she is in love with this person. In love! It is a profound
love-connection.
Parents must know what serves their
children so that they will relinquish the clinging tendencies of this love-attachment
for the sake of their children. You must know about this passion to serve children
rightly. If you do not know about it, you will injure them by not letting them
make the transitions they must make for the sake of their own growth.
II
Avatar
Adi Da Samraj has also Taught us about the joy that children naturally animate.
Children, He has told us, are life-signs. They communicate the delight and inherent
Happiness of existence to us. Adi Da gave the following talk on December 17, 1982.
Adi Da: Children are like Mickey Mouse. They have that same kind of
force, that same kind of innocence. They have received no bad news yet. They do
not operate with mental problems, and they act as if they are immortals. They
can become afraid in certain situations, but most of the time they act as if there
is no death, no threat, no problem, nothing negative about existence.
You
become profoundly attached, emotionally attached, to these beings because they
are free life-signs for you. This says something about your adult life, about
what you accept as adults. You presume that only children should be life-signs
to one another, but you should not be involved in the mortal vision, either. It
is your responsibility to grow Spiritually and not be confined to the limitations
of the lower stages of life, so that you can be life-signs for one another.
The
Spiritually alive personality is in some ways just like a child — not uninformed
as a child is, but free by virtue of transcending adult information. You take
your information too seriously and you do not take the Truth seriously enough.
You should all be like Mickey Mouse. The reason that you enjoy children is that
they have not learned what you have learned. Now that you have learned it, you
should not take it any more seriously than children do who have not learned it
yet.
III
On
another occasion, on December 25, 1986, a devotee directly
thanked Avatar Adi Da for His tremendous Service to children. Adi Da Samraj's
response illustrates the two aspects of His Love for all His devotees, including
children — that He draws us into heart-intimacy with Him, and that He enables
us to transcend our activity of un-Happiness.
Devotee:
Heart-Master Adi Da, I feel profoundly Instructed by Your relationship to children.
You constantly enliven them and assume a profound intimacy with them and nurture
and Love them. It moves me so much to see Your Example.
Adi Da: See what I do for them. I preserve them, honor them, nourish
them, give them life, give them the Great Vision. This is what I do in every moment
of every day of life with everyone who is associated with Me most intimately.
The
"Radical" Way of the Heart is a relationship and not techniques. There
are practices for which you must be responsible, and there are disciplines, but
they are secondary to the essence of this Way, which is the relationship to Me.
It is a heart-matter, an intimate matter.
The
"Radical" Way of the Heart is an intimate process. It can only be lived
as an intimate heart-matter. If you are going to be called My practicing devotee,
then this Way of life must become an intimate matter for you. In that sense you
are like children, then. You are preserving the Heart, conserving the Heart, animating
It, making It the dominant principle, not allowing the Heart to be destroyed.
Devotee:
Beloved Adi Da, one other thing that I noticed is a little thing, but something
that impressed me greatly. Even with children You will not compromise anything.
When they express some egoic little movement, I have seen You require them to
change their action in such a wonderfully compassionate, Loving, and humorous
way.
Adi Da: Why should I cause
them pain by making concessions to their egoity? Why govern them towards stress
and isolation? Just so, I will not indulge you in your problem. Straighten up.
Take a deep breath. Stand with Me. Be My devotee, and My Mere Presence will Instruct
you. That is what the "Radical" Way of the Heart is about.
