The
Paul Solomon
Source Readings
Excerpts

Teach Your Children Well

QUESTION: We feel a great responsibility for the children. How can we provide the best opportunity for balanced development and inspiring the children to their greatest growth without getting our egos and our irrational cultural beliefs in the way, and passing wrong beliefs and actions to them?

ANSWER: Better begin seeing yourself as the children. Nothing could be more foolish or presumptuous than to think that you can establish a program for teaching the children. Rather, find that place for setting them apart to increase your consciousness of their being and that they see in you. How many of you hesitate to show before the children your childishness? Do you speak in love or in selfishness? Do they see in the way you live harmony, balance, discipline? Do they hear in your words and your thoughts constant struggle for that which will make you comfortable?

Now see it and hear it in this way. Among you now there is the tendency to say, "I have made a vow to this relationship, but I do not feel it. I do not feel excitement, entertainment, amusement in this relationship. Therefore I am not happy. I will look for other relationships, other entertainment." And you feel you have a right to so entertain and fascinate yourself. There are beliefs among you that there must be chemical reactions and this and that to keep relationships alive. And so you teach the children another lie, that marriage and relationships are based on adventure and excitement, that love is a chemical reaction that can be kept alive through expressions of the appetites. And the children see. And they learn to build wrong relationships and to expect from marriage the titillation of the senses rather than the honoring of the words spoken. You've come before an altar of God and made a vow to one another, "Til death do us part," and you entertain yourself by finding reasons to part sooner. And you teach the children, "There is no sacredness in speaking words before the altar of God. If we can't get along, we just can't get along. let us dissolve that we have spoken." How do you speak of a program for children to teach them this and that? You can only teach them what you are, what you believe, the way you act.

Make of yourselves a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God which is your reasonable service. Give your consciousness, your mind, your thoughts,your words, your actions, your deeds, to the Lord. If you want to teach the children, clean up your room and let them live and expect to live in a room that reflects harmony as if it were an altar, to eat food that reflects care.

Let the children grow up to expect that a time every day is given responsibly to work, to discipline. Children among you in your society are taught to play, play, play until suddenly one day they are thrust out and told, "Now work." And confusion comes. You teach your children an unreal world. Every child among you from very early should be taught, should be required, should be disciplined to invest his time each day in being responsible for that he consumes, the he takes and has. Look at other cultures, Look at healthy cultures and see the family together in the fields, and children from very early age working with the plants and the Earth.  Let the children have the opportunity to learn discipline, productiveness, harmony with the Earth.

Do not let anyone among you come before the children and teach them words of religion and spirituality, but rather live before them life of devotion and productivity, and so doing, cause them to have right relationship with spirit.

#1008

© 1994, Paul Solomon Foundation

© 1994 Paul Solomon Foundation for the Paul Solomon Source Readings,  ,
All Rights Reserved

© 2000, Daniel Emmanuel/
Wisdom of Solomon