Questioner: I read your book, it was amazing.
And what caught my eye and what I was amazed that early… you know when you were a child,
you realized that you have those powers and you started really going deeper and meditating,
you know, someone actually taught you how to meditate and go through that.
What do you do with a child that you know is that deep and I do have a child like that,
and sometimes I wanna push her towards - this is right - but I'm actually,
I am a huge believer in what you actually taught.
Sadhguru: We must understand this - a child is not an industrial product.
A child is a life, a fresh life.
You are supposed to nurture this life.
It’s not that you put it through some kind of an industrial process called a school.
It’s like an industry. Everybody is taught the same damn thing.
Everybody is supposed to go through the same thing and come out the same way and find a
job and serve something somewhere. This is not what human life is about.
There is an innate genius in every human being.
Do we have the patience and the commitment and the dedication to pay the necessary attention
to bring that out in a specific human being? That’s a big question.
Otherwise, you will produce dumplings (Few laugh).
All the same. Okay (Laughs)? So, once you have a child…
Before you have a child you must understand, a child means a twenty-year project
full-on - that is, if they do well.
If they don’t do well, it’s a life-long project (Laughter).
Because it’s a life, one life may blossom at twelve, another may blossom at forty.
Do you have the patience to nurture that life?
Or have you already set a thing by the time you finish your high school, you must be in
this university, that university, you must be doing this or that, it’s all fixed up
– common prescription for all life.
This’s what we are doing. This is supposed to be civilization.
This’s not civilization; this is just escape from life.
We want to escape the fundamental process of life.
In tribal societies and other traditional societies even today, nobody expects a man
or a woman has to become like this at a certain time.
Depending on each life how they progress, everybody is valued for who they are.
If you plant this chrysanthemum in your house, in three months it’s full of flower.
If you plant an oak tree, eight years - ten years nothing happens (Few laugh).
So, you want to chop it down? Hello?
None of them would be, if you went by these standards.
“See, this one how well it is doing! In three months how many flowers.
you fool, you're doing nothing.”
This is not the way to handle life, isn’t it?
This’s not an industrial product. So…
I know there are other compulsions in the society, various limitations; keeping all
those in mind, fundamentally we must understand life needs nurture, atmosphere - not fixing,
nothing to be fixed about it.
It just needs an atmosphere, where it will flourish best.
What grows in southern California will not grow in Minnesota, isn’t it?
That kind of life needs that kind of atmosphere, that kind of nurture, only then it’ll happen.
So, this is something that we have to pay attention to.
There is no involvement. We have…
We want everything readymade.
We are looking at a readymade solution. There’s no readymade solution to life.
Life can only happen with enormous involvement, there is simply no other way to do it.
Where there is no involvement there is no experience of life, isn’t it?
Hello? Participants: Yes.
Sadhguru: Whether it’s a simple food that you eat or something that you look at or whom
you live with or what you do or that… the highest level whatever you do in your life,
without involvement there is no life.
But right now, modern societies are trying to do life with information, not with involvement.
This is a big mistake. You have no information about your child.
You can go to all the variety of doctors and get all their ideas about what your child
is all you’ll… all they will tell you is that
he is sick in a hundred different ways, okay (Laughs)?
No, you don’t need information about your child. You need involvement.
With involvement you’ll bring that life to its best.
It need not be as good as somebody else or as bad as somebody else because it’s a unique life.
Is there one life like another? Participants: No.
Sadhguru: It’s a unique life. So, but from…
right from day one we are comparing it to another life and trying to
make it like that one.
This is a very cruel process for the child.
A child never understands what the hell the parents want (Laughter).
I never understood.
Nobody ever explained to me why the hell I should go to the school.
So I never went (Laughter).
Because nobody explained to me why I have to go to school.
They said, “No, no, you have to go to school.” Why?
I'm doing fine (Laughter).
Why should I go to school?
No, because we think information is going to transform us.
No, information facilitates a few things, but its involvement
which transforms us, isn’t it?
Absolute involvement it som... in something, it doesn’t matter what it is.
Total involvement with something, suddenly you find that human being
is of a different nature, isn’t it?
So, that’s all it takes. Involvement (Applause).