George Gurdjieff "Man is a polysyllabic being" Subject: Esotericism RAISING CHILDREN New York, March 1, 1924
QUESTION: There is a method of raising children based on suggestion during sleep. What's so good about this method?
ANSWER: This type of suggestion is nothing more than sequential poisoning. It destroys the last signs of will.
Parenting is a very complex thing. It should cover everything. It would be bad, for example, to give children only physical exercises.
In general, education is limited to mental education. The child is forced to learn poems by heart like a parrot without any understanding, and the parents are happy when he achieves this. At school, he also teaches everything mechanically, and after passing the "mark" exams, he still does not understand anything and does not prove anything. In terms of mental capacity, he is an adult of forty years, but in fact a ten-year-old child lives in him. He doesn't think he's afraid of anything, but he's basically a coward.
His morality is purely automatic, purely external. As he learns poetry, so he learns morals. But the child's essence, his inner life, is left to itself, without any control. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that adults, like children, have no morals: our morals are entirely theoretical and automatic. But if we are truly sincere, we will discover how bad we are.
Parenting is just a mask that has nothing to do with our nature. People believe that one method is better than another, but in reality, everyone is worth each other. We are all the same, but we quickly discover the straw in our neighbor's eye. We are all blind to our flaws. If only a person can look inside himself and put himself in the other person's shoes, he will find that he is no better. If you want to be better, try to help your fellow man. But today, people only seek to plot and trip each other up. In reality, a person cannot help Another, cannot support him, because he cannot even help himself.
First of all, you must think about yourself, you must try your best to elevate yourself. You have to be selfish. Selfishness is the first stage on the path to altruism, Christianity. However, selfishness must have a good motivation, which is very difficult. We teach our children to be ordinary egoists, which is the result of our upbringing. We should always judge them by ourselves. We know very well who we are, and we can be sure that with the help of modern education, our children will, at best, be like us.
If you want the best for your children, you should always want your own well-being. Because if you change, your children will change too. For the future of your children, you must temporarily forget them and think about yourself.
If we are satisfied with ourselves, we can continue to raise our children with a clear conscience, as we have done so far. But are we satisfied with ourselves?
We must always start from ourselves, we must take ourselves as an example, because we cannot see the other through the mask that he is wearing.
Only when we know ourselves can we know the other. Internally, all people are the same. They have the same good intentions to become better, but they can't achieve it. It's also not easy for them. They are still unhappy and full of regrets. You have to forgive them for being like this today and think about tomorrow. If you feel sorry for yourself, then you should feel sorry for others when thinking about the future.
Raising children in doubt is the gravest sin. If you believe in what you are doing, your responsibility is not so great as if you began to doubt it.
The law requires your child to go to school. So be it! But you're his father, you don't have to settle for school. You know from experience that the school provides only knowledge and information, and that it develops only one center. You must therefore make every effort to reclaim all this living knowledge and fill the voids. It's only a compromise, but sometimes a compromise looks better than nothing.
Raising children poses a big problem that is even scary to think about. The strange thing about modern education is that when it comes to sex, children grow up without direction.
We see what the result of such education is. From our own experience, we all know that this important aspect of life is almost completely abandoned. There is rarely a person who will be normal in this regard.
This skew is progressing. Sexual manifestations are found in a child of four or five years old, and if they are not directed, they can go down a bad path. This is the beginning of that parenting, and your own experience will help you do that. It is very rare that children were brought up normally in this regard. You're often depressed about your child, but there's nothing you can do about it. And when he himself begins to understand what is good and what is bad, it is often too late; the evil has happened.
Guiding children about sex is a very delicate thing, because each particular case requires a different approach: a deep knowledge of the child's psychology. The less you know, the more at risk you are. Explaining or forbidding something leads to the fact that this thought settles in his head, arouses curiosity and pushes him to the forbidden fruit.
The sex center plays a very big role in our lives. Seventy-five percent of our thoughts come from this center and affect everything else.
Only the peoples of Central Asia are without anomaly in this respect. There, sex education is included in religious rites and the results are excellent.
QUESTION: How long can the child be managed?
ANSWER: In general, the upbringing of a child should be based on the principle that everything should proceed from one's own desire. Nothing should be given to him in a completely finished form. You can only offer him an idea, instead of guiding him, or even indirectly controlling him from a distance, leading him, starting with another thing, to the desired point. I never teach directly, otherwise my students wouldn't have learned anything. If I want one of my students to change, I start from afar or reach out to the other, and that's how they learn.
This should happen in the same way, because what is directly said to the child, he accepts mechanically and later it also manifests itself in him mechanically.
Mechanical manifestations and that which is acquired by the individual are different; their properties are different. The former are created, and the latter create. The former are not creation, they are only creation through man, not man himself. This is interpreted, among other things, by art, which has nothing authentic. In the creation of art of this kind, you can see where each individual act comes from.
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