Who146;s that?

There is someone inside me who tells me what to do. If I don8217;t do as he says, he stops talking to me 8212; and I miss that very much. So, I won8217;t attend class because he8217;s asking me not to.8217;8217; That8217;s a teacher of a child, recalling what the child had told him more than a two decades ago, when he was managing a school. He now studies and lectures on Indian psychology all over the world. 8216;8216;The child,8217;8217; he said, 8216;8216;just wouldn8217;t attend classes. His teacher tried this way and that, this incentive or that, but no, he wouldn8217;t enter the class.8217;8217;

8216;8216;Finally, I was asked to find out what8217;s going on,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;First I observed him. I found he was very happy to come to school and was friendly with the rest of his class too, so no problems there. It is only when play time was over and the children were taken into a class 8212; essentially an open room, with tall, wide windows and no doors 8212; that he would freeze. I also found him doing nothing in particular. He would be playing under the trees, beside the pond, running with the geese, or often just walking around the school.8217;8217; How old was he? 8216;8216;All of seven,8217;8217; he laughed.

He was lucky to be in a school that tolerated this, I said, remembering the fright I would get when, after a late breakfast in the mess, I would rush to the assembly hall, leaving a trail of crumbs as I ran so the teachers and the monitors didn8217;t put me on PD punishment drill. 8216;8216;I asked him why, when all the other children in his class were inside and obviously enjoying themselves, he didn8217;t enter the class. And this is the answer I got. 8216;Surely there8217;s something there,8217; I said to myself and along with his teacher set about discovering it. But that8217;s not the point.8217;8217;

What then? 8216;8216;The point is only what the great masters have said so often 8212; as a child grows, he loses his intimacy with the Divine. We stop listening to that Voice that cries out at every turn, the Presence that tells us, in its inimitable, indescribable way that what we8217;re doing is right or not. We smother it in order to do what we, with our pretentious intellectualism, think is best for us 8212; and then regret it.8217;8217;

He8217;s about a month and hundreds of km away, but this thought still lingers.