Tags:
Journalism of Courage
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.
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.
