Masonic, Occult and Esoteric Online Library
Our Relation to Children
By C. W. Leadbeater
Strengthen the Good
37. But how? you will say; by precept? by education? Yes, truly, much may be done in that way when the time comes; but another and far greater power than that is in your hands — a power which you may begin to wield from the very moment of the child's birth, and even before that; and that is the power of the influence of your own life. To some extent this is recognized, for most civilized people are careful of their words and actions in the presence of a child, and it would be an unusually depraved parent who would allow his children to hear him use violent language, or to see him give way to a fit of passion; but what a man does not realize is that if he wishes to avoid doing the most serious harm to his little ones, he must learn to control not only his words and deeds, but also his thoughts. It is true that you cannot immediately see the pernicious effect of an evil thought or desire upon the mind of your child, but none the less it is there, and it is more real and more terrible, more insidious and more far-reaching, than the harm which is obvious to the physical eye.
38. If a parent allows himself to cherish feelings of anger or jealousy, of envy or avarice, of selfishness or pride, even though he may never give them outward expression, the vibrations which he thereby causes in his own desire-body are assuredly acting all the while upon the plastic astral body of his child, tuning its vibrations to the same key, awakening into activity any germs of these sins that may have been brought over from his past life, and setting up in him also the same set of evil habits, which when they have once become definitely formed will be exceedingly difficult to correct. And this is exactly what is being done in the case of most of the children whom we see around us.
39. As it presents itself to a clairvoyant, the aura of a child is very often a most beautiful object — pure and bright in its colour, free, as yet, from the stains of sensuality and avarice and from the dull cloud of ill will and selfishness which so frequently darkens all the life of the adult. In it are to be seen lying latent all the germs and tendencies of which we have spoken — some of them evil, some of them good, and thus the possibilities of the child's future life lie plain before the eye of the watcher.
40. But how sad it is to see the change which almost invariably comes over that lovely child-aura as the years pass on — to note how persistently the evil tendencies are fostered and strengthened by his environment, and how entirely the good ones are neglected! and so incarnation after incarnation is almost wasted, and a life which, with just a little more care and self-restraint on the part of the parents and teachers, might have borne rich fruit of spiritual development, comes practically to nothing, and at its close leaves scarce any harvest to be garnered into the ego of which it has been so very one-sided an expression.
41. When one watches the criminal carelessness with which those who are responsible for the bringing up of children allow them to be perpetually surrounded by all kinds of evil and worldly thoughts, one ceases to marvel at the extraordinary slowness of human evolution, and the almost imperceptible progress which is all that the ego has to show for life after life spent in the toil and struggle of this lower world. Yet with so little more trouble so vast an improvement might be introduced!
42. It needs no astral vision to see what a change would come over this weary old world if the majority, or even any large proportion of the next generation, were subjected to the process suggested above — if all their evil qualities were steadily so allowed to atrophy for lack of nourishment, while all the good in them assiduously cultivated and developed to the fullest possible extent. One has only to think what they in turn would do for their children to realize that in two or three generations all the conditions of life would be different, and a true golden age would have begun. For the world at large that age may still be distant, but surely we who are members of the Theosophical Society ought each to be doing our best to hasten its advent: and though the influence of our example may not extend very far, it is at least within our power to see that our own children have for their development every advantage which we can give them.
43. The very greatest care, then, ought to be taken as to the surroundings of children. People who will persist in thinking coarse and unloving thoughts should at least learn that while they are doing so they are unfit to come near the young, lest they infect them with a contagion more virulent than fever. Much care is needed, for example, in the selection of the nurses to whom children must sometimes be committed; though it is surely obvious that the less they are left in the hands of servants the better. Nurses often develop the strongest affection for their charges, and treat them as though they were of their own flesh and blood, yet this is not invariably the case, and, however that may be, it should be remembered that the servants are almost inevitably less educated and less refined than their mistresses, and that, therefore, a child who is left too much to their companionship is constantly subjected to the impact of thought which is at least not unlikely to be of a less elevated order than even the average level of that of his parents. So that the mother who wishes her child to grow up into a refined and delicate-minded individual should entrust him to the care of others as little as possible, and should, above all things, take good heed of her own thoughts while watching over him.
44. Her great and cardinal rule should be to allow herself to harbour no thought and no desire which she would not wish to see reproduced in her child. Nor is this merely negative conquest over herself sufficient, for, happily, all that has been said about the influence and power of thought is true of good thoughts just as much as of evil ones, and so the parents' duty has a positive as well as a negative side. Not only must they abstain most carefully from fostering, by unworthy or selfish thoughts of their own, any evil tendency which may exist in their child, but it is also their duty to cultivate in themselves strong, unselfish affection, pure thoughts, high and noble aspirations, in order that all these may react upon their charge, quicken whatever of good is already latent in him, and create a tendency towards any good quality which is as yet unrepresented in his character.
