Divinity and the child

Divinity and the child
by
Balagangadharanathaswamiji, Adichunchnagiri Math

‘The diet we now feed our children on is terribly deficient in vitamins essential for soul-health.’
These are available in our epics which include the Bhagavadgita. Once again the sara of the
Gita must run through society in everyday life.

Review and Comments
by
R. Ashok Kumar, B.E.,M.E (Power), Negentropist, Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal, 299, Tardeo Road,Nana Chowk, Mumbai-400007.
E-mail: ashokuku@rediffmail.com
© 2011-2019 Ramaswami Ashok Kumar
URL: http://vedasandmoderncivilisation.blogspot.com/2011/03/divinity-and-child.html
Keywords: society of specialists, modern civilisation, normal civilisation, relevant education of
the members of society-material and spiritual.

Note: The comments of R. Ashok Kumar are in italics

A child that comes into the world is not a chance; it comes in as a part of a grand cosmic plan. A child is therefore a newcomer that is to be honoured; it has its rights that must not be denied.
A child is a distinguished visitor and an adorable guest, but one who comes to stay and become one of us. It arrives therefore with a sense of belonging, with a charter of ownership.
The soundness of a community can easily be judged from the manner in which it provides for its children. A starved child population is a sure sign of a nation’s decay. A scantily- fed, ill- clothed,uneducated, soul- impoverished child-group is the first sign of a country’s damnation.
A child does not visibly knock, does not audibly ask, does not apparently seek, but its whole being is a ceaseless, though silent demand for the effective granting of its privileges, and the unstinted sanctioning of its rights and the generous satisfaction of its needs.
A child is a citizen of God’s state of the innocents and it cannot put up with any dwarfing of its
citizenship. The Heavenly Father is bounteous in His gifts to the child; He has surrounded the child with colour, smell and delight; He has endowed the child with fancy and imagination; He has infilled the child with poetic vision and a sense of wonder and with the irrepressible desire to reach out and know.
Kamsa and Hiranyakahsyapu are notorious characters in our mythology. Both were the personification of ‘adharma’ (read practitioners of modern civilisation) and both ended in being annihilated by the Lord. Kamsa (Practitioners of the tech innovations like the notorious energy providers and users of to-day-hydro, thermal and nuclear without enjoyable use of living energy, without practicing strict conservation and return) was a child killer. In order to save his own life from a predicted danger, he murdered children, till in the end Lord Krishna brought to an end his demoniacal existence.
Hiranyakashyapu was also a child-killer. However, he did not want to squeeze the life out of every child’s body; but he indulged in the more sinful game of drying up children’s souls(read creating ignorance of true knowledge- that every thing is interconnected with everything else among other truths taught in the Gita). He ordered a recasting of the process of education in his state, by which God was squeezed out of schools, and Hiranya-ism was enthroned. Namo Hiranyaya was substituted for Namo Narayana. And it needed the tremendous soul-strength of Prahalada and the intervention of an especial Narasimha incarnation to save the world from his menace.
Chhatrapathi Shivaji had little of formal education(read specialist rote in a society of specialists), but on his mother’s lap he heard (from Jija Bhai), the exploits of the epic heroes, and founded a kingdom based on righteousness.
Today parental influence at home is in a sad state. And a generation of children is coming up which has not at all heard of our epic characters and our puranic highlights of truth and righteousness. The remedy lies in our opening up the windows of nurseries and schools to the breeze of national religious culture.
The alternative is what we are witnessing today:, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island,
Fukushimas, earthquakes, tsunamies,climate change-to name a few, all man -made disasters. Design made by man only cannot be trusted to return. It is only production, consumption and waste-child-killers, instead of righteousness-production, where it is required, when it is required and returning all that was taken, safely to mother earth.

This is edited and adapted from a version of a discourse which appeared under “Soul Search”
entitled ‘Divinity and the child’ in the print edition of the New Indian Express, Bangalore on 10th
March 2011 authored by Balagangadharanathaswamiji, Adichunchnagiri Math.