Is it Ok to Leave a Child to Follow a Calling?

Is It OK To Leave a Child To Follow Your Calling?

[00:45] Q – Is it OK to leave a child to follow a calling?

What is the Vedic worldview on a father leaving a child to go follow a passion, purpose, a calling.

I have connected with the Universal Consciousness to go, and I have made that choice, but I hear words like abandonment, and it is causing doubt.

[01:12] A – Buddha As An Example Parent

Yes, such a good question, because there is a wonderful example of somebody who did that that we all, irrespective of what culture we are in, what religion we are in, or whatever, we all look up to this person who did exactly that. Buddha.

Buddha was the crown prince of North India and was a famous young man. His proper name was Shakya Muni. Before that, when he was young, he was called Siddhartha Gautama Shakya. The Shakya clan of North India are still there. That family is there, like the Windsors.

In those days, though, the royal family of North India was Shakya. And so young Siddhartha Shakya grew up in extreme comfort in a palace.

His father in particular, the king, wanted him only to be a king, and there had been a prediction that if he had ever seen suffering, then he would not follow the regal path, and he would become a great sage or a saint and teach people how to experience their dharma, their relevance.

But his father was a fanatic. He did not want him to ever see suffering, and so he shielded him from it, and the boy growing up never saw anyone aging, even to the ridiculous extent that people in the palace who began aging were either exported out of the palace area or they had their hair dyed so that no white hair ever showed up. Anyone who got sick was taken out of view and so on.

There was a young woman who was groomed to be his princess. He was the prince, she was the princess, and they were betrothed and then married. Then they had a child, a boy, and at some time in the boy’s young life, the man who later on became known as Buddha, Siddhartha, went wandering outside the palace grounds at night, and there he saw it. All suffering, sickness, disease, arguments, all the suffering on display in the villages outside the palace.

And exactly what happened that the seer had prophesied… he decided he had to go. He had to go on a mission to find out what the cure for suffering was. And he left a note for his wife and son. His son could not read yet, but he left a note anyway and took off into the wilds.

[04:20] From Abandonment to Phase Transition

Now, there we have what, at this stage of the story, we are going to call abandonment, because we are only looking at this part of it. From that year to this year, that comprises abandonment and looks like a negative thing happened and a very selfish behavior on behalf of this young father of a child and husband of a wife.

But he ends up becoming the Buddha after a few years of exploring and arriving at his enlightenment, sitting under the Bodhi tree, Nirvana.

And then he is age thirty. That happened when he was thirty, and then he begins teaching. And about five years into his teaching, he had become famous. The word trickled back to his wife and to his son, who was now much older. They did not know that it was the father. They did not know that Siddhartha Gautama Shakya was the one who was being called the Shakya Muni, the Buddha.

And they were curious, and like many, they made a pilgrimage to where he was, and there he sat on this particular day inside of a tent, and they joined the queue, and then went into the tent carrying a flower. Very often, people would give him a flower, and then he would teach them something, and then they would leave with a flower. We are very familiar with that in Vedic Meditation.

When his wife saw him, of course, she recognized him immediately, even though his head was shaven, he was clean shaven everywhere and wearing a saffron robe. And the exchange was such that the wife and the son became his disciples.

And now everybody was really happy with the fact that he had left. And they became well known disciples of his, who also spread the knowledge that the Buddha was teaching. They spread the knowledge all over North India. His son became one of his most famous disciples. But that could never have happened if he had stayed home.

[06:55] Turning Content Into Context

So now we take a larger chunk of time and look at this thing, and we do not call it the abandonment anymore. We call it the phase transition. He made a phase transition from being an unhappy father who just had to handle the suffering of the world to being somebody who could actually do something about it, and it was for the betterment of the family, and neither his wife nor his son, in the fullness of time, would ever have regretted the decision he made on that fateful night.

So what is the lesson in all of this? The giving of wisdom is the taking of content and turning content and putting it into context. Any good therapist does only that. Any good guru does only that. You come with content and we couch it in context, meaning, with a large enough passage of time, we can see only evolution is at work.

If we give ourselves only a narrow, constricted swathe of time to look at, then almost everything looks horrible.

Imagine if the only thing that anybody ever knew about you was an Instagram shot of you sitting on the toilet. And you do that for a number of hours every week. And if that is all they got, that toilet-sitting person, who makes terrible smells and noises, and that is all you are.

If you want something broader than that, you have to look at the whole picture. If we do not have the whole picture, then we can attribute non-evolutionary words to something. We have to have the whole picture.

[09:14] Divorce As a Phase Transition

Couples will sometimes come to me, or one of a couple, it is usually one or the other of a couple. “We are getting divorced. We are breaking up.” That word breakup, I do not like that word. Phase transition happening. “Oh, well, this has, it is not going, you know. She is not the one. He is not the one. I thought that… blah, blah, blah,” all that stuff. “Yes, boohoo, boohoo.”

And I always say, “Congratulations.” And they look at me like, “What? Do you not have any sympathy. Are you cold hearted? You know? What is this congratulations business?”

“You have arrived at truth. And it is the truth of now. The truth of before was the truth of that state of consciousness that both of you are in now. Evolution has taken you further, and new truths have been experienced, and you have to do something about it. And if you do not do something about it, the message is, ignore the new truth that you have and live your life practicing ignoring it, for the sake of what? For the sake of maintaining a structure that has lost its relevance.”

The relevance of a relationship should be that of the ever increasing joy of shared experience, and for a period of time, every relationship yields that fruit. And that period of time might be fifty years, by the way. It may be fifty years, sixty years, seventy years. It is yielding fruits, but it may also arrive at a point where it no longer yields fruits.

And when it is failing to yield fruits, and if you have looked at all the reasons why, and still it is failing to yield the fruits for both of you, somebody has to be the change agent. One of you has to be the change agent.

It is very rare that both people, at the same time, say, “Let us do something different. Okay?” “Okay, good. I agree.” “You agree. Fantastic. Send me a postcard from wherever you go.” It is very rare. It does happen, but it is very rare, especially if there are children around. You have to figure out what to do with them.

[11:51] Children Are Like Video Cameras

I said the other day in one of these podcasts that children are just like video cameras. They watch the parents and children will always want to be peacekeepers. If this parent is angry and saying, “Blah blah blah,” about that parent, the child will go, “Yes, I agree. I agree,” and that gives that parent ammunition. And then when they are with this parent, this parent is going, “Blah blah blah blah blah,” and they are going, “Yes, yes, I agree.”

And then the two parents meet and they go, “You should hear what the kid says about you in your absence. You really upset the kid.” And the kid is just like, “I am keeping peace with whoever is in the room. I am not going to rock the boat.”

Children know how to avoid, they get good at avoiding conflict like this. So we cannot make children happy by agreeing to live an unhappy life. We cannot make children happy by agreeing to live an unhappy life. So if there is something that needs to happen that is not happening in the structure of that relationship, then that relationship is going to have to get flexy. It is going to have to become adaptive.

A relationship is a third thing. You have this person and that person, and the relationship is a third thing. One and one makes three. And that relationship has to be like any organism. It has to be adaptive. All forms, all functions in any successful organism that survives, a successful organism survives because it produces forms and functions that are adaptive to change.

Their relationship also has to be adaptive to change. And if it is not, then the relationship cannot survive in its current form. It has to be able to adapt and change as well.

And so these things are all fraught. These are very touchy subjects for people, very, very touchy, because we are all convinced that, “I was just living my life and I was in love with somebody, and then they started behaving like that. And they started living in the non-me way. They started thinking thoughts that were the non-me thoughts. They started behaving in the ways that are the non-me behaviors. How dare they?”

Come on. There is no human being whose body and mind is designed to be the perfect vibratory match for another human being. That is a very hokey idea.

There is a season, a season of resonance, and I will be the first to say the season could be your entire adult life. It is a great possibility, as rare as it is today, very rare, but there is a season. Explore and enjoy the season. Explore it and enjoy it. If the season begins changing, do not get angry with the season. The season is changing, and when the season changes, we need to learn how to be adaptive and draw advantage from the change.

So, digging in our heels and saying, “I will not change. I will not change.” There were generations of western society where people stayed together, and now I get to tell you a story about the couple in their nineties, which has been recorded before, so I hope people do not get too bored with it, the millions who are listening to this now. “Here he goes again on that old story. He must be getting old,” but I just love telling this story, so you are going to hear it again if you have heard it before.

[14:05] Seasons of Resonance in Love

Back in the nineties, I used to teach in a place just up the road in a little suburb called Woollahra, at Jersey Road, and I was there for, I do not know, twenty years or something. And somewhere in that twenty years, this elderly couple came to me and learned to meditate, and then they said, they were very elderly, in their nineties, and they said to me, “We heard that you give private sessions. Is it true?” And I said, “Yes.” And they said, “Well, we have learned to meditate. We love it, and we really like you and we trust you. Could we come to you in confidence and tell you something that is going on in our life?” I said, “Absolutely.”

So they appeared one day and they sat down. He was about ninety three, she was about ninety one from memory, and they said, “We have been married for something like seventy five years. We have been married for seventy five years,” let us say that that is what it was. It was up there somewhere since they were in their twenties, “and we have decided we are getting divorced.”

And I said, “Really, how long have you been contemplating this?” And they said, “About fifty years.”

And I said, “You have been contemplating divorce for fifty years?” “Yes, we have talked about it a number of times, and we have decided that now is the time. We have a few years left and we would like to go our own ways and have other experiences.”

And I said, “Okay, what was the critical mass that caused you?” And they said, “Well, it is a long story. We had a son. He was an only child, and he lived until he was sixty five and then he died. And the only reason,” and it was recent that he died, “and the only reason why we are openly talking about divorce now is we waited for our son to die because we did not want to upset him.”

And I said, “What was the likelihood that, over that his sixty five years of life, he never figured out that the two of you were having problems? Do you think it was likely that he just thought you were in a happy, jolly relationship when you were openly contemplating divorce for decades?” I do not think so.” They waited for their son to die before they decided.

And so what is the moral of the story? If you have decided that your relationship is not yielding the fruits, you need to have a serious contemplation, get the counseling, and do all the rest of it, and if it works out that it is still yielding fruits as a result of that, fantastic. Fruits are back on the tree. But if you have done everything that you can, and the fruits do not reappear on the tree, then be sweet and nice to each other and send postcards.

You do not get extra points for living a life of suffering, and especially not for the child. The idea that we have a child and the child will not like it, I guarantee you the child knows that you are unhappy, and I guarantee you the child is just waiting for the two of you to get real.

The children that I talk to all tell me that, “Mommy and Daddy, you know, they have gone their separate ways. I am so relieved. I was so relieved. To see them snarling at each other or ignoring each other for all those years. Oh my God, when they finally found a way to get happy. Fantastic.”

So do not blame it on the children, and do not put weight on the children. If you like each other and you keep on liking each other and you look forward to seeing each other, stay together. If that is not true, challenge the assumption.

[16:21] The Couple Who Waited Fifty Years

Back in the nineties, I used to teach in a place just up the road in a little suburb called Woollahra, at Jersey Road, and I was there for, I do not know, twenty years or something. And somewhere in that twenty years, this elderly couple came to me and learned to meditate, and then they said, they were very elderly, in their nineties, and they said to me, “We heard that you give private sessions. Is it true?” And I said, “Yes.” And they said, “Well, we have learned to meditate. We love it, and we really like you and we trust you. Could we come to you in confidence and tell you something that is going on in our life?” I said, “Absolutely.”

So they appeared one day and they sat down. He was about ninety three, she was about ninety one from memory, and they said, “We have been married for something like seventy five years. We have been married for seventy five years,” let us say that that is what it was. It was up there somewhere since they were in their twenties, “and we have decided we are getting divorced.”

And I said, “Really, how long have you been contemplating this?” And they said, “About fifty years.”

And I said, “You have been contemplating divorce for fifty years?” “Yes, we have talked about it a number of times, and we have decided that now is the time. We have a few years left and we would like to go our own ways and have other experiences.”

And I said, “Okay, what was the critical mass that caused you?” And they said, “Well, it is a long story. We had a son. He was an only child, and he lived until he was sixty five and then he died. And the only reason,” and it was recent that he died, “and the only reason why we are openly talking about divorce now is we waited for our son to die because we did not want to upset him.”

And I said, “What was the likelihood that, over that his sixty five years of life, he never figured out that the two of you were having problems? Do you think it was likely that he just thought you were in a happy, jolly relationship when you were openly contemplating divorce for decades?” I do not think so.” They waited for their son to die before they decided.

[19:15] Children Want Authentic Happiness

And so what is the moral of the story? If you have decided that your relationship is not yielding the fruits, you need to have a serious contemplation, get the counseling, and do all the rest of it, and if it works out that it is still yielding fruits as a result of that, fantastic. Fruits are back on the tree. But if you have done everything that you can, and the fruits do not reappear on the tree, then be sweet and nice to each other and send postcards.

You do not get extra points for living a life of suffering, and especially not for the child. The idea that we have a child and the child will not like it, I guarantee you the child knows that you are unhappy, and I guarantee you the child is just waiting for the two of you to get real.

The children that I talk to all tell me that, “Mommy and Daddy, you know, they have gone their separate ways. I am so relieved. I was so relieved. To see them snarling at each other or ignoring each other for all those years. Oh my God, when they finally found a way to get happy. Fantastic.”

So do not blame it on the children, and do not put weight on the children. If you like each other and you keep on liking each other and you look forward to seeing each other, stay together. If that is not true, challenge the assumption.

You do not get extra points for living a life of suffering, and especially not for the child. The idea that we have a child and the child will not like it, I guarantee you the child knows that you are unhappy, and I guarantee you the child is just 

waiting for the two of you to get real.

The children that I talk to all tell me that, “Mommy and Daddy, you know, they have gone their separate ways. I am so relieved. I was so relieved. To see them snarling at each other or ignoring each other for all those years. Oh my God, when they finally found a way to get happy. Fantastic.”

So do not blame it on the children, and do not put weight on the children. If you like each other and you keep on liking each other and you look forward to seeing each other, stay together. If that is not true, challenge the assumption.

So, Buddha.