Unique – Thus Spake Mohanji

Welcome to Mohanji Speaks. These are answers to questions from listeners. Thank you for sending them. Keep sending them. I will try to answer them as best as I can.

This question comes with the title motivation of children.
Q: How to motivate my children to get over tamasic tendencies and put their minds to useful productive work like doing chores, study time, being responsible people within the society? Smartphones, gadgets distract them completely. And even taking them away doesn’t do much to help. So, what can I do to help them so that they do not waste their time and their lives? Or is it that the predestined behave in such a manner?

Mohanji: We should not consider anything as destiny and procrastinate over it. I believe that if we have the right attitude, we can change anything to something positive. How do you bring up your children to powerful personalities? We have spoken about this earlier, but I will give you another dimension. The world has the highest possibilities of human existence and the lowest possibilities of human existence. The highest is existence in compassion, kindness, selflessness, unconditional love; the highest of human qualities. The lowest is just being sense oriented, chasing pleasures, comparing, criticizing, judging, revenging; these kinds of things.

We have this huge variety. Now, where do we position ourselves? This is very important. And that’s exactly where the children will position, looking at us. If we are always insecure, if we are complaining, if we are criticizing judging, if we are positioning ourselves as completely confused in society; children will do the same because they are looking at us as role models at least in the initial days. What do we need to do? We need to bring the stories of powerful personalities who survived all sorts of tribulations, all sorts of tests and express themselves in the most successful way as trendsetters, game-changers. This is in everybody. You got to believe in yourself to do that.

First and foremost, bring awareness of the child in such a way that they believe in themselves. First and foremost is self-respect, belief, faith in themselves, towards themselves, for which we have to respect ourselves. We have to respect other people. We have to respect people, we have to respect ourselves. We have to cultivate respect for everything we do. We have to accept our self; self-acceptance. Respect our self, self-respect.

And we should not ever position ourselves in a position of insecurity or low self-esteem, or things like that. When we have a situation where we are a bit low, we should be able to address it positively. We can go high or we can go low. That’s how human life works, but we should address it positively. Yes, I have a situation where I’m feeling a bit low, that’s fine. That’s okay. And then, the child will learn that everything is okay. If we accept it, it doesn’t hurt too much. If you resist it, it hurts.

This is how it is, and then failures. We do not allow a child to fail because we think failures means the end of life. Absolutely not. Failures lead to success. When you accept failures gracefully, we have found success. Success is in acceptance and non-resistance. This we can lead by example, we should lead by example. Another aspect is that we should not push a child to be perfect. Perfection is a relative thing and it’s a constant thing. Perfection means you got to keep improving. What was perfect yesterday may not be perfect today. We have seen systems, people, situations, materials, constantly getting upgraded. So, a new thing totally eclipses a thing of the past, because it gets upgraded. We must understand that perfection is a relative thing. We should not push the child to be really, really perfect, and some of the backbenchers become very successful because they did not have peer pressure. Just for the sake of perfection, if we put the child into pressure, they collapse completely, eventually.

Many people who are probably successful in life, in terms of money, are not successful in life in terms of contentment. Many people have many diseases, because of this mad rush for something materialistic and thinking that is what is a success. It’s very, very important that we must understand that a child is a unique creation like we are a unique creation. We are all unique. We must leave the child free to be themselves with gentle guidance; with great stories of people who could have had anything, they could have had anything in life but wanted nothing. That means that they were contented inside, and they performed very well and then transformed the society with their existence. Bring the stories of that kind, so that the mind as the child grows will orient to activities which are good to create legends. Don’t try to say the society is not good or things are not good, a sign of times and stuff like that. Society is as it is; it will keep changing. There’ll be differences each day, let’s not worry about that. Let’s see what we can do in this society at this time, in this situation. We must accept ourselves, then the child will accept themselves.

Do discuss this with your friends, contemplate on it, and increase your awareness, step by step. Wish you great success in life.

Lots of love. This is Mohanji.