parenting – Becoming Human

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.

Virtue in education, ou comment faire de bons Belges…

I was at a party organized at my daughter´s school today, and I had another epiphany.

When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?

Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.

As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.

The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.

I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It has been my experience that many members of the educated population present a sycophantic public persona, which is apparently polite and very conflict-averse, but behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.

A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents.

So is the moral education not working?

Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.

The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?

And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.

There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.

Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.

Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.

The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.

These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.

My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.

Ich schütze deine Lebendigkeit

Welcome to my new mantra. I would like to recommend it to parents and schools the world over.

This came to me in German on the plane back from Istanbul and I don’t quite come up with the translation I want (that in itself probably says something about the alienness of the concepts from our daily reality), but in German it’s absolutely perfect. I defend/will defend/am defending/protect your vitality/vivaciousness/spontaneity/natural élan, something on those lines.

We devote, as a society, as educators and as parents, a tremendous amount of effort towards extinguishing the natural high spirits of children. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient, annoys others or ourselves, brings (and indeed it does) unfortunate consequences in terms of accidents or social opprobrium. And I am not saying education is unnecessary: clearly children need to learn to live in the world as it is, and to defend and protect themselves. Yet our profoundest duty is precisely the reverse – to allow our children to carry their spontaneity and aliveness through into adult life.

So this is my promise to my children; I hope it may also be yours.