To the Mothers
In this extract from a landmark discourse, Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba issues a candid, endearing call to young mothers to embrace their responsibility as their children’s first spiritual preceptor.
In the tender hearts of the children, there is much potentiality for devotion and attachment to higher ideals and objectives. These (potentialities) can be developed and cultivated by you. Do not think that they do not know anything. that you can divert them any way you wish; this is a mistake. Recognize the great potentials of the child. Adopt such methods as the child himself might suggest or indicate. Help the child reach Godliness and become aware of its high destiny. Do not presume that the child is some inferior personality or that it is incapable of attaining the heights.
The parents themselves are not competent to guide the children; they dote on them and do not know how to correct them. In fact, they (the parents) have reprehensible habits and ways of life. They smoke, play cards, gamble, drink, and fight in the home. Further, they utter falsehoods, scandalize others, boast, and slander in the presence of the children. How then can they lead their children on right lines? You will have to persuade such parents to mend their ways and be inspiring examples, rather than be like enemies and obstacles….
Establish the status of the mother in the home as the upholder of spiritual ideals and thus, the guru [spiritual teacher] of the children. Every mother must share in this effort—the expansion and steady manifestation of the God-consciousness latent in every child.
Children are the crops growing in the fields that will yield the harvest for the nation to sustain itself. They [the children] are the pillars on which the foundation of the nation’s future is built. They are the roots of the national tree that will yield the fruits of work, worship, and wisdom to the next generation.
The Sathya Sai Bala Vikas [spiritual program for the young] has been evolved in order to feed these roots, strengthen these foundational pillars, and fertilize the growing crops. Children are now growing up in an atmosphere polluted by corruption, anxiety, and hollow pomp because people are enamored by the shallow material culture, mainly imported from the West. Parents, teachers, and even the leaders of the nation fail to admire, adore, understand, and practice basic principles of Indian culture. Children are denied the precious heritage that is their due, instead they are inducted into alien ideals, thoughts, and habits. They [children] are praised when they recite foreign nursery rhymes, neglecting native rhymes. The educated child cuts himself away from the village child or the children of the unschooled.
The elders have but a little distance to travel before they disembark. But remember the children have many miles to go, and they take the nation along with them to perdition or progress. The sages of old knew the value of our culture and the deep peace and security that the heritage of that culture can give in times of turmoil and strife. They prescribed three disciplines for everyone, young or old. They declared, Matru devo bhava, Pitru devo bhava, Achaarya devo bhava [Treat mother as God, treat father as God, and treat your guru as God]. So long as a nation grows up with these three noble ideals, its roots would not be uprooted and dry up. Adoration of the mother as the Divine, of the father as God, and of the preceptor as God will make the growing generation cherish the heritage, which is handed down by them and through them. The generation gap will not be an unbridgeable chasm.
Source: Sathya Sai Speaks, Vol. 12
