You will have to understand some significant growth patterns. Life has seven-year circles, it moves in
seven-year circles just as the earth makes one rotation on its axis in twenty-four hours. Now nobody
knows why not twenty-five, why not twenty-three. There is no way to answer it; it is simply a fact.
The earth takes three hundred and sixty-five days to make one round of the sun. Why three hundred
and sixty-five? Nobody knows, nobody needs to know. And it does not make any difference. If it
were taking four hundred days, what difference would it have made to you? ... or three hundred
days ...? The question would have remained the same: Why?
So remember one thing: any question is absurd if with every answer the question still remains
standing the same. In twenty-four hours the earth makes one turn on its own axis. Why? Make it
twenty-five, make it twenty-six, make it thirty, sixty – as much as you want – the question still stands
the same: why? Hence I call the question absurd; it will always remain the same.
So don’t ask me why life moves in seven-year circles. I don’t know. This much I know, that it moves
in seven-year circles. And if you understand those seven-year circles, you will understand a great
deal about human growth.
The first seven years are the most important because the foundation of life is being laid. That’s why
all the religions are very much concerned about grabbing children as quickly as possible.
The Jews will circumcise the child. What nonsense! But they are stamping the child as a Jew; that
is a primitive way of stamping. You still do it on the cattle around here; I have seen stamps. Every
owner stamps the cattle, otherwise they can get mixed up. It is a cruel thing. Red-hot steel has to
be used to stamp the cattle’s leather, skin; it burns the skin. But then it becomes your possession; it
cannot be lost, it cannot be stolen.
What is circumcision? It is stamping cattle. But these cattle are Jews.
Hindus have their own ways. All religions have their own ways. But it should be known whose cattle
you are, who your shepherd is – Jesus? Moses? Mohammed? You are not your own master.
Those first seven years are the years when you are conditioned, stuffed with all kinds of ideas which
will go on haunting you your whole life, which will go on distracting you from your potentiality, which
will corrupt you, which will never allow you to see clearly. They will always come like clouds before
your eyes, they will make everything confused.
Things are clear, very clear – existence is absolutely clear – but your eyes have layers upon layers
of dust.
And all that dust has been arranged in the first seven years of your life when you were so innocent,
so trusting, that whatsoever was told to you you accepted as truth. And whatsoever has gone into
your foundation, later on it will be very difficult for you to find: it has become almost part of your
blood, bones, your very marrow. You will ask a thousand other questions but you will never ask
about the basic foundations of your belief.
The first expression of love towards the child is to leave his first seven years absolutely innocent,
unconditioned, to leave him for seven years completely wild, a pagan.
He should not be converted to Hinduism, to Mohammedanism, to Christianity. Anybody who is trying
to convert the child is not compassionate, he is cruel: he is contaminating the very soul of a new,
fresh arrival. Before the child has even asked questions he has been answered with ready-made
philosophies, dogmas, ideologies. This is a very strange situation. The child has not asked about
God, and you go on teaching him about God. Why so much impatience? Wait!
If the child someday shows interest in God and starts asking about God, then try to tell him not only
your idea of God – because nobody has any monopoly: put before him all the ideas of God that have
been presented to different people by different ages, by different religions, cultures, civilizations.
Put before him all the ideas about God, and tell him, ”You can choose between these, whichever
appeals to you. Or you can invent your own, if nothing suits. If everything seems to be with a flaw,
and you think you can have a better idea, then invent your own. Or if you find that there is no way
to invent an idea without loopholes, then drop the whole thing; there is no need. A man can live
without God; there is no intrinsic necessity.
”Millions of people have lived without God. God is nothing that is inevitably needed by you. Yes, I
have my idea; that too is in the combination of all these ideals in this collection. You can choose
that, but I am not saying that my idea is the right idea. It appeals to me; it may not appeal to you.”
There is no inner necessity that the son should agree with the father. In fact it seems far better that
he should not agree. That’s how evolution happens. If every child agrees with the father then there
will be no evolution, because the father will agree with his own father, so everybody will be where
God left Adam and Eve – naked, outside the gate of the garden of Eden. Everybody will be there.
Because sons have disagreed with their fathers, forefathers, with their whole tradition, man has
evolved.
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