TRANSCRIPT
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If people fully resolve their traumas, they would spontaneously become wonderful parents. But how would they do it? What would they look like?
I think the first thing would be a radical nurturance of their child, radical empathy for the child’s feelings, an intuitive spontaneous grasp of what the child’s needs are. And even more so than that, a profound sense of responsibility and obligation to meet those needs. And not just that, an ability to do it. Because I think someone who is fully connected with their true self would be able to meet the needs of a child much more profoundly than people do nowadays.
And whole concepts now that we think of, oh the terrible twos, these bratty little kids. Oh, he’s just going through a very normal stage of development where he needs to say no and rebel and fight and cry all the time and have temper tantrums. I think a lot of that would be rendered moot. I don’t think children would be doing that if they really were having their deep needs met.
I think when children go into their terrible twos and terrible threes and fighting and kicking and screaming and crying and biting and being rageful and nasty to other kids and going through the “mine, mine, mine” phase, I think what they’re really doing is they’re really rebelling against their parents’ lack of love for them. And they’re pulling away from their parents and they’re saying, “You!” They’re furious at their parents for what they’re not getting. But what they’re going through is actually very normal because that’s a normal response to an extremely unhealthy situation.
And I consider the average parent nowadays to be exceedingly unhealthy, extremely disturbed in fact, and yet with no awareness of it. And in a world where everyone supports parents because most parents are exactly alike, when you scratch below the surface, they’re all saying, “Good job! You’re doing a great job! Good for you for sticking with your kid through his tantrums and his rage. It must be horrible for you. I give you so much credit.” Well, do they really deserve credit? Or are these people who all have the same delusion and are all acting out the same forms of abuse on their children, just patting each other on the back and saying it’s okay?
[Laughter]
I suppose it would be the equivalent of a society where everybody raped their children and everybody could say, “Well, that’s normal. That’s what we do. That’s okay.” And there are societies where terrible things have happened to children, but because everybody’s doing it, it’s considered acceptable. Like circumcision in our society, like in other societies, female genital mutilation, or binding girls’ feet. Meaning those Chinese societies, ancient or not so ancient, 100 years ago even, or less, where they would bind women’s feet, girls’ feet, to make them appealing to men. They take their feet and they crush all the bones in them and bend them over and then wrap the feet tight. The feet would rot and stink and they would be broken, and that was total torture of those little girls. But it was considered normal.
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In what ways is our society just like that nowadays? I think mostly we just are just like that, but on an emotional level. We take little children’s spirits and we crush all the bones in them and break them under and force them to our will. And children are taught to bury their rage, to bury their rebellion, to bury their “no,” and bury their “mine,” and bury their terrible threes, and bury their temper tantrums deep within. And that’s considered normal development—to learn how to bury your feelings, to split them off.
But in a world where parents were fully healthy, fully connected with their true selves, they wouldn’t be forcing traumatized children to bury any of their feelings. They would actually love their children more, and they would empathize with the children for their rage. But primarily, the children wouldn’t even have the rage because they would have nothing to be rebelling against, because they would be loved the way they knew deep down that they deserved to be.
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Parents working less, parents being there for their children, parents devoting themselves educationally to their children’s welfare as best they can, feeding their children good food spontaneously. I think people would have a much more spontaneous desire also, if they were fully healthy, to eat healthy. They wouldn’t want to eat junk food; they wouldn’t want to put garbage into their bodies. People who love their cars don’t put water and don’t put salt down the gas pipe. They don’t put bananas down there; they put good gasoline and high-quality gasoline in there. They change the spark plugs regularly.
I think people, if they were much more emotionally healthy, if they were all enlightened, they would live much more healthy lives. I don’t think we would see psychiatric disorders at all because I think a psychiatric disorder is an expression of a very twisted, traumatized personality. I think you’re going to be hard pressed to find a psychiatric problem that doesn’t have a deep emotional root.
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There would be a lot less crime. There wouldn’t—I mean, how many crimes really just have an emotional root? People compulsively repeating the horrors done to them through a symbol: shoplifting, stealing, stealing cars, being violent toward other people, sexual abuse of other people, murdering people, using drugs, selling drugs. I mean, these things all have an emotional root. So if people worked out all the emotional roots, they would have no desire to act out crimes.
I also like the idea of thinking that humanity would devote itself, if humanity were healed of its traumas, toward living in sync with our natural world. I think people would eat a lot less meat. I think people would eat a lot more vegetables. They wouldn’t be killing animals so much because it would feel horrible to be killing animals. I think the human population would shrink. I sometimes wonder, what would the human population shrink to if we were really deeply emotionally healthy? 6 billion people now, or is it 7 billion people? Perhaps it would shrink to a million people in the whole planet, back to what it was 50,000 years ago. And small populations, small towns, not massive pollution.
We would realize just how criminal it was on a spiritual, deep level of our truth to pollute our rivers. We’d be able to drink out of them because we wouldn’t be polluting them with human sewage and heavy metals.
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People would be much more kind to each other. They’d be much more empathic to strangers. It would be a much safer world to travel, and people wouldn’t have to worry about getting mugged and getting ripped off by everyone. I think people would spontaneously become much more educated and intelligent because I think there would be much more openness. All the people that are stunted intellectually and educationally because of their traumas—that wouldn’t exist. People would be much more open to learn; they’d be much more spontaneously curious.
What about all these children nowadays who have their curiosity just squelched by traumatizing parents? Those children, their potential could really flower and manifest.
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I do think it’s possible. I think—I really do think it’s possible. Now, what could create that? That’s the other thing. What could create this world? We may be up for some massive starvations at some point, and I think that sometimes a huge wake-up call, as horrible and tragic as it can be, can also help people and help humanity grow. Help some people just have a burst of realizing that we’ve been doing things terribly wrong.
So, not that I hope for a mass starvation or a mass horrible incident, but it seems like we’re going in that direction. Certainly, humanity cannot keep going in the direction that it’s going. It’s not a sustainable direction. 10 billion people? 15 billion people? When is it going to end? When will people wake up? When will people begin spontaneously making sacrifices? Sometimes the world starts making our sacrifices for us. That may be what we need. But I certainly don’t want to see humanity go extinct. On the other hand, I’m hoping that people wake up.
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