About Conscious Parenting

The notes in this essay are related to a discussion that I had some time ago where a Sufi method of parenting shared on a cassette tape that I heard about 25 years before. The cassette itself was part of a series of lectures that I was very impressed with. It was related to what is now called, "the Fourth Way". It is a work that a very good Sufi teacher named Gurdjieff mainly brought into existence. He was the most successful in bring this work to the level that it is experienced by many groups today, though there are some other lesser known transmission lines of this knowledge that also have happened. One of the lines is through the Jesuits and has to do with what later became known is the "Enneagram personality work". Another line is through the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Christian churches and has to do with "Hesychasm", a method of prayer and meditation, similar to kundalini yoga, but focuses more on the 3rd Eye and Heart chakra. Another line is through Hasidic Judaism, where the cassettes that I heard were from. It seems that the Marx brothers, especially Harpo, were representatives of this school, and that it had something to do with "conscious movement". If you look at videos and watch how Harpo moves, there are indications of some mime training that is behind some of the teachings that I later incorporated into the Tanran Reiki energy exercises, to help people to directly feel the energy. Harpo tends to move very consciously and I find that watching him move always "wakes me up" some, out of the robotic slumber of automatic mental, emotional, and physical habits that we normally live in.

Regretfully, the cassettes got lost through a number of relocations in my life. The information is not found in any of the Sufi books I have of any lineage. Some of the information is, but several keys ideas and practices are missing. Part of my work in preserving this knowledge is to embed some of the missing ideas into a few stories and essays that I have written, just so if there is anything valuable in the ideas that it can transmitted to the future. This essay is going to serve this process. It may require "hearing between the lines" to fully get what the cassettes were trying to share. Sometimes the information is not so linear so as to be about memorizing some rules and robotically following them, but of understanding certain processes and being intuitively conscious of them when engaging certain life challenges in the world. This is especially true with parenting children.

A few preliminary notes about "conscious parenting" or any parenting for that matter. I do find that, in general, parents do a good job raising their children. Humankind has been going forward, generation to generation, because human parents have managed to get their children to be functional adults who in their turn do the same. It is an amazing miracle that has kept humanity literally alive for over thousands of years. Like other animal species, humans are partly wired genetically to raise their children fairly well, well enough to insure that they become adults. What is interesting and what many researchers found, though, is that humans are less genetically wired to adapt to the environment than most animal species. There is something more open ended to human development. It allows humans to be more shaped and molded by their parents than other animal parents. As a result, animals have and need a shorter formative period before becoming a functional adult, whereas human children are becoming adults later and later in their history. In early human tribes, the ritual initiation into adult life could have been as early as 7 years old. In agricultural societies, it was around 12 to 14. In industrial societies, the ritual had become graduating from High School, therefore marked initiation around 18 years old. But it is really pushing more to 25 years old and even further, because this is usually when College graduation happens. There is apparently more to learn in being human than other animals species are required to learn. This is because human life is changing enormously. The early tribal humans could literally not function in modern industrial societies without at least undergoing some remedial education of a fairly long duration. The language systems of modern human life are very complex. Even the vocabulary and grammar mastery of language on a simple literal level requires years to achieve, and to understand how to decode the complex patterns of political spin and lying takes even more time, and to understanding how to encode and decode the neo-modern tribal slang of post industrial subculture tribes, each one different but related to the other subcultures, takes even more time.

Even though astrology is considered by modern liberal semi-scientific humanistic eduction to be a pseudo science, it seems that several developmental models, like Eric Erickson's 8 developemental stage model of childhood growth, Margarent Mahlers objective relations model of childhood growth, Maria Montessori's model of childhood education, the ideas on how to support the genius child in the writings of Alice Walker, the moral stages of Lawrence Kohlberg, Liedloff's continuum concept, or the sensory motor and cognitive development model of Jean Piaget all really presuppose developmental rhythms implied in basic astrology, in particular the Saturn cycle of moving through the houses every 7 years, though similar deductions can be seen by looking at the inner planets (short cycles, like the ultradian and cirdacian cycles) and the outer planets (larger developmental patterns, including whole generations mapped by Pluto, and multi-generational patterns mapped by the new planet Eris). Some of these theorists did have some exposure to astrology and may have believed in astrology as being useful, Rudolf Steiner brought some of this understanding into the Waldorf education system where it got interweaved with Montessori's ideas.

I find that, in general, sensory motor development is given less support than it really needs. Some training in Hatha Yoga does help, but Mime and Tai Chi training added to this would be better or the original full kundalini yoga system behind Hatha Yoga. When Yogananda brought the Kriya Yoga system to America, he intuitively and correctly left out the breathwork, the deep mudras, and the chanting of bija mantras. He still taught them, one on one, or esoterically, to students, but let a stripped down version of yoga be released to the public. The esoteric elements of yoga still sometimes cause an adverse reaction from dogmatic fundamentalist Christians who can and do repress this knowledge, sometimes trying to actually make it illegal in some states. They have failed to do this, but their repressive influence still exists.

There are certain junctures in childhood that are called "imprint formation" periods. This is where the child needs to get certain kinds of input from the environment in order to grow properly. There is something that I call "sensory motor phase", which lasts a fairly long time, and which the Steiner and Montessori schools generally do okay with. I say "do okay with" because, in general, parents and teachers cannot fully teach what they do not already know. The sensory and motor training of most industrial humans is lacking a lot. This educational process is the least audio and visual of them all. There are a class of humans who need to learn through the body and through the sensory and motor functioning of the body. They are called "kinesthetic learners". Up until recently, many of them were relegated to the class of "learning disabled" or "special needs children" or "mentally retarded" (this term is, mercifully, not used as much as it used to). Several teachers, however, were able to get this class of students to become high achievers in the school system by first teaching them in their primary learning modality first. Modern society is tremendously audio-visual in its learning processes and tends to discard the kinesthetics, yet as a group they are the hardest to "brainwash" into believing anything. Unless they feel truth as a body sensation, they do not believe something. The animal belly instincts are tied into more ancient parts of the brain that have a sense of reality that has evolved over millions of years and predates the strange cultural brainwash process that often is behind education. It seems that fundamentalist religious groups are aware of this aspect of education and this is why there are Koran schools and movements to teach Creationism and prayer in public schools, and why these groups do not merely want to "expose children" to their ideas and to all the other ideas of other religions. They really want the "one right belief system" to be taught instead.

In terms of child raising, there is a time when a child must go all over the house and touch everything. If they do not map out their world this way, their brain will be smaller and more shrivelled up, even organically. If there is trauma, the very shape of the brain can be affected. There is a reason why one favorite method of early death is due to brain tumors, why there are many epileptics, why many more brain illnesses are abounding than any time before in human history. Like many things, there are a vast array of multiple causes for this emergence, many remedial causes that can stop this, and many neutral causes that just grow around this. I learned a lot about this when I was visiting a house of a friend who often got the social task of being the house where kids were dropped off while parents were doing errands like going to the grocery store to buy food. The kids were bouncing off all the walls and causing much chaos. Me and my friend decided to go a place called Agate Beach and found, much to our surprise, that as soon as we were out in nature that the kids started spontaneously behaving better. When we got to the beach, they started making up many sensory motor tasks for themselves, collecting the smooth stones that the beach is known for, collecting branches, forming shapes, drawing in the sand, etc. Their brains, too, seemed to emanate natural oscillations circa 7.83 hz, the magnetic resonance frequency of the Earth and the harmonic our brains entrain to when we are "one with life". This is harder to notice unless you are an emerging telepath. But it is relatively easy to pick up if you are spending time immersing yourself into "brainwave music" and letting your brain EEG patterns move toward "coherence". When the brain reaches this coherence point, it broadcasts a pure signal from the brain that is usually experienced by humans as being "calm and content". It is the difference between a pure flute sound and a heavy metal concert where people are trying to "rock till you puke". There is a time for both, though too much catharsis, by itself, does not allow for "integration".

The experience mentioned above, I found, allowed me to draw some ideas about what an optimal parenting could provide. I did find that sensory motor tasks were very helpful. Tai Chi, Chi Kung, and various kinds of movement work are helpful for kids and they are hungry to get it. They are a little impatient with Hatha Yoga, unless you move through a motion sequence with them. There is more sensory and motor variation in Chi Kung and children respond to this, especially if they are allowed to improvise a lot. Most adults do not realize how they are living a narrow band of physical and attitudinal postures. Many of the problems of later life are these rigid postures clashing with each other in relationships. They are habit reflexes that do not mix very well with other habit reflexes formed in other family systems. It is like everyone is born and raised in a small religious cult which has even secret handshakes. People can go through their entire life living a very small pattern vocabulary. Some New Age teachers help expand this pattern language and some merely teach another pattern. In terms of sensory and motor processes, the "hippie pattern" and the "corporate exec" pattern are equal. They are just patterns. It is better for our kinesthetic intelligence to "feel them from the inside" and to learn what they mean by trying them on. This is better than subtly forcing a child to conform to one sensory motor emotional pattern or another. As an adult, they will need a larger range of responses than any one family teaches. They ideally do not want to lock into one pattern. They rebell against parents trying to impose this on them. It will literally shrink their brain to fit into one pattern box.

The hidden gift of children to the parents is that they are not pattern rigid. They can remind and invoke the fluidic life state in their parents. A subtle power struggle ensues between parent and child where the child resists the socialization process and the parent imposes it. The good side of socialization is "harmony", but sometimes harmony is created by a subtle goose step to a hidden imposed rhythm. There is a greater sensitive harmony that is possible that is symbolized by the Tai Chi "push hands" exercise or the "melting into each other" of contact dance. In these, it takes a certain amount of wakefulness to find. It does involve how we "learn" patterns and robotically lock into them. Parents often resort to just giving commands of "do" and "do not" or worse "should" and "should not" (which is teaching a pattern that should always be operated from). Or if a child is "copping an attitude," is the immediate response to judge it and tell them what they should or should not feel? I have seen parents shout commands to their children with threats behind those shouts, with threats of a stick or a "time out" to back up the commands, with an obey/rebell versus control/allow dynamic forming that looms across the entire parent/child relationship, with the teenager eventually completing the rebellion. But then the teenager learns that they only have two patterns, one is to obey and the other is to rebell, and from an acting standpoint, that is very little emotional range. They may learn more range through suffering, because suffering, from one view, is when the emotional range that we have cannot adapt to the moment effectively. It forces us to grow. In Buddhism, you learn to "remain with the sensation" and not go into pattern, to stay directly in the learning process, to stay in unknowing, until insight dawns.

This society is a post patriarchal culture. The hierarchical system was based on authority and control, chain of command, rank and status, rewards and punishments, guilt, praise, shame, and approval, defining what is right and wrong, and having people live in a certain role conformity to what they are supposed to think, feel, and do. We are now in a pluralistic world where there are many conflicting role model ideals and many special interest groups who want to control public education to enforce their moral shoulds into the school system about what is right and wrong. The whole democratic system is based on democracy, indirect competition, and balance of power between different factions. Although it is for individual rights, there is a hidden assumption that the individual has few rights unless they are part of some group of people, some special interest group. Therefore everyone generally takes on a series of group labels, like liberal versus conservative, democrat or republican, theist or atheist, etc. I have, in my own journey, found that those labels rarely compute for me. My nonverbal development was less disrupted than my verbal development, where I had to keep switching languages very early in my life, being exposed to Mandarin, Kantonese, Spanish, at least one Incan dialect, and English, later on Russian (to learn how to play Chess), Sanskrit (to learn yoga), Tibetan (to learn more yoga), Pali (to learn meditation), Japanese (to learn Zen and Shingon), Chinese (to learn Chan and early Shingon), Latin, Greek, and Aramaic (to learn about Christianity and the New Testament), Arabic (to learn some Sufi teachings), and Hebrew (to learn about the Old Testament and the Qabalah). The nonverbal side was more constant and latched on to numbers and mathmatics, symbolic logic, game theory, geometry, and sketching to evolve my learning. I did feel that I evolved my comprehension of English after I learned from its Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Greek roots, and found a series of phonetic rules behind the articulations of the language (and all human languages). This involved relearning, again and again, patterns of listening and speech, that humans often memorize in childhood and then forget, and then unconsciously live for the rest of their lives.

The Sufi group in question noticed that the human ego structure starts to crystallize into a specific pattern of thinking, emoting, and reacting to the world, form a specific kind of personality identity, and locks in. Once this happens, the person has an ego that they will eventually need to transcend in order to get enlightened, and that the vast majority of people will never succeed in doing, and that a large number of people will only have glimpses of in religious experiences or through psychoactive drugs. They asked whether it was possible to raise a child in such a way that did not have to "fall into ego consciousness" at all, or whether it was necessary to form an ego and then need to transcend it later on. It is a very interesting and deep question. What they concluded was that one will need to go through some kind of ego phase, but that the ego could be "softer" or less crystallized, and therefore easier to transcend later on. The time of the crystallization, according to their observations is around the age of six. They did find that a certain kind of "acting" would keep them psychically flexible, where they do not get molded into any rigid pattern so easily, and where their natural tendency to try on emotional roles in adults, even negative obnoxious ones, helped them to stay flexible. They found, too, that parents tend to clamp down too fast on these negative roles, usually from their own conditioned patterns that they were raised from, and unwittingly stamp their own ego pattern or the reverse pattern on their children. The pattern may even be a "good" pattern, but it becomes a subtle robotic pattern and pattern of conditioned reflexes, that the person will then live possibly for their whole life. It is then only during periods of sorrow where these patterns can soften and shift, though people often avoid the pain of these reprogramming phases by taking pain killing drugs of all kinds. People do not "remain with the sensation" until a new response from the luminous void happens from inside them.

The challenge is that the adult needs to keep awake and alive, above their own reactive patterns, in order raise their children. They need to keep in a learning process themselves. Otherwise, the children will be adapting to the rigid patterns of the parents and this is the real learning process that is behind all the words that are happening. There is a certain amount of healthy chaos going on that forces a certain amount of growth. Society is changing a lot and no control system is working very well. The tribe surrounding the children is changing a lot, members switching often, the extended family is less involved or nonexistent, many single moms are emerging and so one personality is imprinting on the child more than usual, with many dead beat dads or remote control dads making the process complex and often painful. This is interesting because the new astrological planet discovered is Eris who is about creative chaos and how control systems get subverted by seemingly random events and causes. Right now it is in the house of Aries which is about asserting oneself and defining oneself, and how the chaos itself is part of the process.

I remember when the feminist revolution took place that many males, including myself, were puzzled, we did want to honor the feminine, and we were having discussions about whether or not to open the door for a woman and other role patterns that we had learned. I did decide it was a good thing to open the door for women and then figured it that it was also nice to just do it for everyone, male or female. But some women would occasionally frown if I did it for them, because they did not want to get locked into the implied roles (this is the conform/rebel dynamic mentioned above, instead of embracing infinity). What I learned was that all of us were being released from gender roles and had to go back to creative chaos (in contact dance they talk about "embrace the awkwardness" aka remaining with the sensation). A question emerged from this process if there were some essential gender differences that the dance would still be based on, behind all the layers of social roles. How much is biologically determined? Is biology itself something rigid? Can it be changed? Should it be changed? What is doing the changing? So we go into the chaos of experience, with all kinds of responses possible with different people at different stages of this process, all usually afraid of dong the wrong thing when there are no longer obvious cue cards telling us what the right thing to do is. We have grown a bit too much to believe in anything in one sense. We are all a bit agnostic, though we also inherit dogmas we do not always know we have and sometimes do not realize how beyond question they are or how afraid we might be to fully question and end up with nothing. If some preacher wants us to go back to the Bible, we are aware of how many dogmatists contradict themselves in what this even means and how small minority is that thinks their version is the right version, and how many awkward verses need to be ignored or rationalized to hold those views. And yet when the baby is screaming or a two year old is "acting out", merely being agnostic and open minded does not seem enough. Some knowledge seems necessary to raise a child rightly so that they become healthy and functional adults. Human children are more easily woundable compared to other animals species. Other animals do not spend hours talking about their emotional problems with a therapist or friend. There is a longer and more complex set of phases that human children go through in order to become biological adults. The process seems to end at around 25 years, when the brain takes its final shape. The Saturn return is then 28, but really starts a little earlier, only 3 years with a full adult brain, unless it is addicted to brain hijack foods laced with MSG and Nutrasweet, white sugar, refined starches, hydrogenated oils, and salt (nothing wrong with real salt, but combined with the others keeps you hungry for more). The first 7 years the child is still attached to the energy field of mother, then next 7 years it expands to the family, the next 7 years it expands to friends and peer groups, and the next 7 years it expands to the world.

One way to process the Sufi group and the question it has about the parenting process is to see that the child is raising itself, drawing what it needs from the environment and exploring the environment. The early intelligence is more sensory and motor. Many parts of the brain will never directly function in the language universe. Even when the child is learning language, it is learning process is largely nonverbal. Its first language is its interaction with the world and how we interact with the child will be its impression of the world. If the ego is the "me constructed by thought", then it can be softened by more attention to what is not thought and keeping the learning going on this level and never "teaching ego" in thought. The child will probably form an ego anyway, but if it is softer than it will be easier to transcend later on. One way is to make the learning tasks feel like play and explorations, because that is what they really are. There will be pragmatic times when some emergency will require our intervention and even our control. But this will be different from the overall learning process. It would be good to see whether we are teaching a dynamic interactive harmony or are secretly imposing harmony as conformity to a pattern where people do not conflict with each other.

The question about conscious parenting is really only meaningful to parents who have some taste of enlightenment and want enlightenment to guide their parenting process. If parenting is only seen as a socialization process to get children to become conventional adults who fit into the social order, then the question is not necessary. To the degree that society is shaped by the conditioned mental, emotional, and physical reflexes it wants its people to act out, being both the shaper and the shaped, is the degree that keeping enlightenment alive in the child raising process is actually going to get in the way. Children live in the energy field of their parents and will act out what is in the field. To the degree that words and agendas do not really reflect each other, the children will act out the hidden conflicts within the parental field. The question is whether the patterns are made conscious and explored together with the children or people are just going to impose a pattern of shoulds through commands and occasionally or frequently meet resistance, with the resistance seen as the problem, and overcoming it seen as the solution. What I find is that children naturally obey their parents unless there is some need that is getting frustrated or if the command of the parent is not framed in a language that the child can understand or if the command is coming out of emotional ambivalence and confusion. But when parenting is taken on this other level, it becomes a mirror to our own learning process and our own unresolved issues from childhood. Parenting could be seen as a second chance to get it right energetically or to simply reverse roles and become the parents that raised us.

If you will notice that there is not really a lot of advice here in this essay. If it more like a question and a perspective that needs to also be worked out in practice and perhaps an invitation to take an honest look at how children a being raised and how much we feel the need to build control systems around them, and what this kind of thinking may not be reaching. It seems that women reach their sexual peak, according to some studies, around the age of 34. This may suggest the age which might be the best to have children. One Sufi school, a different one, suggested that people do not have children until they are 40 years old. While any number is a little arbitrary here, I am clear that I would not have had any idea of what I was doing in raising a child when I was in my 20s. I barely knew who I was, let alone could know what it meant to actively raise another human being into adulthood. I was barely an adult myself. When I got past 30, I found I felt I finally had some real knowledge, something tested in life and found to be workable, but not much real knowledge, and it was barely even applied rightly to myself. When I got past 40, I realized how much I was just unconscious and acting out patterns that I did not consciously chose to live out, but just happened due to the impacts of traumatic events and long term factors that I could not negotiate with. It seems that a lot of humans die with this level of knowledge and some of us change a little, gaining something we pass into the next lifetime, and grow step by step up the evolutionary ladder. Only recently has our expected lifespan moved past the biblical generation of 40 years, with cultural longevity seen by what percent of the people live past 100 (the Okinawans having the highest percentage which is 7 percent, though this might be changing adversely due to their diet getting westernized by fast food restuarants and school cafeterias, which is already creating a teenage obesity crisis).

I think what I would add to the Sufi understanding is "trusting the life force" to guide every process. To trust the channeling of Reiki energy and to see what the energy wants to see happen. To let this energy even guide the parenting process. Children are very energy sensitive and if the energy of the household is wholesome, then the children will tend to act out the harmony of the field, rather than the conflicts within the field. To constantly run energy into the family field so that it circulates in a peaceful and healthy way, to keep all conversations energy sensitive, to flow with the energy, and to be sensitive to when we disconnect with the energy and choose separation (children often act out when they feel they have lost connection). If there is a continuum like one theorist noted, then it is an energy feeling that unites the continuum. If there are developmental stages, they seem related to the chakras activating at different stages of the growth process from the root up to the crown chakra, or when planetary electromagnetic frequencies trigger them and form aspects with each other. Energy can unite all these awarenesses into a unified understanding and give relevance to keeping love energetically flowing among people, so that love does not reduce to a mental ethical ideal we are trying to live out or impose on ourselves or others. Mental ethical ideals are important, but are literally lifeless without the life force flowing behind them.