Children in Community
“We know that they come from another state of existence.
We will watch them
and we will learn from them.
We will give them guidance,
but we will not make up their minds for them.
We will see to it
that they carefully switch over to a new state of existence,
and that they thereby forget as little as possible.”
–Sabine Lichtenfels
I begin with a very conservative statement: children need someone to call MAMA from the fullness of their hearts, and they need someone to call PAPA from the fullness of their hearts. This is an immanent archetypal structure in life, which needs to be fulfilled in order for a child to be able to grow up healthy, without fear, and with a sense of security. In other words, the child needs stable structures, stable people to relate to and a stable feeling of home. The more stable this home is, the more self-assured the child will be, when it one day makes its excursions to discover the world. Like a reeling young kitten, it always needs to be able to come back to the nest after such adventures. This kind of thinking is contrary to the way that children come into this world. Most of them are without a home right from the beginning. The solid structures that a child needs are, as a rule, provided neither by conservative nor liberal parents. Parents, whose love lives have died, can maybe give their children a stable home, but not a warm nest.
In functioning future communities, the children’s nest is not limited to the family, for around it is an interesting community. Children, who feel at home, have a very generous concept of family. Sometimes, out of sheer fun, they seek out other mothers and fathers to live with for a while until they maybe choose others. That is normal, for if there is trust between the adults, then the children trust the adults. Like adventurers, if they are allowed to trust, children enlarge their terrain and their family. The basis for raising children in a healthy way is that the adults live together in a healthy way. Under the social conditions of the old matrix, this has not been the case for a long time. In order to be able to grow up healthy inside, children need the human environment of a good, solid community.
Children are cosmic beings, just like we are. They do not come to Earth like sweet babies with a clean slate, but as mature spiritual beings, with a longer or shorter karmic history behind them. In this sense, we do not know if they are older or younger than we are. A newborn child, who is lying in front of me, could have been my great grandfather. Is s/he therefore older or younger than I am? This question of age according to the calendar has no meaning, and we would be well advised to see our children as cosmic beings and not artificially make them smaller than they are. We can learn a lot from them, if we regard them as cosmic beings. We can see how their way of perceiving the world is still connected to cosmic memories. We recognize the incredible alertness, with which they sometimes look at falling leaves or at clouds that go by. They are often on a real trip, and it would do us good to join them on this trip. We could thereby more easily find the inner space that connects us with the “beyond,” from where we all come. Many of the things that children babble about come from experiences from “over there.” They have forgotten much, but they still know the aura, the energy of the spheres and light. They are awed at what they find every day on Earth. If we could see things as openly and as freshly as they do, then we, too, would marvel at existence every day.
Children live in immediate contact with everything that is alive or that they see as being alive. They learn through observation and participation. But they do this in their own way. Otherwise, they could not learn their mother tongue in two years, without taking a single lesson. We must learn to understand what they are doing, for here we are being shown a way of life that could become ours one day, once we have rid our lives of stress.
Children must be protected from the too many desires for contact that the adults have. They must especially be protected from too early entering into the private relationships that the adults like to engage them in. A mother, who enters into a possessive personal relationship with her child, robs the child of its freedom and binds it to her rather than to the world. The child will react to the desire for relationship, and it will become demanding, impatient, whiny and blackmailing. It will scream, not out of pain, but out of anger. The whole world today is full of the angry screams of children. They all have parents, who much too early entered into an almost symmetrical relationship to their children. In this way, the children lose their early role models and the possibility to orient themselves on Earth. They only need to scream and the adults will come. This type of overprotection is poison for the free development of a child. If the child itself could see through these connections it would cry out and beg: “Please do not follow me around just because I’m screaming. I don’t need any dolls. Be the solid anchor, to which I can always return. I need you, and I must be able to trust you. I am a child and I need adults that I can believe in.” It is very difficult for many modern parents to understand this point. First, they had to set their authority aside, and now they are supposed to take on true authority again. A child needs positive authority and guidance from the adults to orient itself; it sometimes needs a clear rejection of its insistent wishes; and sometimes it needs a definite no. (…)
There are many mothers, who do not want their two-year-old child to call them “Mama” but to use their first name. They thereby unknowingly rob their child of its Mama.
If a child is drawn into the adults’ wishes for relationship at too young an age, it quickly loses its cosmic existence and memory. If a mother wants to have her child for herself, the same thing happens as between love partners: the child develops an incomprehensible anger toward its mother and at some point it goes off into the world as a warrior and fights the Goddess. The child must be protected from the emotional advances of the adults. Usually, this insight is most difficult for the parents themselves. There is another thing that is difficult for them: that the child does not belong to anyone, not even to its parents. The child has sought out a certain parental home, in order to realize a life plan and not in order to belong to these parents.
One cannot capture a child for oneself, neither through overprotection, nor through excessive offers of gifts and other goods. At some point a child will react to this with hatred. The uncontrolled consumerism, with which the children of our consumer society are fed – even by fairly intelligent parents – brutally separates them from their source and turns them into little monsters that want to have everything. One day they will exact revenge for this deceit. Someone, who as a child has repeatedly received chocolate instead of love, cannot but become evil and cynical inside. These children then turn into adults who lie to and blackmail their love partners because they can no longer believe in love. The parents of these children, who themselves mostly grew up during the anti-authoritarian movement, have lost a great dream of life, for the movement did not achieve its goals. They now pass their resignation on to their children. The children notice that the parents have no dream or goal any more. What should they believe in, if their parents no longer believe in anything?
That is the situation of a child in today’s society. Maybe I have described it too gently, for it constitutes one of the major tragedies of our time. Many parents despair and do not know what to do. The sacred matrix has an entirely different situation in mind for the children. We find this described in detail in Sabine Lichtenfels’ book “Traumsteine” [“Dream Stones”]. The children live in community. The entire community carries the responsibility for the children. There are no property rights whatsoever between parents and children. The community creates a kind of circle, of which the children have a large part for themselves. There we find – to use today’s words – a “Children’s Republic.” This relatively independent children’s facility was an essential element within many highly developed cultures. In modern literature we have rediscovered it in reports about the Indian Muria tribe, which is now disbanded. There the children and the youth lived in their own village, the “Ghotul,” and they determined their own rules for life and their own sexual order. During the time of the stone circle at Évora there was no static family membership, but the children were firmly embedded into the tribe and into a certain age group. In their age group they learned to connect with nature beings in their own way and to enter into a process of discovery. Under the guidance of adults, they learned the basic things about the plant world and the animal world, about healing plants and moon rhythms, and about geography, geomancy and astronomy. Relatively early they knew what the ant roads mean, how they arise and how they are connected to the weather. Early on, they could speak with animals and ask plants if they were healing plants. Our children today also develop surprising abilities in this area if we do not stop them. The knowledge that these early humans developed, can be found in us all.
Our children are the carriers of the new culture. I have experienced what joy they feel in the moment when they discover their parents anew, when they love us again, when they believe the adults again and when they can trust their authorities again. They love the world in which parents are parents again, where adults are adults again and where role models are real role models. They love being able to ask the adults questions and get meaningful answers or help. They are willing to do anything to help the Earth, nature, the plants and the animals, if we put our knowledge at their disposal without making their decisions for them. They are cosmic beings and they have the ability to learn incredibly fast. Maybe some of us will come back to Earth as newborn babies when they, our children of today, have become old and wise. Perhaps we then will be their grandchildren and will listen reverently to their words.
You read an excerpt from the book The Sacred Matrix by Dieter Duhm