Daily Lessons from
Sivaya Subramuniyaswami's
Master Course Trilogy

Making Up For Abuse

Of course, parents who curse their children can’t hug them, can’t show the same love for them. That would be counterproductive! In fact, many families think it’s weakening to the child to hug a child and to show love or to congratulate the child. Thus we have whole societies and entire countries that hold themselves down, generation after generation and do not flourish, and therefore are held down by other communities who are doing the same thing, and that are held down by other communities.

What is the prāyaśchitta, what is the penance, for foul or abusive language—for language that hurts? If you call a child stupid, or call him a little bastard, counteract it by telling him he is intelligent, wanted in the family, loved. Counteract the abuse by saying five good words for every bad word. Otherwise, the parents will have a bad birth. What is a bad birth? Being born diseased. A bad birth is being born without parents. A bad birth is being born in a land that has no room for children. There are lots of suffering kids these days who abused their children in a past life without mercy, taking out their frustrations on them. Which is worse, beating the child physically or berating him with words? The pain of the beating will go away, even the memory, somehow. But the words will ring deep in the mind of the child throughout his lifetime.

Now, if the child performs certain sādhanas and is able to forgive the family for the verbal beatings, what then happens? It breaks the curse. Then what happens? The whole force of that curse goes back on the mother and the father. The child walks away free, healed, and his parents take the impact of their impropriety. They take the impact of their bad words. To young people who are cursed by your families, I say take your life in your own hands and plan for your own future. After all, why would parents curse and call bad words and put down a child but to control him, use him as a meal ticket, social security, make him so afraid that he can’t talk to them!

In many homes parents are not beating their children anymore, but they still raise their hand in the threat to hit them! The child knows that if he persists, he’s going to get it right in the head. Physical threats and verbal abuse turn a child into a person who is weak, discouraged, without courage—without courage enough to have a conversation with his mother, without courage enough to have a conversation with his father, without courage enough to have a conversation with himself, to develop any initiative, to stand on his own two feet, to be a leader. If your kids cannot or will not talk to you and have a conversation with you, you have probably hurt those kids and scared those kids so much that they don’t want to be hurt by you anymore. It’s as simple as that.

There are awful stories we hear about slavery, how slaves were brought to America, Europe and all over the world, beaten and whipped to bring them down to abject servitude so they wouldn’t cause any problems lest they be beaten without mercy for the slightest thing—beaten even if they did nothing wrong, just to keep them in their place. That’s what verbal beating does, too. It keeps kids “in their place” so they become useless slaves in the family, earning money to give to parents who still curse them, and then feigning love toward the parents lest they get more verbal abuse. We see this happening all the time. I hear and receive by e-mail desperate testimonies from children and young adults on how they have been abused, physically and with words, in their own home. From the many experiences I know about, I can assure you that words can hurt a child as much or more than a bamboo switch, a belt or a fist.

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NANDINATHA SŪTRA 200: THE DEMONIC DRUG CULTURE
Śiva’s devotees stand against drugs and never mix with those who use them or listen to talk extolling them. The drug culture and its demonic music erode the very fabric of human character and culture. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.

Verbal Abuse Of Children

It’s one thing to hurt yourself through swearing, but it’s a double hurt of yourself if you hurt another person. We wrote quite extensively on the widespread problem of corporal punishment and child abuse last year in HINDUISM TODAY. We explained that those who abuse their children, their spouse—even husbands get abused and hit and scratched—are hurting themselves five to ten times worse than if they simply hit themselves once instead of hitting their child. We find that in some homes the advice to stop was taken very seriously. Scaring children by threatening them has also ceased, at least in the homes that I am aware of in the broad Hindu community. But verbal abuse of children has increased, calling children bad names in order to put them down, expressing anger by viciously badgering them: “You’re stupid!” “You’re worthless!” There’s a long list that apparently nearly every mother and every father has memorized. It goes on and on and on, this constant downgrading and demeaning, expressed in the name of discipline, starting at five or six years of age and continuing until youths are old enough to leave home on their own.

The verbally abused child’s self-image is terrible, but the pain and humiliation is locked away in his subconscious. He covers it up and forgets it, but it continues festering there, and one day bursts forth. If he is a kind-hearted child, he will protect his own children in the future from verbal abuse. If he is a mean-spirited child, he will release what his parents put upon him and into his mind, all of that hatred, upon his children. So, the verbal abuse continues generation after generation. Its pain and hurt long outlast that of a slap or a beating.

In some parts of the Hindu community we hear a lot about curses. The more intellectual, Western-educated Hindu doesn’t believe in curses at all. But what is a curse? A curse is negative energy gathered together and pointed at someone you don’t like. Those priests who are able to conjure up a curse—and are often paid for it—take careful precautions to protect themselves from being cursed by their own curse! Sometimes that protection doesn’t work, and they become ill, occasionally even die, or become tremendously confused as long as the curse is working.

To freely hurl mental harassment and abuse at a child who can’t talk back—lest he be slapped down, dragged across the floor and slammed against the wall—is cursing the child as well as oneself. It is also cursing the home, as well as the entire family, because this tremendous force of negative, angry energy that has been suppressed leaches out and fills the room and the entire house. Call a child one bad name and you are calling yourself ten bad names. And that goes into your subconscious mind, because the perpetrator of the crime also hears what he has said.

Many people verbally abuse children in order to motivate them, to make them courageous, to make them stand up straight, to make them do better in school. Any psychiatrist or psychologist will tell you that to tell a child he’s stupid is no motivation to do better in school! To tell him that he’s a pig, he’s a dog—and then there are the four-letter words, the “f” word and the “b” word—is no motivation whatsoever. But the children have to take it, because they are dependent for housing, clothing and food. The verbal abuse goes into their subconscious mind. But it goes double, triple, quadruple into the subconscious mind of the mother—and the father also if he hears the mother cursing the kid—and on and on until finally the whole family has cursed itself, become filled with the hatred, the scorn and the filthy meanings of the words they have spoken to one another a thousand times.

Will that family be successful? Never. Will that family enjoy vacations? No way. Will they be totally frustrated on the inside? Yes. Will disease come to that family? Of course! They are creating disease by the disease they are putting into their own subconscious mind, and the harm to the astral body will eventually affect the physical body.

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NANDINATHA SŪTRA 199: CHEMICAL CHAOS
Śiva’s devotees know that drugs may awaken simultaneously the chakra of divine love and those of fear, confusion and malice, producing vast mood swings and a stunted intellect. They dread this chemical chaos. Aum.

The Courage To Change

It’s up to the individual to stand on his own two feet, take his life in his own hands, his karmas in his own hands, to bear his karma cheerfully and work with it. Nobody else can do that for you. Gurus and swāmīs can point the way and give certain sādhanas, but they cannot do it for you. They won’t do it for you. If they did do it for you, it wouldn’t do you any good!

People who are cynical are expressing their anger and contempt with snide remarks. They may seem to be joking, but their sharp feelings come across anyway, which stimulates that lower chakra until one day their cynicism will turn into really good anger. Then they build up new karmas they never had before, which they will live with until they are faced with those karmas.

Some devotees take pride in saying, “I’ve been with Gurudeva for forty-five years.” “I’ve been with Gurudeva for thirty years.” But if you ask them, “Do you still get angry?” “Yes,” they say. “What have you realized?” “Well, that I shouldn’t get angry.” “Do you still get angry?” “Uh-huh, yes, sometimes.” Those people haven’t been with Gurudeva at all! They’ve just been hanging around. Because the results of everything we have been teaching have not taken hold. Results have to manifest in the lives of each of you. Otherwise, you’re just bodies, sitting there listening to me talk, living your own private life, living a double standard. Just bodies. So, there can be a lack of sincerity. I want my śishyas to do a job, do it right, and be on to the next one, not this insincerity of playing with me, playing with my mind. I don’t like that.

You can’t work at correcting something. You either do it or you don’t do it. You don’t work at not falling off a cliff, a big precipice that drops off a hundred feet. You just don’t step forward; that’s what you don’t do! When you come to the point where you hear about the Self, and you get interested in the Self, you’re at a point where you can break the cycle of certain karmas through sādhana. You’re either going to do it or you’re going to think, “Oh, that’s kind of silly, you know. It’s really nice to listen to Gurudeva, but to actually take these teachings seriously and make changes in my life, well…ho hum.” That kind of attitude, that kind of ho-hum, lazy attitude, also results in making new karmas, because others look at you as an example and take up your example. It’s living a double life that I am talking about. It depends on the strength of the person’s soul whether he actually makes some definite changes in his character or not.

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NANDINATHA SŪTRA 198: CHILDREN SAY NO TO DRUGS
Śiva’s devotees educate their children to say no to any and all known or unknown illicit drugs offered to them, whether by friends or strangers. Pure and well informed by caring parents, children avoid these dangers. Aum.