Children

-from the teachings of Eugene Halliday

A Mature person is one who has established inside himself a Law whereby he has been able to integrate all the appetites of his body.

Unless we can make the child self-conscious about his own inner tendencies we cannot lead him towards Maturity.

The technique requires that the Child be shown that he has three parts.

  • In the head he is thinking.
  • In the heart zone he is feeling. Like/Dislike.
  • In the belly zone he is urging, having impulses to action.

When presented with certain questions he will find the arising within consciousness a latent knowledge (which is, in its totality, Wisdom) stepped up by the stimulus of the question. For example:-­

What is (was) the impulse trying to do? Was it destructive/creative, that you would not like/like it done to yourself? What was the idea in your mind when you were trying to do it?

The Child becomes conscious of a response, and it is an intelligent response, because it comes from the Whole Wisdom – the totality of form within that being – AS LONG AS YOU KEEP GREAT PATIENCE AND HAVE NO IRRITATION OR JUDGEMENT IN YOUR TONE OF VOICE.

If you gain the confidence of the Child, which you do by feeling that it is for the child’s benefit that you are doing it and NOT from fear of social censure: then, the child is glad to have the question, because it brings clearly in the child what it is trying to do. When he becomes clear about it, certain tensions which usually arise from obscurities are removed.

Governing All cases are the three questions. To apply this general rule in any particular situation we would have to examine the situation very carefully, to see:­

  • What is in the situation related to the Impulse or Urge.
  • What is in the situation related to Liking or Disliking.
  • What is in the situation related to the Idea.

 

We can question any being whatever in this way, and that being will find inside himself a proper response, which is simply -the appearance in consciousness of a pre-existent formal content which is part of the product of the geometry of its own being.

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A child can respond intelligently to a properly formulated question set in terms that the child can understand.

 

Questions put to the child are to be framed in the vocabulary of the child.

Avoid long winded explanations to a child -it cannot assimilate the energy, because there is nothing in a child’s brain-pattern to assimilate it.

When you stimulate somebody with a word (or anything else), you are actually introducing energy. If the energy cannot go into the existing thought-pattern it must wander about and produce symptoms of some kind, e. g, itching, fidgeting, nail-biting, etc.

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Every little system is trying to establish itself. It is a centre of Impulse. Every little individual is trying to become an ”empire”. In relation to a child, its parent is a large irrational system.

For all beings, the Irrational is relative. It simply means a rational impulse belonging to a being of a bigger order than the one under consideration.

We must always try to remember to talk from consciousness to consciousness not from consciousness to body.

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Instruction re ”danger on the road”. What is required is that, when the child is not under stress (and therefore will not react against the suggestion), to have EXPLAINED to it, in a calm period when it can assimilate, and in its own terms. Mothers, often, after a near accident, proceed to berate the child in public, with smacking, etc. (to exhibit publicly that the child was at fault, not herself).

The thing is to give the information for the situation in terms of the child, so that there becomes engrammed on it a clear consciousness that its own purpose depends on this information; that it shall be able to realise its own purpose (not the purpose of the teller). The benefit must always be to the child. With very young children, explain everything round the name; ”Susie does so-and-so.

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