The wiser we become the more our outlook changes. There are four different stages in life: childhood, youth, middle age, and advanced age; and each of these four stages shows a great opportunity.

For instance, in childhood the consciousness is in paradise. The child living in the same world of woe, treachery, and wickedness as the grown-up is happy because it is not yet awakened to the other aspect of life. It only knows the better side of it, the beauty of life. And therefore that same world is the Garden of Eden for the child till it grows and is exiled from the Garden. Before that it enjoys paradise on earth; it is unaware of the wickedness and the ugliness of human nature. It still maintains in itself the heavenly air and angelic innocence and the tendency to appreciate all beauty and to love every being.

As it grows it begins to lose that tendency; nevertheless the child shows by its words and actions and by every tendency the angelic essence in its soul. This is the opportunity for every child to experience kingliness in life; and this opportunity is taken away by parents who send the child to school too early and burden it with study. We need not be anxious to prepare the child for its studies so that it will be able to answer in school. That kingliness that God has given to it, that joy and beauty for which it is born and which it longs to have, are thus taken away from it. This period of its life should be made free of anxiety and worry. The parents burden the child with studies, but after all what do these studies lead to? The child's strength and intelligence are only lessened, when it is burdened with unnecessary studies before the mind is developed; and this tendency is increasing more and more.

People also want to teach a child concentration; but they have forgotten that a child is born with concentration. It is the grownup whose concentration is weak. Every soul is born with concentration; it loses this faculty as it grows up.

Once I was travelling in England and someone invited me to see a school where concentration was taught. They brought before me ten or fifteen children, and each child was asked to look at a blank curtain, and say what was there. One child looked and looked and said, "A lily." Another child said, "A rose." The teacher asked a third child to tell her what was there. The child answered, "I don't see anything!" I thought, "That is much better; at any rate he says what he sees!" And so the teacher asked ten or twelve children questions about what they saw.

It was a lesson in hypocrisy, in exciting the imagination. It could never help a child, for the child's concentration is already there.

If the child is kept a child that is enough. We want to make the child into a grown-up person, but it is only happy when left to run about or to be cheerful. The child should not have this burden. We have made it for ourselves; it is not born with us.

If life were not so complex there would have been no need of war and of such difficulties as we have today. Because we have spoiled ourselves we want more and more; and yet we make it so difficult to get what we want, that in the end we cannot get it at all. And at the same time by wanting more than is necessary we make life miserable, and the life of others also.