– Say there are parents who take the course, study this method, and have a child who goes to this school. Can you depict how this family will interact with each other? A child comes home after spending most of his day in an environment of peers. What should his interaction be like with his parents and grandparents? Where is the child’s place? Where are the brothers and sisters? How do you envision it?
– Children aren’t drawn to their parents or to their grandparents. They are drawn to their peers or to their personal activities. They need grandparents in the capacity of an environment that helps them and services them, but nothing more than that.
Therefore, I think that there won’t be any problems in this area and the parents don’t even have to go through a certain kind of upbringing. What needs to be achieved here is for them not to interfere. They should not be raising the children.
They just have to provide the right reaction so a child will understand that no matter where he is, he is always in an environment that helps him, and constantly demands a specific type of development from him, the right type of understanding and interaction with the surrounding environment. Nothing else is required of them. Parents should not be educators.
The reason for this is that upbringing happens in an environment of people who are like you, with whom you are equal, and with whom you constantly interact. Parents are perceived as something high and big, as something that serves you, protects you, and takes care of you. Therefore, they are not considered educators.
Development occurs in a large social environment, not in a small corner where the only people around are my mom, my dad, and me. This is good only up to age 2.
– But suppose a child comes home upset because something bad happened. How should the parents react to that?
– I don’t think that the parents can truly understand the child’s state and offer the correct analysis of what is happening. This is something he has to do in a group, through debate and discussion.
We have to approach the world realistically. We are not living in the corrected world yet, where a child is immediately admitted into the correct process of development at home and everywhere else he goes. We are still not in that situation.
Ideally, all problems must be resolved in the place where they emerge, in the same circle of children where he is brought up. He shouldn’t have any other environments at all.
– But what should the parents do? I also have children and I know that when my child comes home upset, I want to hug him and comfort him. Can I do that? Or is that incorrect?
– Why comfort him? You shouldn’t do that, but you can hug him. When you meet a person who’s close to you, you hug him. This is natural.
However, I think we will attain a level of communication where we won’t feel the need to sense each other through touch. Our inner sensations and ability to feel one other will intensify to a point where the body will not be a necessary organ or means of contact.
– That’s difficult to imagine because in the meantime it is a source of tremendous pleasure.
– For now everything passes through the body because we have no other sensations besides it. But when we gradually develop towards coming out of ourselves and connecting with others, towards perceiving the world through others, the body recedes and I begin to feel my direct connection and inclusion in others. My image becomes included in the image of others and simultaneously becomes an image that I share with them.
Then joint sensations emerge, but they are no longer bodily sensations that I have to hug others or let them taste what I am eating, or when we have to participate in a meal together and exchange some kind of physical contact. Rather, a completely new kind of contact emerges, even in the sexual sense. That is, everything grows into a completely different realm of sensations, combinations, and connections with one another, to a point where our world on the animate level loses its importance. This is what will gradually happen. Of course, it is still ahead of us and it’s unrealistic to talk about it right now, but I want to indicate the direction in which we are headed.
– We definitely have to know about this. Do you know why am I so interested in the parents? It’s because most of the questions about the method are coming from them. One of the parents’ functions is to provide their child with safety.
– This is the most important thing, and it’s the same with animals. The only thing that guides them is the safety of their offspring.
– Influenced by this very important need, parents want to find out more about what is happening to their child in these courses, how he interacts in this environment, and so on.
– Their child is constantly filmed by cameras so they can watch everything from home. And not only they. We are currently practicing this at our education center. We have many groups all over the world in our system of upbringing. Some of the groups are primary, meaning they conduct constant work, discussions, and research on themselves. They constantly film themselves and show this material to everyone else. You can go on the internet, type in the URL, and watch a specific group and what it is doing at any moment.
There are specific hours when our primary groups, in which we conduct the main work, simply broadcast everything happening at their location. And the other groups sit and watch, listen, and study this live experience in their locations.
– Still, I would like to ask about the parents again. Suppose a father and a mother watched one of the videos…
– They can watch their beloved child non-stop, 24 hours a day.
– But can they participate in some way?
– We don’t practice this yet. That would require an additional system of interaction between the parents and children, and I think this will be possible in the future. However, I like to talk only about what is currently feasible and what will be feasible in the near future. I think that the system of interaction between parents and children will not be set up in the immediate future. We haven’t the opportunity to accomplish this yet.
So how can they participate? For that they would have to be on the level of the educators. And what does “participating” mean? If they cannot detach from their personal “I” and control themselves, how can they take part in the upbringing?
– Still, we can give parents some practical advice. For example, when a child comes home, should the parents state their point of view in some way?
– The upbringing should not be continued at home. What’s required of the parents is to be gentle, caring, and loving, and that’s all. They should not be raising the child. They have to give him simple, animate, bodily support, provide him with the amount of confidence that he needs, and that’s all. I don’t think that it’s the parents’ job to turn a child into a human being. Only the surrounding environment can do that. Only society can make a person because a person is part of the society.
Parents cannot create an environment around him or an image that would enable him to become a person. By trying, they will simply cause him to remain a big child forever. This is what we often see today, how a grown man who’s 40 years old cannot separate from his mother.