What an important factor it should be in the education of children to teach them the plain common sense needed to keep the mind healthy—to teach them the uselessness of a mental resistance, and the wholesomeness of a clean mind.
If a child worries about his lessons, he is resisting the possibility of failing in his class; let him learn that the worry interferes with his getting his lesson. Teach him how to drop the worry, and he will find not only that he gets the lesson in less time, but his mind is clearer to remember it.
By following the same laws, children could be taught that a feeling of rush and hurry only impedes their progress. The rushed feeling sometimes comes from a nervous unquiet which is inherited, and should be trained out of the child.
But alas! alas! how can a mother or a father train a child to live common sensibly without useless resistance when neither the mother nor the father can do that same themselves. It is not too late for any mother or father to learn, and if each will have the humility to confess to the child that they are learning and help the child to learn with them, no child would or could take advantage of that and as the children are trained rightly, what a start they can give their own children when they grow up—and what a gain there might be from one generation to another! Will it ever come? Surely we hope so.
CHAPTER XXX
A Summing Up
GIVE up resentment, give up unhealthy resistance.
If circumstances, or persons, arouse either resentment or resistance in us, let us ignore the circumstances or persons until we have quieted ourselves. Freedom does not come from merely yielding out of resentment or unhealthy resistance, it comes also from the strong and steady focus on such yielding. Concentration and relaxation are just as necessary one to another to give stability to the nerves of a man—as the centrifugal and centripetal forces are necessary to give stability to the Earth.
As the habit of healthy concentration and relaxation grows within us, our perception clears so that we see what is right to do, and are given the power to do it. As our freedom from bondage to our fellowmen becomes established, our relation to our fellowmen grows happier, more penetrating and more full of life, and later we come to understand that at root it is ourselves—our own resentment and resistance—to which we have been in bondage,—circumstances or other people have had really nothing to do with it. When we have made that discovery, and are steadily acting upon it, we are free indeed, and with this new liberty there grows a clear sense and conviction of a wise, loving Power which, while leaving us our own free will, is always tenderly guiding us.