The Source Book On Sikhism

What Parents or Significant Individuals Can Do

We may find it difficult to teach children Panjabi to the extent that their conditioning be the same as ours. Living and operating at the same level of linear culturally conditioned consciousness might help us to feel that we have successfully transmitted our cultural heritage (or conditioning) to our children. But Aldous Huxley suggests that both the parents (with their Panjabi realities) and children (with their Canadian realities) might like to transcendent to a higher common reality which is beyond Nama-Rupa. He comments:

“From the Christian ‘prayer of simple regard’ to the Zen koan, from Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ to Krishnamurtis ‘alert passivity’ and ‘awareness without judgement or comparison’, all yogas have a single purpose - to help the individual in his conditioning as a heir to a culture and the speaker of a language. Mental silence blessedly uncreates the universe super-imposed upon immediate experience by our memories of words and traditional notions. Mystics are persons who have become acutely aware of the necessity for this kind of deconditioning. Intuitively they know the essential ambivalence of language and culture, know that complete humanity and spiritual progress are possible only for those who have seen through their culture to be able to select from it those elements which make for charity and intelligence, and to reject all the rest.” (Mystic and Society, 1968, p. 10)

Exceptional parents with exceptional motivations will find their way. Some suggestions dealing with teaching of language through modelling and identification have stood the test of empirical investigation. In Canadian settings we may also try the following:

1. All young children should be taught the history of their culture in whatever language they can comprehend. They should be taught the relationship between reality and language. Also they should be made aware of indispensable use and fatal abuses of any language.

2. A child who knows that there have been hundreds of different cultures, and that each culture regards itself as the best, will not be inclined to take boastings of his own culture too seriously. Similarly a child who has come to understand that labels are not identical with things they are attached to, that words can be dangerous, will probably be cautious in speech and on his guard against the wiles of closed-minded, single-tracked preachers.

Every child who is educated in the verbal level for language competencies should be provided with appropriate non-verbal training. Sikh temples and other places of worship provide tremendous opportunities where such training can be imparted in mental silence, wise passiveness and choiceless attention.

Training in sensitivity, awareness, and "other kinds of seeing" should be our goal. We should help the children to see the world as beauty, as mysterious, and as unity. It is a known fact that other kinds of seeing are always there, parted from normal waking consciousness. Let the children learn Panjabi as a part of our input to waking consciousness but attempts should be made to supplement this learning with appropriate non-verbal training curriculum and methodology of which was so subtly built into Sikh ceremonies, by the Great Mystics (Gurus) of Sikh religion.