Way of The Seekers — Page 46
46 THE means to commit sinful actions. Now ponder a little. where does sin come from? Does it come from parents? No, certainly not. But we know that sometimes certain dispositions run in the family from gene- ration to generation. The same habits, the same dispositions, the same skills keep emerging. You cannot make a people courageous overnight whose courage has been dead over many generations. when such people go to the battlefield they are certain to let you down. In any case, they will fall to show the degree and quality of courage which a seasoned force of fighting experience extending over many generations is able to do. True, there are remedies for defects and deviations, but hereditary traits acquired through generations of habit and training are hard to correct. Similarly, sin is also rooted in greed, aggression, fear, love and excess of desire. Now ponder a little. These desires and inclinations are planted in childhood. The child is a great learner. He begins to learn as soon as he is born. His first acquisitions seem harmless enough. Sometimes he shows streaks which could become sins later on. But the parents ignore them saying he is but a child. They forget that it is in childhood that the seed is sown and impressions become deep. A person who begins to steal as an adult could have been saved from this nefarious practice if he had been checked and taught self-control when he was a child. He need not have become a thief as an adult. Similarly, a person goes to the battlefield as a soldier, but on facing the enemy, he recoils and runs away. How cowardly, exclaim the people around him. But the fault is not his. As a child he had been told tales of cowardice. It is these tales which have made him afraid of the sight of the enemy. The same is the case with aggression and pugnacity. Parental control is lax and these emotions are allowed an unbridled play. The result is that when the child grows up, he becomes the quarreling type who would fight on the slightest