Way of The Seekers — Page 56
56 THE and persuaded him to drop his company, learn some vocation and not be foolish. This made him think and he left. But after a little while, the relative brought another young man and challenged Hazrat to try to "spoil" him. To his warped mind, spoiling a young man meant his being separated from him. Hazrat did all the counseling he could. He even offered cash to him to start him in some business. But he would not listen. This surprised Hazrat who asked his relative what had he done to hold him. He said: "It is simple. I supply intoxicants to him. Now he does not have any will to leave me. " In short, addiction to drugs kills initiative. Of all moral evils, lying is the worst. A child should be especially guarded against it. Lying has a variety of causes, some of them very abstruse. Given the causes, or some of them, a child is bound to contract this vice as a matter of course. A child is highly imaginative. whatever it hears, it turns it into a kind of reality. A sister of mine when she was a child used to relate a long dream every day. We would wonder how she could manage to have a dream every day. Later, the truth came out. what happened was that to her mind, dreams meant the ideas and pictures that crossed her mind just before falling asleep. To a child every image is real. Thus gradually it picks up this habit. A child should be helped to realize the difference between fact and fiction. A child can be saved from this habit, if the nature and meaning of thinking can be brought home to it. 20 Stop children from playing in privacy. 21 Do not let them remain naked. 22 Teach them to admit their mistakes, as a matter of habit. For this the following methods would be found helpful: a. Do not try to hide your own mistakes before a child. b. Be sympathetic when it commits a mistake. Let it feel that the mistake is a kind of loss it has suffered. Hence