Question: Is the reason you discourage your disciples from having children because children hinder parents' progress?
Sri Chinmoy: We cannot blame the children at all. I discourage the disciples from having children because when children come into the disciples’ lives, the upstairs God does not remain their only God. In the basement they get another god: their child. So poor God feels miserable. He feels that He is not getting enough attention. Now that they have got a new god, the basement god gets 50 per cent of their attention and the upstairs God gets the other 50 per cent. But the one that is in the basement, unfortunately, is the fake god. Inside him is the real God, true. But the One that is everything — Peace, Light, Bliss in infinite measure — is the upstairs God.A spiritual Master was once asked by a very devoted disciple of his, “If you don’t allow us to have children, then how can mankind survive? We have meditated for so many years; we are all spiritual people. If we do not bring more spiritual people into the world, then the world will not make progress.” The Master said, “You don’t have to worry about God’s creation. There are countless millions of people who will think of preserving God’s creation. Right now, God wants you to achieve your illumination. You do the task that He has given you, and do not try to take away the jobs of others. Others will bring down children into this world. That is their job. Your job is to realise God. After your realisation, whenever you want children, you can have them. But right now God is begging you to realise Him first.”
You may say that to look after your children is a divine task, because God is there inside them. Who can deny that? God is inside everyone. But what if God wants you to be totally devoted and dedicated to Him? He is not jealous of your child; far from it. You are both, after all, His children. But He feels that if this child of His has to realise Him totally in this incarnation, then that is a full-time occupation. You may be twenty-eight years old and your daughter may be two or three, but in the Eyes of God you yourself are a child, nothing else. How can a child take care of another child? So God feels that since He wants you to realise Him totally, it is your duty to please Him in His own Way. That is His Vision.
God has countless other people to have children. After the age of sixty or seventy, when you leave the body, God will not ask you about your children. God will just ask you about yourself. “What have you done for Me?” He will ask. He will not say, “You have six or seven children; let Me have some news about your children.” Your relatives will ask you how your children are, but God will just ask you, “Tell Me, how far have you realised Me in My highest Consciousness? How much did you devote your life to Me?” If you say, “I had to think of my children, so I could not think so much of You,” He will say, “Did I give you that task? I gave you the task only to think of Me.”
I really feel that if you have fully accepted a spiritual path, it is not advisable to have children. Of course, if you already have children, then you have to take care of them. But from now on, just change your relationship with your husband or wife. Just become like brother and sister. There is a little difference between the speed of an Indian bullock cart and the speed of a modern jet plane. The joy that your child will give you when he smiles, I cannot deny. But when you think of where your own consciousness was before having the child, and where it is after, if you are sincere, then you will see how much you have fallen. If you say, “No, I can manage it; I am very strong. I can manage with one or two children,” then what am I to say? You have to know how much capacity you have. When it is a question of my own disciples, I tell them not to have even one child, because I know their capacity better than they do. If they start having children, then they will be useless disciples and I will be a helpless Guru. That is why I discourage spiritual aspirants from having children.
There are countless people on earth who are not aspiring, and among those who are aspiring there are many who have not accepted our spiritual path or some other path that also demands constant progress. These people can have as many children as they want. But if any spiritual aspirant has more than two children, he is really making friends with ignorance. The child is not actually the enemy. The only thing is that you have to know what God wants. If God wants you only to please Him, then He will bring a child into your life only if it is absolutely necessary. If it is unnecessary, He will try to convince you in so many ways through your aspiration and meditation not to have children. Having children does delay your spiritual life; I tell you this without the least possible hesitation.
If some individuals say that they have the capacity, in spite of having one or two children, to do well in the spiritual life, I don’t deny their sincerity. But if they say that they can have as many children as they want because they are very highly spiritually developed, I cannot agree with them. It is not possible. Some people say that to look after children — to see whether the child has eaten or whether the child is properly dressed — is as good as meditation. I challenge them; they are absolutely wrong. There are millions of people who have not accepted spiritual life in this incarnation. But they are so concerned about their children: have they eaten, are they properly dressed, have they gone to school? This is their constant concern. But do you think that by taking care of their children they are making good spiritual progress? Far from it.
