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The trouble with the family is that children grow out of childhood, but parents never grow out of their parenthood.

Man has not yet learned that parenthood is not something that you have to cling to forever. When the child is a grown-up person your parenthood is finished. The child needed it, he was helpless. He needed the mother, the father, their protection. But, when the child can stand on his own, the parents have to learn how to withdraw from the life of the child. And because parents never withdraw from the life of the child they remain a constant anxiety to themselves and to the children. They destroy, they create guilt; they don’t help beyond a certain limit.

To be a parent is a great art. To give birth to children is nothing, any animal can do it. It is a natural biological instinctive process. To give birth to a child is nothing great, it is nothing special; it is very ordinary. But to be a parent is something extraordinary, very few people are really capable of being parents. The criterion is that real parents will give freedom. They will not impose themselves upon the child, they will not encroach upon his space. From the very beginning their effort will be to help the child to be himself or to be herself. They are to support, they are to strengthen, they are to nourish, but not to impose their ideas, not to give the shoulds and should-nots. They are not to create slaves.

But that’s what parents all over the world go on doing: their whole effort is to fulfill their ambitions through the child. Of course nobody has ever been able to fulfill his ambitions, so every parent is in turmoil. He knows death is coming closer every day, he can feel death is growing bigger and bigger and life is shrinking, and his ambitions are still unfulfilled, his desires are still not realized. He knows that he has been a failure. He is perfectly aware that he will die with empty hands – he will go just the way he had come, with empty hands.

Now his whole effort is how to implant his ambitions into the child. He will be gone, but the child will live according to him. What he has not been able to do, the child will be able to do. At least through the child he will fulfill certain dreams.

It is not going to happen. All that is going to happen is the child will remain as unfulfilled as the parent, will go on doing the same to his children. This goes on and on from one generation to another generation. We go on giving our diseases, we go on infecting children with our ideas that have not proved valid in our own lives.Somebody has lived as a Christian, and his life shows that no bliss has happened through it. Somebody has lived like a Hindu and you can see that his life is a hell. But still they want their children to be Hindus or Christians or Mohammedans. How unconscious man is.

I have heard…

A very sad, mournful man visited a doctor in London. Seating himself in a chair in the waiting room and glumly ignoring the other patients he awaited his turn. Finally the doctor motioned him into the inner office where after a careful examination the man appeared even more serious, sad and miserable than ever. “There’s nothing really the matter with you,” explained the doctor, “you are merely depressed. What you need is to forget your work and your worries. Go out and see a Charlie Chaplin movie and have a good laugh.” A sad look spread over the little man’s face. “But I am Charlie Chaplin!” he said.

It is a very strange world. You don’t know people’s real lives, all that you know is their masks. You see them in the churches, you see them in the clubs, in the hotels, in the dancing halls, and it seems everybody is rejoicing, everybody is living a heavenly life – except you of course because you know how miserable you are within. And the same is the case with everybody else. They are all wearing masks, deceiving everybody, but how can you deceive yourself? You know that the mask is not your original face.

But the parents go on pretending before their children, go on deceiving their own children. They are not even authentic with their own children. They will not confess that their life has been a failure; on the contrary, they will pretend that they have been very successful. And they would also like the children to live in the same way as they have lived.

You ask, “My parents are so disappointed in me…”

Don’t be worried at all – all parents are disappointed in their children! And I say all, without any exception. Even the parents of Gautam the Buddha were very disappointed in him, the parents of Jesus Christ were very disappointed in him, obviously. They had lived a certain kind of life – they were orthodox Jews – and this son, this Jesus, was going against many traditional ideas, conventions. Jesus’ father, Joseph, must have hoped that now he is growing old, the son will help him in his carpentry, in his work, in his shop – and the stupid son started talking about the kingdom of God! Do you think he was very happy in his old age?

Gautam Buddha’s father was very old and he had only one son, and he was born to him when he was very old. His whole life he had waited and prayed and worshipped and did all kinds of religious rituals so that he could have a son, because who is going to look after his great kingdom? And then one day the son disappeared from the palace. Do you think he was very happy? He was so angry, violently angry, he would have killed Gautam Buddha if he had found him! His police, his detectives were searching all over the kingdom. “Where is he hiding? Bring him to me!” And Buddha knew it, that he would be caught by his father’s agents, so the first thing he did was he left the boundary of his father’s kingdom, escaped into another kingdom, and for twelve years nothing was heard about him.

When he became enlightened he came back home to share his joy, to say to the father, “I have arrived home,” “I have realized,” “I have known the truth – and this is the way.” But the father was so angry, he was trembling and shaking – he was old, very old. He shouted at Buddha and he said, “You are a disgrace to me!” He saw Buddha – he was standing there in a beggar’s robe with a begging bowl – and he said, “How dare you stand before me like a beggar? You are the son of an emperor and in our family there has never been a beggar. My father was an emperor, his father was too, and for centuries we have been emperors! You have disgraced the whole heritage!”

Buddha listened for half an hour, he didn’t say a single word. When the father ran out of gas, cooled down a little – tears were coming out of his eyes, tears of anger, frustration. Then Buddha said, “I ask for only one favor. Please wipe your tears and look at me; I am not the same person who has left the home, I am totally transformed. But your eyes are so full of tears you cannot see. And you are still talking to somebody who is no more. He has died.”

This triggered another rage and the father said, “You are trying to teach me? Do you think I am a fool? Can’t I recognize my own son? My blood is running in your veins – and I cannot recognize you?” Buddha said, “Please don’t misunderstand me. The body certainly belongs to you, but not my consciousness. And my consciousness is my reality, not my body. You are right that your father was an emperor and his father too, but as far as I know about myself I was a beggar in my past life and I was a beggar in a previous life too because I have been searching for truth.

My body has come through you, but you have been just like a passage. You have not created me, you have been a medium, and my consciousness has nothing to do with your consciousness. What I am saying is that now I have come home with a new consciousness, I have gone through a rebirth. Just look at me, look at my joy!”

The father looked at his son, not believing what he was saying. But one thing was certainly there: that he was so angry, but his son had not reacted at all. That was absolutely new – he knew his son. If he was just the old person he would have become as angry as the father or even more because he was young and his blood was hotter than the father’s. But he was not angry at all, there was absolute peace on his face, a great silence. He was undisturbed, undistracted by the father’s anger. The father had abused him, but it seemed not to have affected him at all. He wiped his tears from his old eyes; looked again, saw the new grace…

Your parents will be disappointed in you because they must have been trying to fulfill some expectations through you. Now you have become a sannyasin, all their expectations have fallen to the ground. Naturally they are disappointed, but don’t become guilty because of it, otherwise they will destroy your joy, your silence, your growth. Remain undisturbed, unworried. Don’t feel any guilt. Your life is yours and you have to live according to your own light.

When you have arrived at the source of joy, your inner bliss, go to them to share. They will be angry – wait - because anger is not anything permanent, it comes like a cloud and passes. Wait! Go there, be with them, but only when you are certain that you can still remain cool, only when you know that nothing will create any reaction in you, only when you know that you will be able to respond with love even though they are angry. And that will be the only way to help them.

You say, “…they worry all the time.”

That is their business! And don’t think that if you had followed their ideas they would not have worried. They would have still worried, that is their conditioning. Their parents must have worried and their parents’ parents must have worried, that is their heritage. And you have disappointed them because you are no longer worrying. You are going astray! They are miserable; their parents have been miserable, and so on, and so forth up to Adam and Eve. And you are going astray! Hence the great worry.

But if you become worried you miss an opportunity, and then they have dragged you back again into the same mire. They will feel good, they will rejoice that you have come back to the old traditional, conventional way, but that is not going to help you or them. If you remain being independent, if you attain the fragrance of freedom, if you become more meditative – and that’s why you are here: to become more meditative, to be more silent, more loving, more blissful – then one day you can share your bliss.

To share, first you have to have it, you can share only that which you have already got. Right now you can also worry, but two persons worrying simply multiplies worries. They don’t help each other.

You say, “…they worry all the time.”
- It must have been their conditioning. It is the conditioning of everybody in the world.

A rabbi was the guest of a family. The man of the house, impressed by the honor, warned his children to behave seriously at the dinner table because the great rabbi was coming. But during the course of the meal they laughed at something and he ordered them from the table.
The rabbi then arose and prepared to leave.
“Anything wrong?” asked the concerned father.
“Well,” said the rabbi, “I laughed too!”

Don’t be worried about their seriousness, about their worrying about you. They are trying unconsciously to make you feel guilty. Don’t let them succeed because if they succeed they will destroy you and they will also destroy an opportunity for them which would have become possible through you.

You say, “They have made my being here possible…”
- Be thankful for that, but there is no need to feel guilty.

“…so how can I turn from them?”
- There is no need to turn from them, but there is no need to follow them either. Go on loving them. When you meditate, after each meditation pray to existence that “Something of my meditativeness should reach my parents.” Be prayerful for them, be loving to them, but don’t follow them. That won’t help you or them.

You say, “What do I owe to my parents?”
- You owe this: that you have to be yourself. You owe this: that you have to be blissful, that you have to be ecstatic, that you have to become a celebration unto yourself, that you have to learn to laugh and rejoice. This is what you owe to them: you owe to them enlightenment. Become enlightened like Gautam the Buddha and then go to your parents to share your joy. Right now what can you do? Right now nothing is possible. Right now you can only pray.

So I am not saying turn away from them. I am saying don’t follow them, and this is the only way you can be of some help to them. They have helped you physically, you have to help them spiritually. That will be the only way to repay them.