They are frustrated; they have been running after shadows, they have not been able to attain any fulfillment. Now their only desire is that what they have not been able to do, their children will do. At least there will be some satisfaction because their children are part of them, their blood – through their children they will live.
And this idea of living through children is immensely dangerous. It means you will not allow the child to be himself – he has to be somebody that you want him to be. And you cannot have any idea…there is no way to find out what the child was going to be if he were given freedom and support just to be himself. You help the child but you help the child with a condition, spoken or unspoken, that “You have to be the fulfillment of our desires, the representative of our longings, the completion of our ambitions.”
That’s why nobody is what he was meant by nature to be – he is somebody else. And you cannot be happy with being somebody other than yourself. You can pretend, but you are only playing a role imposed upon you; you are not being authentic and original. If you are a Catholic, can you think that if you had been left alone by your parents and the society, without any imposition to be a Catholic, you would have been a Catholic? Then the whole sky is open to you, to choose.
If you choose according to your own inclination, according to your own intuition…it is very strong in children but, slowly slowly, becomes weaker. The voices of the parents and the teachers, the society and the priest, become louder and louder. Now if you want to find out what is your voice, you will have to pass through a crowd of noises.
It is a tremendously beautiful experiment for meditators just to watch inside – whose voice is this? Sometimes it is your father, sometimes it is your mother, sometimes it is your grandfather, sometimes it is your teacher; and those voices are all different. Just one thing you will not be able to find easily – your own voice; it has been always suppressed. You have been told to listen to your elders, to listen to the priest, to listen to the teachers. You have never been told to listen to your own heart.
You are carrying a still, small voice of your own, unheard, and in the crowd of voices that have been imposed upon you, it is almost impossible to find it. First you will have to get rid of all those noises, attain a certain quality of silence, peace, serenity. Only then will it come, as a surprise, that you also have your own voice. It was always there like an undercurrent.
Unless you have found your natural inclination your life is going to be a long, long tragedy, from the cradle to the grave. The only people who have been blissful in the world are the people who have lived according to their own intuition and have rebelled against any effort by others to impose their ideas. Howsoever valuable those ideas may be, they are useless because they are not yours. The only significant idea is that which arises in you, grows in you, blossoms in you.