Be Child – In Gita Verse 3.30 Therefore, O Arjuna, surrender all your works unto Me, with full knowledge of Me, without desires for profit, with no claims to proprietorship, and free from lethargy, fight.
Krishna is telling Arjuna to become like a child out of maturity. So you can trust the Universe – when Krishna uses the word surrender to me, he only means the universe in me, as I am connected with that, I do all my act as a vehicle of the universe in totality, in awareness. When he says unless you out of maturity become innocent like a child you will not be able, to free of any desire, proprietorship.
Maturity is not concerned with age at all. Maturity is growth, and the growth must be through childhood, not against it, remember. Your maturity is false because it has been against the child. The child was born; maturity has been created. The child was natural; you are artificial, cultivated. You will have to go back to the child to regain the source from where growth is possible, trust is possible, surrender is possible.
Let’s understand this verse by what Jesus is saying:
Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: these children who are being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom. They said to him: shall we then, being children, enter the kingdom? Jesus said to them: when you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner, and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female, then shall you enter the kingdom.
This is one of the deepest sayings of Jesus, and one of the most basic to be understood by a seeker. It is also one of the most difficult to achieve, because if this is achieved nothing more is left to achieve. First try to understand a few things and then we will enter into the saying.
Man, if he lives with the mind, can never be innocent – and only in innocence does the divine descend, or do you ascend to the divine. Innocence is the door. Mind is cunning, calculating, it is clever, and because of this cleverness you miss – you miss the kingdom of God. You may attain to the kingdom of this world through the mind, because – here cunningness is needed. You have to be cunning: the more cunning, the more successful; the more calculating, the more efficient in the ways of the world.
But the door for the kingdom of God is exactly the opposite. There, no calculation is needed, no cleverness is needed. Mind is not needed at all, because the mind is just a mechanism to calculate, a mechanism to be clever. If you don’t need any cleverness, any calculation, your mind is useless. Then the heart becomes the source of your being, and the heart is an innocence.
Why do we go on being clever? Why does the mind go on thinking about how to deceive? – Because that is the only way in this world to succeed. So those who want to succeed in this world will be failures in the kingdom of God. If you are ready to accept your failure in this world, then you are ready to enter the other world. The moment one is ready to recognize that, “The success of this world is not for me, I am not for it,” immediately a conversion happens, a turning happens. Then the consciousness doesn’t move outward, it starts moving inward.
Jesus emphasizes innocence very much. Hence, he goes on talking about the beauty of children, or the innocence of the flowers, of lilies, or the innocence of the birds. But that type of innocence won’t help, you have already lost that. So don’t imitate him verbally, don’t try to understand literally, it is just symbolic.
You cannot be a child again – how is it possible? Once you have tasted knowledge you cannot fall back. You can transcend it but you cannot go back, there is no way to go back. You can go ahead, you can go beyond it, but you cannot go behind it now – there is no way. You cannot be an ordinary child again. How? How can you lose that which you have known? But you can go beyond, you can transcend.
Once you transcend knowledge, you start growing in consciousness. Consciousness is fresh, innocent, desireless, playful. This is the reason that when someone has transcended their knowledge their face glows like a child. We call them enlightened people.
Krishna tells Arjuna to transcend all the knowledge so from your consciousness you will be able to act like a child, so in your action there will not be any desire or proprietorship of your action. You will drop your Mental Laziness. Means you will not be able to claim that I did this act. Like a child they trust their parents and act, you will trust the universe and act. You will fight without any desire or proprietorship of your act.
Tags: Be Child
