This article is going to draw a lot of criticism I expect, from the boatload of haters but also from some bona-fide fans.
Most people expect parenthood to be the defining point in the lives. What’s there not to enjoy: raising and educating a child, watching him/her grow into adulthood, then finding his/hers place. The need to reproduce is the most basic need of all biological lifeforms.
Humans, however, are the only specie that over-invests into their progeny. The sheer amount of effort and resources put into children, the length of this commitment, dwarfs that of any animal.
I see this parental investment as an over-investment and a hindrance to self-development. Of-course, men are the ones obsessed with self-development and spiritual growth, women rarely go that route since they are not naturally inclined to do so. Women are reproduction machines, and once that reproductive need is fulfilled women cease to move forward. Men, on the other end, continuously strive for the limits of existence and inquiry. Men are explorers. Men go for the sublime, the ecstatic, the deeper meanings of life. Men are the mystics, the Gurus and the Saints. [if you’ve follow my Facebook recently, you might have heard the encounters with the spirit animal a girl had in the back-country where she saw me as a Puma animal and this animal “told” her it was me].
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the series of novels developed on the Star Wars fiction, you know Jedis were recruited as infants then shipped to the Jedi Academy. These Jedi school recruits had little knowledge of the families they came from, most didn’t know who they’re parents were. Their family was the Jedi Temple and School. That seemed to be an efficient way to make Jedis: no family ties. Actually that’s how you build a mercenary force.
Does your child around you make you better ? How?
No, really, how does your child/teenager son or daughter make YOU better ?
You satisfied your wife’s need to have children, still, how did that improve you ? Women make children to give them something to do, to keep busy. (they’re also thinking those children will take care of them into old age). Most men think exactly like women do.
Eugene Ionesco, AZ-Quotes
“You only have yourself. The rest is but crumbs and vulgarity.” -Max Cantor
The average man cannot stand death, so he makes children with women to outlast it.
The average man doesn’t know what to live for, so he makes children. Over-invests in them.
To be clear, I am not saying that we should be uncaring to our children. What I am saying is once we put them on a pedestal, you make that your aim, and it is a poor aim. The aim of a woman.
You don’t escape death or loss with making children. Everybody does that.
The Mystics, Sufis and remote Gurus knew it. They got as far away from people. as they could. They went and lived as hermits on mountaintops. How else are you going to attain wisdom ? With people ?
Guru Babaji, Rinzai Master Soyen Shaku and Nagi Gompa knew that. They were living in this world, but not of this world.