Neale Donald Walsch tells Vishen Lakhiani that raising children to understand their intrinsic worth matters more than material conditions. He shares a story from Ouagadougou where people living in poverty had deep joy and strong community, showing that inner purpose shapes the future more than external circumstances.
Chapters
Someone asked this. Actually, several people asked this. I'm not going to put up one specific question because it's kind of a broad topic. But in our current world with the chaos that's happening, I mean, almost every day it seems you read something in the news about some crisis situation or some political scandal. What can we as good people do to ensure that the earth that we leave to our kids is actually better than the earth we inherited? I seriously worry about this, especially with what happened in the US two weeks ago when the White House started slashing all of these environmental regulations. Right. I mean, I'm deeply concerned about global warming. What message or what can we do as people who want to better the world for the next generation? How should we be acting and what should we be doing?
I think we have to take our. This is going to be an unconventional answer, Vishen. Very unconventional answer. I think we have to take our focus off of the physicality of things. You know, I can't guarantee that my grandchildren will have a better life than I have had. They may not. But, but, and so if we, if we insist on being caught up in the physicality of things, that is how life is presenting itself in the physical world, do we have. Are the days gone by? Have our best days been behind us, so to speak? Maybe they weren't our best days. Maybe the greatest thing is not to have a 75 inch television screen in your living room or three cars in the driveway or whatever you think a good life is. So I'm going to suggest to you that the unconventional answer is to change the focus of our children to, to raise them in a different way, to allow them to know and experience from the earliest days possible, the magnificence of who they are, the truth of their actual identity, and most important of all, Vishen, their reason for even being alive. That is what is the purpose of life itself when we place people at the youngest age possible, in age appropriate language of course, but in the youngest way, in the youngest age possible, when we put our children and our grandchildren in a place of awareness of who they are, where they are. What is this place called?
Earth?
Why are we here and what do we intend to do about that? When we allow children to understand that, we guarantee that they will have a better life than we have had, no matter what the physical circumstance or experience is. Even if they don't have three cars in the driveway, or if they don't have the 75 inch television in their living room, or even if they don't have what people would Call enough to eat. You know, I want to share with you an experience if I can. I spent some time in a place called Ouagadougou. Ouagadougou was a city in Upper Volta. And I was there in 1976 as part of a tour of Africa. I was on a tour of Africa working for the United States Department of State. I was an ambassador for the State Department, bringing space age technologies. Can you imagine this? To developing nations around the world? And that was my contract, my job. And so I found myself in a little village in Ouagadougou. And I was invited by a family there, by a man who said, please come to my home. It would be an honor to have you in my home for a feast tonight, a dinner in my house. And I took him up on it because I wanted to see what it was like to be with a person who actually lived there. So he took me out there. They drove me in a rattle trap over a truck. It was just bouncing along the road, but it got us there. And we were about 25 miles outside of town, outside of Ouagadougou. I want you to know when you drive 25 miles outside of Ouagadougou, you're in brush country. You're not in the suburbs. You're in open brush country where lions, I'm not making this up. Are walking around 150 yards from you. And you want to make sure you keep your distance. And especially when it's feeding time and all of that. But we get into this person's home, it wasn't a home at all in the classic sense. It was an adobe or brick building with knockouts in the walls, no windows, just holes in the walls to let the air through. But they had no windows. They had no screens. They didn't have a washer, a dishwasher. They didn't have a washing machine. They didn't have indoor plumbing of any kind. They didn't have irons, ironing boards, vacuum cleaners. They had none of the things, is the point I'm trying to get at, that we imagine that we need to have in our lives. And furthermore, in this very small brick adobe building, there must have been, I'm going to say, nine or ten people living. We sat down. They had no electricity. But I mean, they had only one source of electricity. They had a little portable generator outside and one source of electricity, a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling that they would take the bulb out of. They would unscrew it and plug in a plug to maybe run whatever few Appliances that they might have. And that's how they lived. When I first walked in, I thought, oh, my gosh, what poverty. What poverty have I stepped into? How do these people live this way? Only after that dinner did I realize I was the one in poverty. They were the rich ones. Never have I met people so joyous, so happy, so fulfilled, so in love with each other. They hugged and they kissed and they smooched and they joked and they laughed and they danced with little instruments. They made up out of nothing a piece of. From a tree with leaves that shook. And, I mean, they had more fun and more joy and more happiness and more peace and more serenity and more understanding and more love flowing from one to the other and that evening than I have experienced in the whole of my life. And I sat there and I thought, oh, my gosh, what was I thinking? That the joy and happiness of my life depended on how many vacuum cleaners I have in my. Do you know that I have three vacuum cleaners in my house? I actually have three. I'm not making this up. One for each floor of my house. God forbid I should have to carry a vacuum cleaner from one floor to the next. You understand what I'm talking about? So my experience has shown me what the truth of life really is, and it has nothing to do now. I went into that for this reason. If we can convince our children of who they really are, what is really important of the true purpose of life, then even if our future is not in the exterior physical sense, as wonderful as we have had it in our life, it will make no difference. Because the interior experience, as opposed to the exterior, the interior experience of our children and our grandchildren will be grander and greater than anything we could ever have hoped for. If you want to give your children a better tomorrow, give them a better understanding of who they are, why they're here, and the purpose of all of life and the exterior accoutrement, the exterior furnishings will be utterly, totally and completely irrelevant.
