Respect for your Elders

All the professors, all the teachers, all the parents, all together are complaining of one thing, that the newer generation is not respectful towards them. But they can’t see one simple thing, that the whole reason for respectability has disappeared. You have to accept it, there is no other way. The person who knows more cannot respect the persons who don’t know that much.

Once it was impossible for the younger person to know more than the older person; now it is impossible for the older person to keep pace with the younger person. The younger person will know the latest developments and the gap between the two will be at least twenty or thirty years.

And this gap is widening. It has stopped the communication between the older generation and the newer generation, because conversation is so difficult. The parents have their own egos, they are not going to sit at the feet of their own children and learn from them. And the children have their own egos, they know more. Why should they sit at the feet of their parents and learn from them things which have proved to be completely wrong? They speak almost different languages.

Old age has lost respect because a new territory, a new space of learning and knowledge has opened up. In the whole past there was only one possibility to learn and that was from the older generation. Now a new door has opened for learning, fast learning. Experience moves at a very slow pace, but education depends on your intelligence.

You are going to see a still bigger gap—one of which humanity is still not aware—and I am talking about it for the first time. One gap has been created by education. If meditation becomes a worldwide movement, another gap will be created which will be immense. Then the old man and the young man will be as far apart as the two poles of the earth. Communication between them is already difficult; it will become impossible.

The people who are here with me can understand what I am saying. If you start moving into the world of no-mind, then the people who are old, who have gathered much knowledge in the mind, will look to you retarded, undeveloped, very ordinary. There is no reason why you should respect them; they have to respect you—you have transcended mind.

The generation gap that education has created is nothing compared to the generation gap that meditation can create. This gap is quantitative, that gap will be qualitative. A man with meditation has no age: he is neither a child nor is he young nor is he old. He is eternity itself. How can you expect from him that he should be respectful to old idiots, donkeys and all kinds of animals all around?

The older generation will have to learn one thing: no more to expect respect. On the contrary, if you want to be still respected, give respect to your own children.

And only if the older generation is humble enough to give respect to their own children, will the children perhaps be able to give respect.

No society in the world has been, up to now, respectful to the children. All respect is for the elders, all respect is for the old, almost dead. All respect is for the graveyards—no respect for the cradles. And the child is the purest life—uncontaminated. The child is closer to the very source of life than the old man. The old man is closer to death… but strange—death has been worshipped, respected, and life has been crushed, destroyed in every possible way.

It is one of the most beautiful things that has happened in this century—the generation gap. Make every effort to widen it, make it almost unbridgeable. Otherwise you will be carrying corpses all your life