Vital Deformations in Children Arise When the External Nature Overshadows the Psychic Being

A disciple responds to the Mother’s statements about the greater access by the psychic being in many children. While the Mother does not state this as a universal reality, she does point out that until the external being develops, physically, vitally and mentally, the psychic being has less ‘resistance’ and thus can appear more in the young children. There are however many cases we can look at where a child appears to be violent, unruly, greedy, selfish and domineering to the point of harming those weaker than himself, in the form of physical aggression or bullying.

The question revolves around the external being and the influences that impact it. These influences can have a tremendous impact on the withdrawing of the psychic being’s overt influence and a manifestation of various extremes of the vital nature. The vital nature, left to its own devices, has various instinctive behaviours developed through many millennia of habitual responses, including those based in desire, greed, self-aggrandisement and fear. In many cases, influences on the young child, such as family histories of aggressive domineering, physical abuse, sexual abuse, create both a culture of fear in the child and at the same time, teach the child to act in a similar manner when they are above someone else in the vital ‘pecking order’. In some cases, where food is used to control behaviour, the child can exhibit what looks like greed or hoarding behaviour that turns out to be a conditioned response to the situations and controls to which he was subjected. In some cases physical deprivation as a child will lead to internal fear and a hoarding response later. It is often the case that someone who abuses others was himself abused as a child, showing the pattern that develops across generations. Some are taught to cause pain in others as a way of aggrandising themselves through the sense of power over the life and well-being of others. Much bullying is based in this underlying dynamic.

Another factor is simply ignorance. Some children simply do not realise the implications and impacts of what they do, particularly if they act under peer pressure or based on a ‘dare’, which is a common social pressure. Thus, they do things to be part of a particular group without thinking or really understanding what harm they are causing.

A disciple asks: “But why are there greedy children?”

The Mother answers: “Oh, good heavens! greedy, that’s not a crime! There are greedy children. Perhaps they have a bad digestion and so always want to eat. They don’t gain by what they eat. The whole outer being is full of difficulties of all kinds, in everybody — in children also. You could ask me with much more justification: ‘Why are there such cruel children?’ That indeed is one of the most dreadful things…. But it is due to unconsciousness. It is because they are not even aware that they are making others suffer. And usually, if care is taken to make them understand — for instance, through experience — then they understand. Children who ill-treat animals (there are many of these) — well, that is because they don’t even know that animals feel as they do. When they are made to understand that when they pinch animals or pull their hair or beat them it gives them pain, and if necessary when they are shown on their own bodies how it hurts, they don’t do it any more!”

“There are some who are particularly wicked. These are under a perfidious influence. And at times this shows itself from their very infancy and they are like that all through their life, unless they are converted, which is not easy.”

“There is a sort of association between the physical and the psychic and between the mental and the vital being. A mental being is very often a very vital being. A psychic being is very often a physical being. Children — just because this psychic consciousness is in front in them — live also altogether in their body. But as soon as one begins to develop the mind, the taste for association also develops, with all the deformations that go with it. People who make very strict distinctions between man and woman (I don’t know why, for one is as good as the other), say that man is mental and vital and woman physical and psychic. There is some truth in it. But naturally it involves all possible exceptions and complications. These are arbitrary simplifications. In fact the physical being has a simplicity and even a goodwill (which is not always very enlightened, far from it), but still a simplicity and goodwill which put it in a closer relation with the psychic than the passions of the vital or the pretensions of the mind. And it is probably because of that also that in children the psychic can feel more at ease, being less constantly jostled by mental and vital contradictions.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 167-168