Wisdom of Youth

All energies of life have in them a possibility of an excess of going too far.
When you bring up your children, and you tell your children your various far-out ideas and the children suddenly believe in them, I'm horrified.
I think "Oh my god, what will they do next?"
But everybody feels that way in regard to the strength of the younger generation that is coming on.
Cause this younger generation is huge.

When we think about young people, we have terrible ideas.
We think that we know what life is and that they have to be told that they will learn it from us, and be like us.
We don't take that attitude when we see the new vegetables come up in the spring.
We don't say the vegetables have to be educated to be vegetables.
We say "hooray! At last, young vegetables. With all the life and energy in them. New meals for everything."
So when we see young people come up, we might say "good gracious, isn't this great? To see the human race is still doing its stuff. I wonder what they'll have to teach us."

Because wisdom doesn't come from above down.
It comes from below up.
That's where the wisdom is, surging into us.
The old people, they have a function.
But they have it in order to fulfill that function.
They have to understand first that they can learn from the young sources.
If they understand that, then they can be wise and be teachers.
If they don't understand that, they never can.

To be wise, you have to...that's the meaning of the saying, "to enter the kingdom of heaven, you have to become again as a child."
From the child's point of view, the things which the adult considers irrelevant to survival, are perfectly important.
And so children collect pebbles and colored glass, and all sorts of trivia which they consider as precious as diamonds.
The adult says "oh, pfft. Frippery."
But they really have the secret.

Now the child, as a child doesn't know how to play the adults game. It is a power game. And so it has to be educated to learn the values of the power game.
To learn what's what and what is important.
But when he has mastered that game he realizes it has no rewards.
That all the things that the adults thought they were gaining by their power game, are after all not worth having.
Which is why you can be rich and miserable.

So that having learned and having seen through the adults power game, we come back to the point of a child.