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Unite, O Lord, this couple like a pair of lovebirds. May they be surrounded by children, living both long and happily.
Atharva Veda 14.2.64. BO VE, P. 259

Monday
LESSON 155
Traditions of Early Marriage
We are now entering the dawning of a new age in
which everyone is becoming more and more conscious of life and the
inner laws of life in their investigation of the inner man. Child
marriage is one of the most interesting and least understood practices
of ancient India, which has a very real basis in spiritual law. I
thought you would be interested this morning to hear of some of the
intricacies of this ancient custom.
For many thousands of
years, India has practiced early marriage in a variety of forms, making
the Indian home through the centuries strong and stable, losing much of
its power and stability only in more recent times as some of the
ancient practices such as early marriage have begun to fall away from
common use. But still, in thousands of homes throughout Asia today,
families practice the betrothal of their children no later than the age
of puberty. Such a practice is continued in many homes surrounding our ashrama
in the northern part of Sri Lanka. In a typical home, the father and
mother begin to take a great interest in finding the proper mate for
the child when he or she arrives at the age of six or seven years. In
the most traditional communities, many matches are proposed when a boy
is five and six years of age to a girl who is just born, because the
family wants a happy life with the other family and it seeks to protect
the youthful life of the children who are raised together with this
vision in mind. Such matches are fulfilled in holy matrimony at age
sixteen or later. The principle of such a match is considered to be
much the same as the grafting of one kind of an apple tree upon another
kind of apple tree, producing a tree which will then bear different
kinds of apples. The children are matched by their parents according to
an intricate system of character delineation which allows the parents
to know the respective basic tendencies of their children.
Sometimes
a betrothal is made several years before the marriage takes place. In
such cases, the little boy or the little girl is told, perhaps at the
age of six or seven, who will one day be his wife or her husband. From
that day on, the child's mind is constantly directed towards the person
he or she will one day marry. The father talks about it, the mother
talks about it, the older brothers and sisters are constantly filling
the child's mind with thoughts of the husband- or wife-to-be; and the
betrothed child begins to anticipate the approaching marriage as a
sacred and permanent lifetime contract. From the moment of decision,
the parents and relatives in both families are quite happy and content
with the arrangement, and eventually it is sanctified with the aid of
the temple priest. Generally it is when the two children reach their
mid-teens that they become actually married. Then the little girl packs
her bag and is taken to the house of the boy, where she lives with him,
but just like any one of the rest of the family.
In some cases
in India, prior to the marriage ceremony, the bride and groom may not
even have met; but as soon as they begin to live together, they come to
know one another slowly in the security of his family's home.
Gradually, their minds, which have long been directed toward one
another, come together in a natural and harmonious way. When they begin
living together, the emotions of each blend one with another, and this
is really the marriage of the emotions. First occurs the marriage of
the soul. Then the two minds become married. Then the emotions become
married or interblended. Finally, the physical consummation of the
marriage takes place when both bodies are mature enough for this to
happen. The physical bodies continue to grow, and the marriage is a
continuing growing together of the physical bodies, emotional bodies
and mental bodies, just as you would mold together two pieces of clay
until finally you could not tell where one began and the other stopped.
Ideally such a marriage is as perfect and complete as the harmonious
grafting of one limb upon another.
Tuesday
LESSON 156
Marriages Of the Spirit
Now, you might ask, suppose a young married couple
find that they don't like one another. Suppose they are not suited to
one another? Well, they are, assuming the match was carefully
determined according to the basic tendencies in the nature of each
child, according to harmonious and compatible character delineations
and not as a forced marriage. The two children, being of the same basic
tree, actually grow together in growing up together. This is an ancient
ideal among Hindus and other peoples. Though it is not widely practiced
in today's world, it may be in the future when society regains the
inner understanding that dispels the misconceptions surrounding the
subject.
One of the most compelling aspects of a compatible
child marriage is that divorce never even enters into the consciousness
of these husbands or wives. In such a relationship, to think of divorce
would be like thinking of cutting off your arm. You don't even consider
cutting off your own arm to solve a problem. Nor do children who have
grown up together in marriage consider divorcing each other. They have
their children at an early age, and they grow up with their own
children, so the whole family is closely knit.
The success of
a good early marriage is due to the fact that it is a marriage of the
spirit. It is not simply an emotional, impulsive pairing or a sexual
mating. When the family elders, the mothers and fathers, consult with
the family jyotisha shastri and make the betrothal at the very
early age of perhaps seven, the destinies of the children are fully
directed in the mind of each member of the family. There is no doubt,
uncertainty or suspense.
We might think that children should
not have their lives determined for them in this way by other people,
that they should be given free will to make their own mistakes, to find
their own happiness. But think for a minute, how much free will do we
really have in our Western culture? Without even knowing it, we buy
what manufacturers and advertisers determine we should buy, our minds
are filled with what the media presents to us, and we date and marry
those we contact by chance circumstance. Our existence in all ways is
dependent upon our surroundings more than we would like to admit.
Now,
I am only giving you one view of early marriage. You will have to
arrive at your own conclusion on this subject. Certainly, there are
abuses of the practice of arranged marriage in general. For instance,
in response to such abuse, in 1999 England passed a law forbidding
forced marriages of young girls.
The responsibility for the
marriage of youths lies with the parents, just as they were responsible
for their children's conception. After both families have agreed upon
the betrothal, it is the duty of the parents in each family to
thoughtfully direct the minds of the children toward one another. The
parents and all the elders of the family watch carefully to see that
the children do not form any other romantic alliances. They may have
other close friends, but first and foremost in the mind of each is the
husband- or wife-to-be. In this way, a slow amalgamation of the souls
of the two children is made; and looking within, it is possible to see
the process of interweaving which takes place on the higher planes of
consciousness.
Wednesday
LESSON 157
Advantages of Early Marriage
I have observed that children born in such
early marriages are spiritually inclined. They are religious and
intuitive by nature. Intellectual education does not concern them too
much. Nor are they concerned with the worldly pursuits of Western
people who are suffering, basically, from frustrated sex emotion, or of
those unhappy, incomplete people of the West who live in the
frustrations of intellectual ramification and who arrive at the end of
their lives and suddenly ask themselves, "Who am I, where did I come
from and where am I going?" for unless they have a particularly strong
memory, most of their study will have left them. Just as the memory of
each detail of your yesterday has flowed through you, so does
intellectual knowing eventually flow through the life of the person who
contains it, as a thing of only temporary value.
The custom of
early marriage in Asia does not stop with the marriage ceremony. The
mothers and fathers enter into an unwritten contract together to
support the son and the daughter and set aside a certain amount of
money for them, so that they can eventually have their own house. The
boy usually follows along the line of business of his father, and in
this way, spiritually, socially, culturally and economically, the
youthful husband and wife are taken care of until the young man is old
enough to assume his full family responsibilities. If the young man
exhibits special aptitude that might warrant it, and if the parents are
sufficiently well off, perhaps they will send him to the university. If
not, he follows happily and usually successfully in his father's trade.
The result of such stable early marriage is to give the nation a
solidarity and to bring forth, as well, spiritually strong children.
You
may enter a home in which such marriages have taken place and find ten
people living in the same small area so harmoniously and so well
adjusted that you would hardly know that more than one or two are
living there. Very large families may live in close contact with each
other, and because they are so well adjusted and have such inner
respect for each other, there is no contention, no feeling of being
crowded. This inner respect for the moods and feelings of another is
only possible because the soul qualities are awakened at an early age
in the children. Without all of this, we would not, in all wisdom,
recommend such early marriage.
Thursday
LESSON 158
Drawbacks of Late Marriages
The further a culture strays from the basic laws of
early marriage, the more difficulty do its people have mentally and
emotionally, and the more difficult it is for them to awaken
spiritually. They have to struggle to internalize and utilize the laws
of willpower, concentration and meditation; whereas in a spiritually
adjusted Asian home, inner knowledge and inner peace are more or less
second nature.
Now let us consider marriage the way we know it
today in the West. Boys and girls grow up and may not enter into
marriage until eighteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty or later. Along
the way they enter into various relationships, and each time they
wonder, "Is this the right one?" They compare one experience with
another, and each experience they have in this line makes them more
unsure of themselves than the last. When marriage finally does happen,
instead of the wife going to the husband's home and looking to him
completely for her security, she goes to him with reservation.
Prior
to many Western marriages, the years of looking around, wondering,
investigating, experimenting and dating only build up an unnatural
conscience, because during the crucial, early years, the young men and
women are going against the natural inclinations of their own soul, and
the resulting states of uneasy conscience only make them insecure. The
man who does marry with a foundation of such insecurity can no longer
depend fully upon himself, and he finds himself depending upon his
wife. She, in turn, is only half depending upon him. They are like two
rickety posts leaning up against each other. Jar them a little bit, and
they both fall down. By contrast, a well-raised man who marries early
develops, with the support of his family, a natural reliance upon his
own inner being, and the wife depends upon her husband.
Perhaps
you wonder what this force is that amalgamates a husband and wife at
their early age. It is an inner force of the nervous system. Perhaps
you are somewhat familiar with the central nervous system and the
sympathetic nervous system. The arms and legs could be likened to the
gross projections of our nervous system which can be seen with the two
eyes. But there is also a subtle projection of man's nervous system
composed of millions of tiny nerve currents which radiate out from his
body and which form an aura about him. When you are close to someone,
it is through this subtle nerve force of the aura that you can feel how
that person feels.
Before a young boy or girl reaches puberty,
the nervous system is pure and strong and vital in its growth,
providing the child is not beaten or abused and lives in a harmonious
home. If you could see psychically the subtle nervous system that
permeates the physical body and extends beyond it, you would find that
it has little hooks at the end of the nerve force. In an early
marriage, these little hooks come together, connecting the boy and the
girl like interlocking fingers, and thus the subtle nervous system of
each grows together.
The soul brings the boy and girl
together, the mind brings them together, and finally the nervous system
in this manner binds them closer and closer together in an actual
amalgamation. Once the subtle forces are completely intertwined, they
cannot be torn apart. This is why children scheduled for an early
marriage are watched very closely, because until the marriage actually
takes place, the power to properly amalgamate the subtle forces and
projections of this nervous system may be lost. This virginal power may
be dissipated in an instant, never to be regained until a new birth.
The children are watched so that they do not have any sexual experience
with another of the opposite sex before their intended marriage. If
they do, the pristine amalgamating power of the subtle nervous system
is lost; and though they could still come together in marriage, there
would not be the same binding force to hold their lives together. Thus,
early marriage as described above is the ideal only when both boy and
girl are virgins.
Friday
LESSON 159
Marriages and Social Problems
When a marriage takes place after the boy or girl
have already dissipated their sex energy in one way or another, the
main force that holds the two together is one which the woman emanates
from within herself in order to stabilize her own security. This is a
psychic force which projects subconsciously from her solar plexus. To
psychic vision, this force looks like a long, translucent white rope,
about six inches in diameter and up to fifty yards in length, which is
manifested by the woman's desire for security and is sent out from
herself to "hook" onto the frame of a man and wind round and round his
spinal column, thus binding him to her, even at times against his
conscious will. This is why you find so many weakened men over whom
women have gained an inner, psychic control, holding them in lower
states of consciousness. Some mothers exert this kind of control over
their sons, too, from time to time, when they do not have their
husbands. When a man feels "edgy" and "peculiar" without knowing why,
he may well be under the psychic domination of a woman.
When
this is the only binding force of a marriage, it is not a marriage at
all. Women are inwardly very unhappy in using this force, because it
leads them into a lower, instinctive plane of consciousness as well.
Until they renounce the use of it, they are never able to contact the
faculties of their own soul or to find the Divinity within. Until a man
frees himself from these psychic forces, he can never realize freedom
within himself or realize his true Divinity. Yet this is the basis upon
which our new culture, or nonculture, in the West has formed.
Even
in Asia today, which is now tending toward later marriage, the boys and
girls are making up their own minds about marriage. But basically they
aren't making up their own minds at all. Instead of the soul forming
the marriage, it is done the other way around. First the body makes the
marriage, then the emotions make the marriage, then the couple become
intellectual partners in marriage and spend all their time and energy
trying to see eye to eye on many subjects which they can't see eye to
eye on. When the intellect makes such a marriage, it never becomes a
spiritual marriage. It can't be, because the power of the spirit, which
was not harnessed in chastity at an early age, is gone. As man loses
the power of a spiritual marriage, his life depends more and more upon
his instinctive nature, upon his instinctive drives, and fulfilling his
instinctive drives becomes popular, becomes the cultural way of life,
the social custom.
The news media are now making us aware of
the terrible social problems being created by the tradition of late
marriage in America. Child marriage is not considered modern, and yet
each day the percentage of children engaging in intercourse, and of
teen pregnancy out of wedlock, is increasing, especially with the help
of the Internet's pornographic enticements. Hotmail is not only e-mail!
What proper guidance, what dharmic fulfillment, is given to the Western, and now Eastern, boy and girl at the age of puberty? Very little, very little.
In
1962 Someone gave me an article telling about the many families in the
United States who were considering entering their children into early
marriage with the consent and support of the two families through a
legal contract and agreement. Even in our own state of Hawaii, the law
sets the age of consent for intercourse, and hence marriage, at a
youthful fourteen. This is a basic social issue for us to think about
and consider. If you know two people who were married at an early age
without prior sexual experience, compare their lives with a couple who
married later in life after many affairs and experiences. Early
marriage has long been practiced by many cultures and civilizations of
the world, including the early Jews, Christians and Muslims. Such
practices are not thought out intellectually but are arrived at through
observation and the intuitive knowing of the tremendous forces in the
instinctive nature of man.
Saturday
LESSON 160
Growing Up Together
Now let us suppose that a young boy and girl are
pushed, even forced, into marriage together who are not astrologically,
intellectually and spiritually compatible. That would be like trying to
graft a pine tree upon an apple tree, which just would not work. The
chemistry of the inner forces of this boy and the girl simply would not
mix, and naturally the marriage would not be a happy one. This is often
the case when two different types of people, who are basically not
suited to one another, marry at a later age and thus do not have the
chance to grow and mature together. In this case, they are only "glued"
together, and when the circumstances of their companionship become too
intense, the glue melts and they fall apart.
This indicates
why we see so little of early match-making for youths today. There is
simply not sufficient knowledge widespread in our society to make
proper matches between children. This sophisticated knowledge must be
present in both families. Furthermore, both must necessarily be mature
and traditional religious families. Similarly, where there is no proper
experience in grafting, trees never get grafted.
Among my
initiates, we arrange marriages at a slightly later age, such as
twenty-one for the boy and seventeen for the girl, and we always
require the blending of the two families as a one family and the
unequivocal consent of the young man and woman, as well as a written
agreement between the couple. There is a lot to be said for marriages
that are arranged at these formative ages, because after age
twenty-five, personal patterns are already set, and it is more
difficult for anyone to adjust to a marriage partner and be guided by
community elders.
Years ago in the West, before the two World
Wars, it was looked down upon, even unheard of, if there was not at
least a three- to five-year difference between the groom and the bride.
And to keep genetics strong, cousins never, ever married. The boy was
always older, of course. It has been my observation that there is more
strain and misunderstanding in marriages when the woman is of the same
age or older than the man. When younger, he may feel like a boy, and
she like a mother. Whenever the husband is older, his masculinity and
sense of protective caring is stimulated, as his wife is younger than
he and therefore depends upon him, as eventually do the children.
In
today's world the new trend is to marry when the professions are well
established and earning power is up -- enough to support a nuclear
family. But what about the children? The generation gap is humongous,
or at least very big, for them. The mom who marries as a child herself,
around sixteen or even earlier and having a baby ten months later,
would be only about sixteen or seventeen years older than her first
child. By the time she and her husband are fortyish and in the
stressful throes of male and female menopause (yes, men go through it,
too), their children will be in their early twenties and totally able
to help handle their parents' traumas.
Compare this to a young
woman of twenty-five marrying a man who is thirty or older. Mom will be
fortyish and dad, too, when the children are in puberty. Hot flashes
for mom, while dad is wondering whatever happened to his youth and
resisting having an affair. In the midst of all this, the children are
demanding their freedom as they experience their own budding powers of
procreation. Under these circumstances, the emotional ups and downs in
the home can be almost unbearable for everyone, including the
neighbors, who sometimes have to listen to loud, high-pitched voices
and banging of doors.
Many nuclear families blow up because of
the simultaneous release of the biological forces of bodily change
experienced by both generations, which inevitably happens in families
who marry late in life -- father going through middle age crisis while
his teenage son is coping with "testosterone poisoning," mother going
through menopause while her adolescent daughter is transforming into an
estrogen-powered woman. Of course, the generation gap of twenty-five to
thirty years or more between mom and dad and their offspring also
contributes to deeper misunderstandings.
What price
profession, a well-established financial plan and enough income to
maintain a nuclear family? The divorce lawyers get their share, and so
do the marriage counselors and psychiatrists -- and, oh yes, the
doctors, the druggists and the hospitals all take a cut. So, there is a
lot to be said, in contemporary Hindu families, for marriage beginning
around sixteen for girls and twenty for boys. By this age such children
are practically young adults, which even present-day laws recognize.
Sunday
LESSON 161
Not Growing Up Together
One suggestion is for marriageable youth to give up
those summer vacations and study around the year to get through school
and into a profession so they can wed and establish a family while they
are still young, rather than delaying the completion of education and
the time of marriage.
Can you tell this to the young people of
today? No. They will say, "We will deal with it when it happens." To
delay marriage until age thirty or later and go into a situation with
no plan of how to deal with the problems when they come up is flying
blind, isn't it? We don't even buy our automobiles like that. Will
youth listen to such advice from elders? No, not any more. "It's not
cool," they say. Well, it won't be cool when emotions get hot and the
family has to live through the seven teenage years of puberty
simultaneously with the five or more fortyish years of menopause. Think
about it.
Here's a story: Little Jyoti got interested in
sailing when his father purchased a boat. Dad was reliving his youth,
but had no time to take Jyoti out on a sail, except once, and that was
the time they nearly capsized. Dad was forty-seven, and Jyoti was
seventeen. There were thirty years between them. Imagine! It certainly
didn't used to be that way, but it is now. All their lives the father
and the son lived in different universes, seldom communicating. Even
when they thought they communicated, they didn't. The distance between
the ages of Jyoti and his parents contributed to the breakup of the
family.
Jyoti went to live with mom after the divorce. They
were all happier, now that the fights about the cost of the boat were
over. Mom thought the money spent on the boat would be better spent on
a new wing built on their house for her mother, who was getting old.
Now mom and Jyoti live in her mother's house, which is big enough for
all three of them. Jyoti and dad have finally become friends. Dad sees
Jyoti whenever he comes over. Jyoti does not visit dad's place too
often and only when dad's "significant other" is at work and it's dad's
day off. It's all too true that this story is the tale of many families
in today's world.
Another story: Rani's mom was married at
seventeen to a boy who was twenty. They were both virgins and grew
together as they discovered each other physically, emotionally,
intellectually and spiritually. Then came little Rani, then Kumar and
then Krishna. Mom, dad and the kids were all children together, and
they are still together. Mom stays home. She has never held a job. Dad
makes enough for the whole family; they live simply. Mom is always
there for her family, laughing and smiling. She is rarely tired and
never stressed out. Dad has mutual-interest projects going in the
attic, the basement and the garage for the two boys. Mom is teaching
her daughter how to sew, cook, sing and serve. Mom, dad, Rani and the
boys enjoy each other because they are not so far apart in age. Are
those days gone? Are there going to be no more happy times when the
entire family enjoys each other without too much distance between their
age and interests? Dad doesn't have to worry about giving quality time
to his family. He is there with them -- there for them -- and so is
mom. They have no marriage counseling bills to pay; no problems,
really.
The moral to these stories is simple. There is a
wisdom in the old ways of marrying early, which is exactly what
happened in tribes and cultures for thousands of years prior to World
Wars I and II. That is the natural way, the way that avoids frustration
and promiscuity, marriage failure and unhappy families.
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