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THIS?
Our whole education is so ugly, our whole upbringing is so wrong, that it takes away every possibility of your inner growth and gives you stupid ideas which have no relevance as far as your joy, your understanding and your maturity are concerned.
Every child is being told, in thousands of ways, to criticize himself, so this is not only your problem. He is always told he is wrong in everything. Slowly, slowly he catches the disease of criticizing himself. And a person who criticizes himself cannot forgive others. How can he forgive? -- for the same reasons, he criticizes others. His whole life simply becomes a condemnation -- condemn yourself, condemn others. Then love becomes impossible, friendship becomes impossible, and he simply suffers. And what he is criticizing is so absurd.
A young boy came running fast into the house, went directly into the kitchen and said to his mother, "My God! It must be God's mercy that I am saved. A lion was following me from the school to the house. He is standing outside."
The mother said, "How many millions of times have I told you not to exaggerate?" She is saying, "How many millions of times have I told you not to exaggerate? Where can you find a lion in the city?"
The boy said, "Perhaps out of fear it looked big. But it is certainly a very dangerous dog."
The mother said, "Now you are coming to your senses. If it was dangerous you would not have been here."
He said, "That's true. In fact, it is a small dog." But the child made the comment, "I was exaggerating, and that is wrong. What about you? You said, `How many millions of times have you told me....' "
I was staying in Calcutta in a friend's house from where I was going to a conference. I was sitting with him in the car and we were waiting for his wife. He was honking the horn. She came very angrily to the window and said, "I have told you a thousand times that I am coming in a minute!"
I said to my friend, "This is something -- a miracle. She has told you a thousand times that she is coming in a minute. In fact, in a minute, one cannot say it a thousand times. And she has again disappeared into the bathroom."
The
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