Learning Right from Wrong
Living with my two- and four-year-old grandchildren reminds me that, not only is childhood about discovering the shapes and movements and idiosyncrasies of the world, but also about learning to manage one’s inner experience and behavior. In the best of all possible worlds, we receive help labeling those strange sensations in our chest, the rumblings in our belly. Maybe they’re fear, sadness, rage, embarrassment, frustration. Once we give them a name, we can figure out what to do with them, how to express them in word or picture, in play and movement.
Then there’s morality. We have to learn what our culture deems proper, what our family values. We learn right from wrong, according to the worldview we’re taught. Will we learn compassion, competition, independence, or interconnection?
To some extent, our beliefs about good and bad appear to come from our genetic inheritance, passed down like are a love for cinnamon or a tendency to take risks. Yet family, school, and religious communities teach us the rules of life and the consequences of misbehavior. We discover that life is not always fair, and sometimes, it’s painful.
If we are fortunate, we also learn that, even at the worst of times, comfort is available, whether from God or parents or aunts and uncles, or pets, or friends. That can make all the difference.
Growing Up
Of course, no upbringing is perfect. Conflict will arise. We want one thing; the world wants another. But that’s good. Without some tension or struggle, we would not experience sadness nor frustration. We would not have to cope with difficult emotions. We would not need to grow.
To become an adult who contributes to society, such as by working at a job, raising a family, sharing wisdom, or offering service, we must successfully navigate our early life challenges. We can’t do this, though, if we don’t have help from kind and consistent caregivers and teachers.
The psychologist, Erik Erikson, identified the tasks of childhood as trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame, initiative versus guilt, and industry versus inferiority. Erikson believed that if our childhood gives us what we need for healthy development, if our lessons are mostly kind and consistent, we will learn to trust others, to develop autonomy, to realize that our efforts are worthwhile, that what we do and who we are matters. We will learn the rules, and we will figure out to follow them without betraying ourselves and our values. Ultimately, will feel loved and competent.
If our life lessons come with uncertainty, cruelty, and shame, we will not navigate these stages well. We will grow up needing to protect ourselves from an untrustworthy world. We will have difficulty recognizing who we can believe in and who we can’t. At our core, we will feel shame and guilt, believing ourselves to be worthless and inferior.
Even so, life is not hopeless. As we grow up, we can reach out. We can ask for help. Eventually, we may heal our wounds. Then, when we become an elder, we will be better able to nurture the next generation. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
The Hindu Child
In his article, “The Human Life Cycle: The Traditional Hindu View and the Psychology of Erik Erikson,” Sudhir Kakar shows how these childhood stages, and others outlined by Erikson, correspond to the Hindu system of āśrama. Erikson’s initial four stages are similar to that of the Hindu student phase. [1]
In the Hindu system, children learn less about autonomy and initiative, and more about their proper place in society, about the tasks they will perform in life, each according to their caste, and each appropriate to their gender. Industry is important, as is competence, but only in as much as the children follow their dharma and identify with their station in life. [2] Of course, caste is technically outlawed in India, but that system is as entrenched in their culture as is racism in ours.
If upward mobility is difficult in the United States, it is even harder in a Hindu society. Even so, all children start as students. We learn who we are when we’re young. By how it treats us, the world teaches us what to expect of life. We may become haughty and entitled, browbeaten and submissive, humble and generous. At different times, with different people, we may switch from one attitude to another. Childhood is a time of discovery, but what we discover about ourselves and the world, is as variable as is our DNA, whether we grow up in the United States, India, or someplace else.
Householder
In Erikson’s developmental model, we must next get through adolescence. The goal here is to develop a stable personality that will sustain us for the rest of our lives. We all grow and change, of course. Our sense of self evolves, as does our ability to love, to work, and to know God. Nothing stays completely the same.
Yet a part of us will remain “us.” In the best of all possible worlds, we will emerge from adolescence with a strong identity, faithful to ourselves and our communities, and true to values that will, hopefully, allow us to build strong, loving relationships with friends and family, and give us the grounding we need to do work that has meaning, that matters to others, and that we enjoy.
This stage is not unlike that of the Indian householder. We marry and pursue our careers. No matter our caste, the urge to form unions, to lust and to love, to have a purpose, exists in all of us. How successful we are at relationships, how much meaning we can find in our work, will depend on how well we navigated the earlier stages of our life, how much kindness we received, how much consistency, how much compassion. It will also depend on our station in life, our financial resources, our education, the color of our skin, and other identities we are given or claim.
Forest Walker
Regardless of where we fall in the caste system of our country, being a householder is a big responsibility. Even upper caste individuals may struggle to sustain the healthy intimacy and affectionate care that is the lesson of Erikson’s first adult stage. When society funnels us into demeaning and grueling occupations, ones that only the powerless will accept, it becomes even harder to fulfill our obligations to family and society. Maybe we can love our spouse, our children, and even show deep caring. Yet when our work pays barely enough to sustain life, our relationships tend to become strained.
In the householder stage, a man is expected to guide his family in their religious obligations, as well. There are the rituals, the holidays, the prayers. Though work and pleasure are a vital part of this period of our lives, it is also a time to bring up the next generation according to the values of our culture and our community of worship.
In India, some adults choose never to leave this stage of householder. It feels good to have a home, a family, work that satisfies. To continue to evolve, however, at least in the āśrama system, we must begin to disengage, to spread our focus outward toward society, to become a Forest Walker. This is a time to think on God, to seek the stillness within.
For Erikson, during this next stage, we choose to either stagnate in self-absorption or offer ourselves as a parent, a mentor, a guide. We give back to society. We seek to make a difference in the world.
Spiritual Development
Just as not everyone in the United States will choose the path of what Erikson called “generativity,” so not everyone in India will walk the forests. To do so is a kind of sacrifice. To spend time helping others, to reach out to the world, means we will have less time and energy for ourselves. Like giving alms, or donating to charity, this stage requires at least some level of sacrifice.
To sacrifice is spiritual. The generative person, the forest walker, must trust in something grander and more wonderful than themselves. To reach this point, we must get safely through the earlier stages. We must have developed the trust necessary for deep relationships, the fidelity to be true to ourselves, the industry and initiative to move forward on a path that not everyone takes. We must have learned to love.
In this third Hindu stage, in Erikson’s “generativity” period, we don’t withdraw completely. We continue to maintain a family, to provide and produce, yet we begin to care not only for our own happiness and that of our immediate family, but also for those outside our inner circle. We take an interest in the public sphere.
This is something of a middle way, a time of both engagement and contemplation. We reflect on our past and on our future, discovering new depths and new wisdom, while sustaining the relationships at home and at work that allow us to pass on what we have come to know.
Everything and Nothing
Some of us will eventually renounce the world. We will leave even our loved ones. Jesus did this; so did the Buddha. As we become the wise elder, we become more or less connected to this material plane. One might say that this corresponds with Erikson’s final stage, that of integrity versus despair, yet he never imagined the elder wandering off to an ashram or spending all day in meditation.
For Erikson, old age is a time to reflect on our accomplishments, to come to terms with who we are and who we are not, to accept life as it is, and to find serenity with the task of letting go. During this stage, we prepare to die.
In the Hindu system, the renunciate relinquishes all notions of separation. No longer does she see a “you” and a “me.” She experiences oneness. With time, she learns to live as if this were true.
Although spirituality can be part of any life stage, it is integral to these later stages. We cannot do without belief. Even if we choose to disbelieve everything, we must make sense of life somehow, and that means we must claim a spiritual path, whether atheist or religious or mysterious.
It is the mystery that we enter into during these last life stages. If we seek the path of the renunciate, even if we live in our homes with our families, we engage with them differently. We know and experience, but we don’t teach so much as model. There are no words to explain the mysterious. Thus, we have nothing to pass on, yet we also have everything to pass on.
The Broken Pot
Today, in my chaplain job, I met a woman who was sick from a bad case of pneumonia. She had heart failure and COPD to complicate things. As she lay there, struggling to breathe, she told me she was tired. Although she didn’t refuse treatment, she wasn’t excited about living. She didn’t really want to go home to her apartment with her husband and her dog. She wanted to go home to God.
Besides, she didn’t see any reason to live. She and her husband had never had children, and though her husband would miss her if she died, it was expected that life would end one day. One of them must continue on alone. Why not him?
At the same time, she spoke of wanting to matter, to have a purpose. She told me the story of the broken pot, a tale that comes from India.
Once upon a time, a water carrier had two pots that she carried on a stick over her shoulders. One of the pots was whole; the other had a small crack. Out of that crack, water dribbled, so that by the time the woman made her way from the river to her stall to sell the water, the cracked pot was half emptied.
The pot felt terrible about this, but when it apologized to the water carrier, she shook her head. “Pay attention as we walk back from the river today,” she said. “See what you think then.”
So the pot watched as they walked. Along the trail, on the side where the water leaked, a profusion of red and yellow flowers grew. It was lovely, and the pot told the woman so.
“They grow because of you,” she said.
Then the pot understood that the crack was not a liability, but a gift.
Having a Purpose
After she told me that story, the patient smiled. “I’m the broken pot,” she said. “That’s my purpose.”
“Does that mean you’re not ready to die?” I asked.
She guessed she would leave that up to God.
This woman held deep sadness in her heart. She’d experienced losses, not the least of which was the loss of her dream that one day she would be a parent. Although she had a dog, it was not the same. Yet sadness can coexist with love, generosity, even hope.
In some ways, she was like the forest walker, reaching out to tend to community. In other ways, she was the renunciate, ready to give up her life for eternity, for that experience of oneness that is beyond all explanation. This woman had navigated childhood, with strengths and sorrows, and, with her husband, had become a householder. Now she was moving on to other stages.
Becoming One
This didn’t happen, though, until the pandemic isolated her, a few of her siblings died, and then she got sick. With time, she became very tired. By the time I met her, she was ready to let go.
In her mind, however, dying did not mean letting go of everything. Yes, she would leave her earthly home, but she would go to heaven. There, she would reunite with loved ones in heaven. She would go fishing on the river with her father, play cribbage with her mother, dance with her sister. And one day, her husband would join her. Maybe even her dog. Then she would be a householder again.
It’s the never-ending story, a vision of eternity that is like the life we know. But even though she imagined death that way, even though she longed to stay a householder until the stars winked out and beyond, she was already starting to walk in the forest. Her purpose was to water the flowers, to drip her wisdom onto the ground, bit by bit, offering it to the world, to the next generation. Hopefully, from that watering of wisdom, flowers would grow.
One day, though, the water–the wisdom–would be all gone. She would die. And then she would enter that final stage when she would become one with everything. You might say that death itself is a kind of renunciation.
In faith and fondness,
Barbara
Credits
- Kakar, Sudhir, “The Human Life Cycle: The Traditional Hindu View and the Psychology of Erik Erikson,” Philosophy East and West, Jul., 1968, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Jul., 1968), pp. 127-136, University of Hawai’i Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1398255, accessed October 17, 2021.
- Ibid 132.
Photo by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash
Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.