DVD #293 – What Is the Duty of Grandparents

Lecture given in the Aquarian Education Group’s old temple in Sedona, Arizona on September 8, 1996.

“There is a great difference between responsibility and duty. Responsibility depends on self-determination and is related to Soul and Spiritual values. Duty can be forced upon a person by others and is related to the personality.

“Duty is related to a segment of life.

“Duty is limited to the requirement of the field.

“Duty is the service for self, or for an interest. Responsibility is service to all for the interest of all.

“Duty requires knowledge. Responsibility requires not only knowledge but transformation of one’s own nature.”

– The Psyche and Psychism, p. 1082

“Grandparents are not old shoes who have finished their job, to be put on shelves or sent to different places. Grandparents have their special role in evolution. Without them the evolution, the progress of humanity, will not proceed in the best ways. They have a great role to play in family life, in social life, everywhere, if they know their role and how to manage their role in the family.

“First of all I believe that parents stand for the present. It is very strange that parents teach the children the present values: competition, schools, colleges, universities, how to make money, how to buy houses, properties, how to make their life pleasant and beautiful. They stand for the present.

“I have watched many, many parents, and they do the same thing. They are concerned with their children’s dressing, schooling, behavior, and their relationships with daily events. They are concerned with how to manage their children and how to protect them. This is very interesting.

“Grandparents stand for the future. They inspire the children in the real values of life because they passed through that experience of being young and beautiful and rich and pleasant. They passed the life of pleasures. Now they are seventy, eighty, they have cooled down, and they know really what life is. Parents do not know that. Parents are very happy now, strong, healthy; they teach health and happiness to their children. But grandparents know what the suffering of life is, what pain and suffering are, what is sickness, how many times they faced death. They conversed with death and took special wisdom from the experience of meeting death. It is a very valuable cycle.

“If they accumulate lots of wisdom, they slowly pass it to their grandchildren, but in such a balanced way that the balance is not distorted. The present and the future will be balanced with such a dosage of wisdom that the children do not lose their present and do not neglect their future.”

– Duties of Grandparents pp. 3-4