Jiddu Krishnamurti - Have diet and regularity any significance in the growth of a child

Questioner: Have diet and regularity any significance in the growth of a child?

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Obviously they have. Have you the proper food to give the child today? But those who have the food are so unintelligent about their diet; they merely eat to satisfy the palate, they love to eat. Look at your body. Do not smile and pass it by. You just eat what you have been accustomed to. If you are accustomed to highly condimented food and if you are deprived of it, you are lost. You have actually given no consideration to diet. If you did, you would soon find out how simple it is to know what to eat. I cannot tell you what to eat, obviously, because each person has to think out and organize what is most suitable for him. Therefore, one must experiment for a week, for a month. You do not want to experiment because you want to continue with what you have been eating for the past ten or twenty years.

Most obviously, children need a regular life; at their tender age when they are growing up bodily, they must have the right amount of sleep, the right diet, right care. These are obvious necessities in the life of a child. But you do not love the child; you quarrel with your wife and you take it out on the child, or your wife takes it out on the child. When you come home late, you expect the child to keep awake for your amusement. The child becomes a toy to play with and a means to pass on your name. You are not interested in the child; you are interested in yourself.

Sir, if you were interested, you would have a revolution tomorrow; if you really loved the child, you would break up this educational system, this social environment. Then you would consider what he eats, whether he leads a regular life, and what is going to happen to him, whether he is going to be fodder for cannon. Then you would investigate the causes of wars, not merely quote others, and have a pattern of action.

If you really loved the child, you would have no sovereign governments, no isolated nationalities, no separate religions with their ceremonies and organized dogmatism. If you really loved the child, all these things would change overnight, you would avoid them because they lead to chaos, they lead to destruction, they lead to sorrow and suffering. But you do not love the child, you do not care what happens to him as he grows up and looks after you when you are old, or carries on your name. That is what you are interested in, and you are not interested in the child. If you were, you would not have so many children; you would have one or two, and see to it that your child develops intelligence and the right culture. The pity of it is, sirs, that it is not the fault of the educational system, but of ourselves - our hearts are so empty, so dull. We do not know love.

When we say to a person, ''I love you,'' that love is purely gratification - sexual pleasure, or the pride of possession, ownership. Mere pleasure and pride of possession are clearly not love. But it is only those two things that we care about; we are not concerned about our children, we are not concerned about our neighbor. The beggar as we go down the street gets no help, but we talk loudly about how we should help the unfortunate people. You join groups, you join systems, but the man in need goes empty-handed. If you were really interested, your hearts would be rich with feeling and you would be ready to act, and you would change the system overnight.

So, diet and regularity are necessary not only for the child but for each one of us. To find out what is necessary, we must investigate, we must experiment with ourselves first and not with the child. At least we can give him clean food, see that he has a regular time for sleep and rest. It is because we have never thought about it that most children are so small, stunted, and hungry. I am sure you are listening very attentively, and you will go home and make a noise, shout to see if the child is asleep and stuff his mouth with sugar to show how much you love him! I do not think you know what you are doing, that is the pity and the misery of it. We are not aware of our actions, we are not aware of the words we use, we are not aware of the significance of our means of livelihood - we just live, drift, breed, and die.

When we have one foot in the grave, we talk about God because we want to be secure when we land on the other side; living a wretched, monstrous, ugly life here, we expect a beautiful life at the end of it. Beauty consists in living a rich life, living reality from the beginning to the end. There is no beauty in a life of exploitation, of greed and hatred, in seeking titles and possessions, and it is odd that you add one more object to your accumulations - God. What you are doing is too ugly for words, it has no meaning, no depth. Most of you live on words, and naturally your child is the same, he also grows up like you. There can be regeneration only when there is transformation of the mind and heart.

Source - Jiddu Krishnamurti talks in india 1948