Teaching Children About Their True Nature

And then my question is about children. I am an educator. I work with kids age 5 to 10. And our classroom is already pretty groovy, and we meditate and sing and dance and do all kinds of fun kid stuff. But my question is, how would you begin to bring up these kind of big concepts with little people? I have a 19-year-old son, and I have never once discussed these matters with him. I have never once tried to introduce him to these concepts. Why? Simply because he never asked me. That doesn't mean to say that I haven't responded to him throughout his life, whenever he came to me, whenever I was with him. And that my responses have always been informed by my understanding. But my responses were always tailored to his questions or his situation. So I'm not sure that I would try to introduce these concepts to 5- to 10-year-old children. But what I would try to do is to encourage the spirit of inquiry in them, to encourage them to question their experience. Because if they get the taste of questioning and investigating their experience, then sooner or later, at some stage in their life, one of these big questions will occur to them. How come there is experience? With what is my experience known? How do I know that this isn't a kind of dream? If they are encouraged to be inquiring and investigating and not simply to believe everything they're told, then you instill in them a spirit of inquiry, which is much more important than giving them concepts. And of course, how you do that varies. Very different with a 5-year-old than with a 10-year-old. With a 5-year-old, maybe it's more in terms of play and games. With a 10-year-old, you can begin to be more rational. I would be very wary of imposing any new concepts on a child. I would rather just encourage creativity and investigation. And anyone that is creative and investigative will sooner or later begin to ask serious questions about the world, about themselves, about the meaning of life, the purpose of life, who they really are. Cool. Thank you.