Paulji talks to the Children – Salt Lake City, 1971

Now, when you are at the age of anywhere, that are here, and I say, friends. I don’t say young people or adults or that, because there’s no difference in that. I remember many years ago. And, it’s been a long time ago, that when I, myself, used to go down to my father’s office, and he was a manager of one of the biggest Riverboat repairing docks in the world, and I’d sit down in his office and put my feet on his table. I remember, several times, a night watchman or the day watchman would come in. And he said, “Well, Paul’s an old man already.” Didn’t he? “He’s running the office.” And, you know, the fact is, we have so many people at this age who are already old people in nature or in their thoughts and in their wisdom. And, they say things and they do things that absolutely amaze their parents and other people.

And, they do it with the fact that they’re all open to this wisdom before they go to school. And, before you go to school, you have all of this within you. Now, in Los Angeles when talking to my young friends, I told them a great number of things that happened to me, how that I was considered to be the meanest child that ever attended that school because I always fought with the teachers. I didn’t agree with them upon anything and the teacher and I would have fistfights.

This is actually true and my step-sister used to have to carry me home after we would have one of these. And, she had taken a note with herself to our parents saying that, “Paul, today, had a fight with me and we’re like to see rectification of this and punishment.” And, that’s what they meant. “Or, get him in line with going to school with the other children.” Now, the fact was that my step-sister would always tear up the note. It never got home.

But, there, they knew all what had gone on and so, they’d be in touch with the teacher. And, these things would rectify themselves. Now, to tell you the truth, a really funny thing occurred many years afterwards and the follow-up of that. Because Mrs. Hill who was then the principal of the school and always sent me home with my step-sister Katie, met Katie one day on the streets. And, they said, Mrs. Hill said to her, “You know, I thought that Paul was the meanest child that I had ever seen in my life until I had my grandson come to school. And, she says, “Now, Paul is laid in the shade.” So, I suppose I held the record for many years.

But, the funny thing about going to school is a fact that I had a dog in those years and they called him Ringo. And, how I got the name Ringo for this dog was really funny because it went back in a time when they were having, and this was a child now mind you, and I knew about these things that people never thought about. During the 1880s, there was a great cattle war that went on in New Mexico between two factions And, they had Billy the Kid on one side and Johnny Ringo on the other side. And,  Johnny Ringo was one of these fellows who were all bluff and he never wanted to get meet up with Billy the Kid. But, he was always talking and always showing off and this was what I knew about him. And, this is the way that my dog was. No, my dog was always a big bark and, you know, when somebody got after him with a stick he would run and I called him Ringo.

So, they never could understand where I got the name for this dog. But Ringo went to school with me the first time I went to school and Ringo stayed with me. I wasn’t going to go into the classroom unless Ringo was with me. So, they let Ringo sit in the back and, you know, he was a very good dog and the only problem they had with him was thumping his tail. It would make a lot of noise in thumping that tail. But, otherwise, he always graduated when I graduated and he got an A’s in conduct. They gave him a report card, which I took home with me. And, he’d always have on there, A’s for conduct. See? So, you know, these are things that children remember and adults remember when they get into that age because animals are a great thing to them. They mean a great deal to them.

It isn’t the fact, that we grow up, that we’re much different from what we were when we’re children. Because, today, Gail has as much trouble with me as I think my stepmother did because she has to come in occasionally and pick up the socks and say, “Whew! How long have you worn these?” She knows a week. See? She takes them out and that’s the way we are when we’re children. We wouldn’t change clothes. If we had to, we wouldn’t take baths or anything else except maybe the old swimming hole or the swimming pool. And, I think that every child, in growing up, feels to the extent that he is the individual who is going to grow up and change the world. And, I dislike seeing this sort of thing in the child resolved. Or, that society, when he goes to school, the society pushes on their ideas. The social order says this is the way you have to be in this and the way that you had to fit in.

There’s a very interesting thing if you didn’t know this, but most of youth changed world orders. Of course, back in the ancient days, a man was considered to be, at 14, he could go out and he could enter the army or he could do, he could be, he could even be king. And think, that at the time when in the Middle Ages, many a woman was married at the age of nine or ten.

I think King John, who was supposed to be the very terrible King of England who tried to defeat Richard the Lion-Hearted, married a woman at the age of nine as a woman. Because, they were considered women at that time. But now, the person, without us knowing this, is or thinking about it, they’re given an opportunity to grow up and to become individuals who know their own will and can have a choice in life of who they want to marry. Now, in India, when the child is five, six or seven, the neighbors may get together, and even today this exists, and have a marriage contract drawn up at that age. And, when they’re maybe 12, or something of that age, they’re married which does not give them any choice in their life. But now, the child grows up. He goes into high school. He goes through that. He gets to 17 or 18. He may be married that age or he may go into college and finish college. And, some go into careers and even into their 30s before they’re married. But, now we have, despite the fact that we do not think we have such freedoms, we have a freedom to do these things.

And, we didn’t, in those days, because life was short. Back in my time when I was a child, the father accepted the boy at 12 and began to train him for livelihood, for the upkeep of the family. And, the girl would under the mother’s care to learn the domestic side of life. And, it wasn’t very far back in times before that in which that the family’s business, everyone grew up in the family business, they stayed in the family business. For example, in Italy, in the times I’m talking about, if the husband had the business of, say the dyeing of materials or yard goods, he was in the business and his whole family was in it. And, when they brought anyone in from the outside, as a husband or a wife to the younger, he was to learn the business.

And, this went down from generation, into generation, into generation, into generation. For, when I was a child and the first time I went to England, I saw people wearing the grandfather’s clothes because, in those days, they made clothes that last. And, he may. they may. wear the hat, wear the altered suit. They may wear something of that nature on down from generation to generation.  I think I got into that because every time I got anything for myself, I always got my step-brother’s suit. They altered it until, finally, I got to the age and says, ”No more. I’m going to have new clothes or no clothes at all and they thought that was terrible.” Because here’s this son rebelling against something which was an economic thing in the family. And, it was an economic thing in the family in those days because they didn’t have the money today.

Now, you know, there is a fact that there that I had all sorts of pets, all you can name, any kind of a pet that I didn’t have, from a snake named John, up to a burro. But, we had this silly cat that we had in the family called a Jaydo, And I took Jaydo when some riverboat captain gave her to me. And, Jaydo was all right, was contented, as long as if I fed her and I pampered her and just like children would be. But, when the minute that I would go over to one of the others, the duck or one of the other pets or the billy goat that we had, she didn’t like it. And, she had a funny lip on her and she could whistle some way when she was. Instead of doing her little meow, she would make this noise and it sounded like a whistle. And, we would always say she was whistling Dixie, but she was a great traveler. And she loved boats.

And, one time she got awfully tired of living with me and she got out some way. And, we figured what she did, she got on a steamboat that came into the wharf and traveled down to New Orleans and got on a ship. And, the next thing we heard from her, maybe a year or two later, that her nine lives had run out. And, she died on the way to South Africa, but she would often take trips when she was living on that waterfront, so they told me down in New Orleans, and get on a ship and go out and come back. And, this is unusual because the people or those who sail ships, especially in those days, didn’t like animals on board. They were very superstitious of them. And, even in World War II, somebody brought a dog aboard ship to take out with us in the Pacific. And, what happened to him, the captain told him to destroy the dog, though he had practically a rebellion on hands. But, they got rid of the dog.

And, this is a really interesting thing because the animal is a good luck piece and not a bad luck piece. Now, where they ever developed that idea in service, I don’t know. It probably came from way back there in some place where, maybe, they had storms. And, they thought the animals were where they created the storms from and they threw them overboard. And then, perhaps, a storm abided and they were all right and they said, “Well, they create evil and bad luck on board ship.”

But, I think that every child like yourself, because you are the young old people, should have an interest within this area. For it is a natural thing to have something to create a vacuum where the loneliness between the adult and the young will never close that gap. Between the older people and the younger people, is a gap that will always be there because they can’t touch one another. And, the only way to touch one another and you find, yourself, that when you are wanting love, that is not there. No matter how much that the mother or the father will try to express to you, it isn’t there. But, you having an animal, it seems to be there. And, no matter whether you had a toad or whether you had anything at all, this is something which comes about to have a love for. And, this is the biggest difference, being loved and having a love for. Because I’ve often thought and it seemed to me back in those days when I was so high as a tiny tot, my goodness. I look up at these six-footers and everything. That was a big world. These people were giants. And, therefore, we have to have something that we can love instead of that big jolly giant up there that seems to be pouring love out on us, but for some reason or other, it never touches.

And, this is one of the things which I have often thought about because, when I grew up, I thought there was never a woman in the world who had less love and less regard and less feeling for a child than my stepmother. And, I just, literally, didn’t like her. And, after I grew up and got of age and looked back, then I could say, “Well, after all, the child was forced on the woman. And, she did what she normally felt in doing, in giving me clothes, home, education, moral training and all of that, and what more could she do? That was a form of love.” But, of course, that’s not the type of love that a child thinks about. And, this is why that we, at our age, as you see now, you must look upon the world as something that belongs to you and you giving your love to it.

I say that about the only thing I can tell you is to love one another. I know this is awfully hard to do at this age because, at the child’s age, no matter how much that the sociologist tells us that we have to train the children into great love, there is always a stage of violence that are of tempers and everything that a child goes through. These are stages. He goes through all the primitive stages until he gets up to the stage of about 12 to 14 in which he, himself, begins then to think of life as being something civilized and he must either fit into the society or become a rebel. He instinctively knows this.

But, I feel very much for those, in that age, because I knew the type of things in which it went through my life, because I was constantly, always, embarrassing my step-parents, as the time when I picked up the child and I threw him through an open glass window or I threw him through a glass window. See? I was about the age of six or seven at the time and it wasn’t anything to me because he had done something to me that I didn’t feel right. But, on the other hand, our feelings at this age are definitely sharp. Much sharper than they are when we become older because, then, we can see the repercussions. We can see, if we do things of this nature, then we start a chain of action which may end somewhere way out here, far away, that we don’t think about. See? But, here, the actions are clean cut and sharp. If we don’t like it, we show it, when we make no bones about this.

I was thinking the other day. There was a bull snake that crawled into our yard, the first time I’d seen one in about 15 years of the snake. I took a broom out and whacked him three or four times and he got out of the yard and into the back. And,  I got thinking about this. Now, here, was something which things happen to us every day. We start out to do, we start out to go even to the mailbox or something else. All of a sudden, here, an action starts. See? I think about this poor innocent thing. It crawled out there and into the yard, thinking he was going to find some goodies in some of these insects and everything. And, what happens here, is this big bully gets out a broom to him. See? And, he gets all injured and bruised and he’ll probably be several days lying out there under the leaves, recovering from that. But, this is true of it, all of us. See?

When we start out to do something at the beginning of the day, things happen. When I, only a suggestion to say is, let them happen. And. don’t fight them. And, let them go. But, the unexpected in life is something that we’ll always have to have, no matter what/ If we are at the age of five or we’re at the age of 65.

I remember an old Banker when I was a child. This fellow used to walk six to seven miles to his work, to his office. And, about 30 years before that, the doctors told him he wasn’t going to live for six months and he went off very depressed, very unhappy. About this the point, he lived and the doctor didn’t and this old man had come tromping out of his office. He must have been in his 60s, then, and four or five o’clock, he’d go out and he’d walk all the way home. He didn’t have to do all that. You get in an automobile or buggies or horseback or anything. He wanted to see but this is a fact of life that we don’t believe when people say that things are going to happen to us. We have to be the fact that we know. We know what we want in life and we have to hold to that goal, no matter how many of the bumps are up and down to that particular point. And, if we don’t get to that point, at that time, without being diverted off to someplace else, then we have missed the whole goal. And, believe me, when one sets out to make ECK his goal and trying to get God-realization, he’s going to be bumped up and down quite a bit.

So, he has to think, then, that the Masters who are giving him help and giving him love and giving him everything that he particularly needs, withholding some time, giving, forcing through and experiences the answer. Remember, this is all being done for his own good.

And, he has to know that the Master is with him. He has to know that the Master gives him this great love. He has to know that this is the one thing that he can depend upon all throughout his life. No matter where he is, what happens, how the things are going to be in his life, that is a Master whose love is being given him at all times and the Master is with him at all times. The Master is close as his heartbeat. The Master is close as his breathing. As long as it is he doesn’t forget this, then he, himself, is on the path and nothing can harm him. May blessings be.