Sacrifice is the key to joy. Those who are capable of sacrifice are very privileged because they have understood the meaning of life, they are ready to be fathers and mothers. Everyone knows that fathers, mothers and children exist, but very few people are capable of understanding all that is contained in this simple image of a family. The existence of father, mother and child can teach us something very important.

When someone is capable of sacrificing themself for others it means that they are mature and ready to become a father or mother. One who is incapable of sacrificing themself for others is still a child. On the physical plane they may have children of their own, but this is only an outward appearance, and heaven will not consider them a father or mother.

To be a father or mother is a very high ideal, and at the same time, it is not an ideal to remain a child. The true ideal is to become, first of all, a father or mother, and thereafter to become a child. Yes, because it is only if you become a fruit, that you can then become a seed: this is the way things are. But if you have not yet become a fruit, how can you possibly become a seed? You can’t. Seeds can only come after the fruit, and in order to bear fruit you have to be a father or mother: you have to be capable of impersonal, disinterested love.

The ideal, therefore, is to become a father or mother so as to be capable of bringing children into the world, and these ‘children’ are the sacrifices, the impersonal fruits of enlightened parents. Those who are incapable of sacrifice are incapable, also, of bringing children into the world because they are not yet mature.

A child reaches the stage of puberty when they are thirteen or fourteen. Puberty is a phase in the process during which a human being is transformed from an egotistical, personal being into a fully mature man or woman, capable of giving, of producing fruit, in other words, of making sacrifices.

Before the age of puberty, a child is like a sterile soil which needs to receive and absorb everything for itself. But once they have reached puberty they become capable of producing fruit, on both the physical and the psychic levels. This is why I say that if you don’t have that spring of clear water within you, that is, if your love is not pure and disinterested, you will shrivel and dry up; you will never produce a harvest; you will have neither flowers nor fruit; you will be a desert, a wilderness. And who wants to linger in a wilderness?
To be continued…

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
Izvor Book 219, Man’s Subtle Bodies and Centres
Chapter 1, Human Evolution