All energies of life have in them a possibility of an excess, of going too far. When you bring up your children, when you tell your children your various far-out ideas and the children suddenly believe in them.

‘I’m horrified! Oh, my god, what will they do next?’

But everybody feels that way in regard to the strength of the younger generation that is coming on. Cause this younger generation is …

… when we think about young people, we have terrible ideas. We think that we know what life is, and that they have to be told, and that they will learn it from us, and be like us.

We don’t take that attitude when we see the vegetables come up in the spring.

We don’t say that the vegetables have to be educated to be vegetables; we say ‘Hooray! at last, young vegetables, with all the life and energy in them.’So when we see young people come up, we should say ‘Good gracious! Isn’t this great to see that the human race is still doing its stuff. I wonder what they will have to teach us.’

Because wisdom doesn’t come from above down, it comes from below up. That’s the way that wisdom is surging …

… the old people, they have a function, but in order to fulfill that function they have to understand first that they can learn from the young sources. If they understand that, then they can be wise and be teachers. If they don’t understand that, then they can’t. To be wise, you have to become again as a child. From the child’s point of view, things which the adult considers irrelevant to survival, are perfectly important.

So children collect pebbles and colored glass and all sorts of trivia which they consider as precious as diamonds.

Now the child doesn’t know how to play the adults game, which is a power game, and has to be educated to learn the values of the power game to learn what’s what and what is important. But when he’s mastered that game, he realizes it has no rewards.

All the things that the adults thought they were gaining from their power game are after all, not worth having. That’s why you can be rich and miserable.

So, having learned and seeing through the adult power game, we come back to the point of the child.