Until we are enlightened we must not have children. We will hurt them and add more wounded people and pollution to an already stressed planet.
The unenlightened, which defines most of us, have children to avoid the most painful and important birth of all—the birth of our inner child who carries the seed of the true self.
We avoid giving birth to ourselves because it is too painful—and instead we procreate, giving birth to another. Birthing ourselves requires separation from our parents and ancestors and indicting them for traumatizing us and crushing our originality. To give birth to our true self, we must be honest about our parents and how they failed us. This healing task is too wrenching for most.
So instead most deny how their parents failed them, often saying they did the best they could. Then they quickly forgive them, secretly hoping to gain their love at last. Sadly, ancient wounds don’t go away by this ruse, and must instead go somewhere. Cruelly, people infect their children with their poison, because their children are the easiest, most convenient target. They use their children to carry the hope of their broken dreams and to receive the fury of their denied rage when the child turns out to be his own person and defies their wishes. They say, “How dare this child have needs that I should meet and honor when my needs were not recognized, respected, or fulfilled when I was a child?”
Our task in life is to generate more aware, healed souls, starting with ourselves, not to bring more troubled people into a crowded and crazy world. We do not have an inalienable right to have children, especially children we are unprepared to love as they need. We do not have a right to have and abuse children simply because we are sexually mature enough to reproduce. We do not have a right to create another generation of wounded children who will grow up to stress the planet with their presence and pollution.
Only the enlightened should have children. But even those rare conscious few in this troubled, polluted, and overpopulated world would be better to parent not a child but, once they have completed the journey of parenting themselves, to parent the troubled masses that need enlightened parents to love and guide them into a new way of being.