Shivkumar talks about the sanskaras and the importance of the first 2 years of life and how they impact the overall life
Did the ancients really know about it? What’s the, what’s the proof, if I might ask for it. Well, in the context of prenatal perinatal education, let’s take recourse to the fundamentals. One, that the most important period of a human being’s life is the golden period, it is pregnancy, infancy, and preconception periods.
Now, how does this translate into ancient wisdom? Now, if you look at a human being’s life. A human being’s life gets orchestrated around certain milestones as we call them or which are called sanskaras.
Sanskaras are typical milestones in life and what’s a milestone – it’s like a journey. If you’re going from saying Bangalore to Chennai, you’ll define the route and you’ll stop at certain places at certain crossings, you’ll either fill up the gas or take a wash or have a cup of tea, whatever it might be. Each milestone, there’s a certain thing that happens at that point in time.
Now, these are potent periods as well. So your life as a human being has orchestrated over 16 milestones called shodash sanskaras – the 16 sanskaras of life. So I have a full life of whatever, 60, 70, 80 years, which should get orchestrator over 16 sanskaras. But if you look at the construct of the sanskaras, let me start from the end.
The last of the sanskaras, the last two, actually the last part, one being marriage or vivah. Vivah is the 15th sanskara and the 16th one is the end of life, which is called as antyeshti, which is really at the time of death and post-death. So 15th and 16th are two, now I have got 14 left to be engaged with the course of life. 14 of them, out of the 14, nine of these sanskaras have to be done within the first two years of life.
Three, before you are born – garbhdana sanskara, punsavan sanskar, and simantonnayana – just typically in the seventh, seventh eight months. Now, if you look at three sanskaras before birth, six sanskaras immediately after birth definitely within the course of the first two years. What is it, if it’s not the golden period? It indeed is the golden period.
So they packaged as not as things that we need to chant and do, they have put it in your culture. They said that culturally live this life where you take care of these aspects and do these particular things that you need to be done for a child. And each one of them deserves a highly beneficial impact for the child because you’re working on the subconscious programming and after birth to whatever extent, a subconscious reprogramming as well.
So you’re getting into an arena, which is so potent by just engaging in a sanskara. So, therefore, the wisdom of the ancients was immense. So in the course of 80 years of life, the first two years took the maximum provenance because it was recognized how you can genetically engineer and re-engineer patterns so that the rest of your life becomes fruitful, that was the power of ancient wisdom.
