It all begins with the parents.
How to bring forth a noble child?

Prosad again interferes as he does often and Ma-Mahajnan has had no problem even being in a state of Trance.—No, it is the canal-water which can be trained to follow a course. What happens in the case of a mountain torrent? The idea of building an embankment is a farce.

Ma-Mahajnan: No, why do you say like that? It starts from the very beginning. It’ll be of little avail, if you make such a late start. It all begins with the parents. They come first. Once you are aware of this fact, you’ve to exercise your judgment from the very beginning of conception. So you have to. Why? How to bring forth a noble child? Next, how to bring it up and on what lines? There lies, indeed, the duty of the parents, their charge.

That duty and that charge they have cast into the ditch. Strangely, the ideal is no more than a word with them. In fact they follow the beaten track like a herd of sheep.—“Haven’t I got to eat, dress, rest and sleep? How can I take time off to bring up a child in that way?” They don’t care to do that. They can’t. They won’t. But if one brings up one’s child on the right lines, it doesn’t prove to be too taxing.

As you say, if you can manage to bring a child’s life under some sort of discipline—reduce it to a certain pattern, its heady passion and excitement of youth are a good deal curbed, they are kept away. At that time of life the blood heaves up like a tidal wave, but the embankment has been built in such a way that it holds back the tide washing up against it. Why so? Well, the embankment has been firmly built. But if it isn’t there, when a youth feels passion, it swamps the bank. He can no longer resist. The result is, if he comes to understand at all, it happens a good deal later. Huh, how brief is his remorse! He then says, what was to happen have happened. He was to act like that, so he has. What does it matter after all? But in the last hour, the cruel truth comes home. The last hour teaches the bitter lesson; it doesn’t pass without doing it. If one lives an orderly life, the last hour has no such lesson to teach.

If you don’t form the character from the very first, but try to form it getting maturity, how can it be at all possible! Form yourself in an ordinary way. If that is done, the extraordinary will come of it. The eternal will follow in the footstep of the extraordinary. There’s nothing to worry about. But if you turn your eyes towards the eternal all at once, what effect can it produce! That’s not wise at all. That’s a mistake.