Nivedita, continued....

As the childishness of children is not always merely childishness, similarly all the codes and rituals of the mass of ordinary people are not simply born of ignorance, and therefore, entirely meaningless. They represent the efforts of ordinary folk to teach themselves, and these are the only avenues that are open to them. Nivedita’s motherly instinct made her view all such efforts by ordinary folk, as a child’s efforts to gain knowledge. She was extremely accepting of all such conventions. Disregarding what seemed as the crudeness and sloppiness of such methods, she saw in them the perennial instinct of human kind to teach itself.