Forgiving our Parents

Now is a good time for us to forgive our parents, and to accept personal responsibility for our own lives.  Regardless of what our parents taught us, we now have the responsibility to teach ourselves.

Many of us don't know how to teach ourselves without relying on what we have been taught by others. So we begin our re-education by searching feverishly in our childhoods for reasons to blame our parents for not being good parents.

Conversely, some of us search for reasons to praise them for their parenting skills. Nevertheless, either way, blame or praise, we are limiting ourselves to judgments about our parents'  beliefs and values. 

Our challenges lie in the development of our egos, our self-awareness of being a separate individual, which we attribute to our parents. Unfortunately, we ignore our role in developing our own minds, which causes us to believe someone else developed them for us.

The most obvious people to blame for this development are our parents. We believe their whippings, beatings in many instances, are responsible for our success.

For example, if they hadn't whipped us, then we wouldn't have become the fully developed individuals we are now, and we might have become casualties of the street life.

Similarly, some of us blame them for our shortcomings, particularly those of us who have not successfully assimilated into the mainstream. We are the ones struggling with ourselves to understand why our parents neglected us by leaving us with babysitters, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and others.

Moreover, we don't understand how to translate our parents' excessive partying, drinking, using drugs, and sexual exploits of bringing too many daddies into our lives for us to even remember their names. Surely, we opine to ourselves, this had a profound affect on us.


As we go deeper into the blame-game, some of us want our parents to mirror the illusory parents we see in movies and television programs. And when we believe they don't measure up to the illusions, we create our own illusions for them to exist in a manner that makes sense to us

In our illusions, we want them to be greater than what they believe is possible for them to achieve. Unfortunately, unbeknown to us, our parents created their own illusions to define themselves.

While we can assume that their illusions did not empower them as parents in the same manner as those in movies, we don't know because we never asked them. We judged them by our own illusory beliefs and values.


Moreover, in our illusions, we place them on psychological and emotional pedestals. We even create scenes in our minds for them to find success in low-pay, unskilled, and dead-end jobs. And we absolve them of the responsibility for creating their own suffering by blaming others for it.


The more we cling to our illusions about our parents' suffering, the angrier we become toward the people we believe are responsible for it. This anger distorts our clarity to understand that our parents had the powers in their minds to make different choices about how they chose to live.


Meanwhile, like most things in self-discovery, it's difficult to examine our parents' actions without  adding colorful anecdotes to make them exist as we desire to see them. And like ourselves, it's difficult to admit that, in most instances, our parents, and us, too, could have done better with using the powers in our minds.

While some of us may find it difficult to believe, but our parents chose to live the way they lived.  And there's no right and wrong judgment about how they chose to live. We don't have the clarity of mind to judge them without relying on illusory beliefs and values.

Nevertheless, with all their perceived shortcomings, they are still our parents. And when we commit to going  deeper into our minds, we free ourselves of the right and wrong judgments about them. This is the freedom of forgiveness.

We must never forget that all power is in our minds. When we discover this wonderful truth, we also discover the power of forgiveness. This forgiveness, unlike what we have been taught by others, comes from our unconditioned consciousness or inner mind power. 

At this level of awareness, forgiveness begins with ourselves and expresses itself in others. We are able to perceive ourselves and others with our toxic distortions.

Now we are able to perceive our parents with clearer vision. We are thankful to our parents for not killing or maiming us as children. We are also be thankful for all the little things: love, compassion, hugs, chastisement, fixing our lunches, taking us to school on the first day, motivating us through our doubts, and tucking us in bed at night.

There are so many things our parents gave us, even those parents who were victimized by anger, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, illiteracy, menial jobs, and lack of visible ambition to succeed in the world. They gave us examples, which we can  choose to follow or choose another path.

All powers are in our minds.
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Overcoming Intense Feelings of Anger

Some of us are so angry that we have become time-bombs of self-destruction. Our anger has become so intense that it's difficult for us to control.

We begin our days with anger and end them the same way. And during our waking hours, we focus our anger on people we don't know anything about, except from their images on our television or computer.

It's important for us to remember that while anger is treatable, it is also a deadly disease of the mind. And like other deadly diseases, if we leave them untreated, then we have to be prepared for their deadly consequences.

Similarly, we cannot ever forget that anger is a psychological disease transmitted to us by our parents, society, and our life experiences. It begins with the development of our ego or individual awareness of being an individual.

 Moreover, as individuals we seek to protect our uniqueness by fighting others who challenge our beliefs and values.

We protect our anger by protecting our beliefs and values, which are responsible for our anger. And in doing so, we insulate our minds with toxic distortions about ourselves and others.

After awhile, and after years of playing mind games with ourselves, we become numb to our actions.

Unfortunately, some of us believe we're too civilized or spiritually awakened to become killers. And  when our lives explode in fits of anger and rage toward others, we misinterpret this behavior as an anomaly.


Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, if you place us in certain situations where we have to protect our children, loved ones, and ourselves, then our moral perspective on killing becomes different.

Furthermore, if we are placed in positions for our anger to explode in murderous force, we would undoubtedly not hesitate to use deadly force against a car-jacker, robber, or even purse snatcher. While we are taught to control our anger, most of us are not very good at it.



For some of us, anger is just another form of victimization to rationalize our feelings of powerlessness. So the shock some of us feel over the rampant murders in Philadelphia, Chicago, and other cities represent many of our own fears about killing another person. 

Nevertheless, for those who are fighting to control our own anger, we just want others to stop killing people for apparently no reason. 

We assume that since they live in the same country, and were taught similar beliefs and values to our own, they should know it's sinful or amoral to kill people without some fears of losing their own lives or the lives of their loved ones.

The problem we face is that the individuals who are murdering people senseless, at least according to our beliefs and values, are operating from beliefs and values that are diametrically opposed to our own.

In other words, they might believe it's okay to kill someone who has challenged their beliefs and values about respect, love, and social order

We cannot stop the killings by wishing them away. Nor can we stop them by incarcerations. They can only be stopped by those who are willing to do the work to remove the toxic beliefs from their minds.

This means that those of us who have worked on our minds to the level where we can control our anger enough not to kill someone over petty disagreements about drugs, respect, and social order, we must begin the process to develop new beliefs and values.


When we can teach others that our anger comes from the development of our egos, then our conversations, our efforts, and our perspectives on anger are  transformed. This means we have reached the point where others are willing to listen.


Now we are ready to develop effective neighborhood organizations and groups to teach children and wayward adults enlightenment beliefs and values.


Whenever we spend too much time judging others without understanding ourselves, we neglect the work we must do on our own minds.

Our minds are the source of our anger, and also the source of our liberation from it.

Searching for Power in our Minds

It's never too late to trust ourselves. Even after lifetimes of searching for power in things -- money, people, fame, places, and so on -- we can remain confident that the real power is in our minds.

This power, our unconditioned consciousness -- that part of our mind that remains free of human illusions -- is what connects us to our Creator. Some of us distrust our unconditioned consciousness, because we don't understand how it works,

Nevertheless, it's our unconditioned consciousness, sometimes referred to as intuitive consciousness or inner-power, that allows us to free ourselves from the illusions that are ruling the world. This consciousness exists as just being. It doesn't have to be anything. Yet it can become anything it imagines itself to be.

Throughout human history, we have been taught by the great ones that "The Kingdom of Heaven is within."  Or that to end suffering, we must accept personal responsibility for it, and to clear our minds so that we are able to perceive life without distortions or illusions.

The greatest barrier to clarity or spiritual awakening is found in our beliefs and values. We draw our psychological and emotional sustenance from the beliefs and values taught to us by our parents, society, and confirmed by our illusions.

When we embody confusing beliefs and values honed from centuries of illusory teachings, we lose our connection to the unconditioned consciousness in our minds. And the more we believe in things -- money, people, fame, places, and so on, the greater our struggles become with the illusions.


Similarly, it's important for us to know this world and its illusions cannot provide us with the clarity we seek. It can only provide us with what it has to give to us, which are the illusions it has created for us.

We must remember that the illusions exist to remind us that there is no power, except that which comes from the illusions. Everything we know about ourselves and the outside world came from them. This includes, education, language, religion, ethics, and so forth.

Some of the great teachers of the past taught us to accept that we were "born into a world of sin or suffering." Today, some of us know and accept this as an universal truth. We know we must find the clarity to perceive ourselves with power and remove the prism of distortions causing us to believe the illusions are the only possible reality

Meanwhile, the teachings of the enlightened ones remain plain and simple: the power we seek is within our minds. Some of us make their teachings complicated or out of reach by coloring them with our own beliefs and values.

We must remember that the power they used thousands of years ago is also available and present in our minds today. And contrary to what the illusions tell us, this power is in all of our minds. It is not limited to the few people defined by the illusions.

So as we search for our inner-power, we must also remember that The Creator is not bound by human illusions nor by our interpretations of who can receive this power. We are the ones limiting ourselves by embodying beliefs and values that define us as less than others.

When we gain the confidence in ourselves that is sufficient enough to understand the illusions we believe in, we will know that unconditioned consciousness is not controlled by the illusions, nor by the beliefs and values we hold as sacrosanct.

Unfortunately, too many of us believe we must look to others for our enlightenment. We worship other people and elevate them above ourselves without ever asking ourselves: Who are we? We forget that discrimination is a human illusion.

Similarly, it's our forgetfulness that causes us to play mind games with the illusions. We worship them by denigrating ourselves. In other words, we mitigate the great power in our minds so that we can pretend to be helpless and powerless.

There are no rewards for those of us who allow our minds to be conquered by the illusions of this world. The rewards are for those who are able to conquer the illusions. And to do this we must lose ourselves (beliefs and values) to find ourselves (enlightenment, without the illusions.)

Each one of us has the potential to express this power, if we stop searching for it in things outside of ourselves. The enlightenment we seek is found in our own minds.

Keeping Our Power

Today is a good time for us to remember that we have great powers. With so much uncertainty about our well-being being discussed by the media, it seems that too many of us have forgotten who we really are.

As we live with the financial meltdown of home foreclosures, rising unemployment, and burgeoning debts, it's easy for some of us to slip into a psychological coma of self-denigration. And before long, we begin to believe we are powerless, helpless, and unable to live our lives without calamities befalling us at inopportune moments.


Many of us doubt ourselves because we have been taught to denigrate ourselves. We have become victims of our own toxic beliefs and values. And it's from this confusion that our beliefs in powerleness originate. 

Nevertheless, whenever we believe we are powerless, we are in that moment actually powerless. We are powerless because we have abdicated our mind power to the illusions of the world.

Yes, over time, we gave our power away.  And until we achieve the clarity of mind to become aware of what we've done, we will continue to give our powers to the illusions in exchange for hope. 

Power is a form of imagination or visualization.  It's invisible, unborn, and nothing until it empowers itself to become aware of being something. And fortunately for us, we can become aware of being anything we dare imagine ourselves being.

Similarly, in it's purest form, our power always remain with us. It's always available for our use to empower ourselves to express whatever we are aware of being. For example, if we are aware of being poor, we express our awareness of poverty effortlessly.

Meanwhile, some of us express our awareness of being in ways that we believe do not represent or reflect our true awareness. Yet whatever we are expressing in our lives now is identical to the images we have created of ourselves.

Sometimes we forget that we are actually the way we are acting. It's difficult to believe we created the nightmares in our lives. So we attempt to place the blame on others.

In other words, someone other than us is responsible for the debts, addictions, anger, suffering, failure, unemployment, home foreclosure, unhealthy foods, and so forth. And after we create these illusory things in our lives, we find them so unreal, so out of character, for us to do this to ourselves.

It's unfortunate, but most of us create undesirable results in our lives all the time. This is particularly true when we abdicate our powers to the beliefs and values produced by the illusions. And all of this confusion is caused primarily by our social and spiritual disquietude about the existence of our inner power.

Nevertheless, whether we are aware or not of the powers in our minds, we are the beneficiaries of  enlightenment. This means it's our God-given right to possess and use this power and not seek permission from others to do so.

So as the world reels from uncertainty, we must remember that the great powers in our minds are capable of creating new languages, discovering cures for pernicious diseases, and enlightening our minds to see ourselves without the distortions concealing our true identities.