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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