An Essay A Day For A Year
By Roe
Day 58, February 27, 2012
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There is a lot of hype in the parenting world about wanting our children to be “good”. I suppose wanting our children to be good is the opposite of wanting our children to be “bad”. If I had a black and white choice, I would choose a good child over a bad child. I would never have to make that choice, since there is no such thing as good or bad children, only good or bad parenting. We all have an inherent belief system that we carry in our own hearts and minds that we are born faulty, born unruly, and born in need of teaching and control. We learn this from our own parents, who learned it from their own parents, and so on, and so on. Great, great grandma and grandpa were made to feel impure and unworthy by their parents and their harmful religion, and taught to believe in an outside force, from parents to government to God, to purify their imperfection.
We are born and raised and spoon fed our defects and need for guidance and control since birth, and the religion that we believe in creates our belief in our badness, and therefore our need to believe in religion to give us meaning and hope for goodness. Everything in our lives relates to our servitude to our fallibility, and the need to reach out for the hope of redeeming ourselves with the belief in something outside of ourselves. In English we say that our children are raised or reared. In truth chickens, goats, cows, and pigs are raised and reared. Human children are guided and mentored. We are treated as goats and pigs as children, we have little value except to accept the values of our raisers and rearers, lest we return to our sinfulness for lack of teaching and molding. This is the largest tragedy inherent in all civilization, that we don’t believe in or trust our children, who grow up to be us, who have a lack of belief in and trust in ourselves. We are taught to believe that the God or belief or practice out there is going to help us or guide us, or save us.
The secret truth that you still know in your heart is that you are perfect. You were perfect when you were conceived, perfect in your mother’s womb, perfect at birth, and no matter what you have done in your life, at this moment you are still perfect. The children who have elected you to be their guides and mentors are perfect. They are not your children, they are their own children. These children that came into your home were perfect when they were conceived, they were perfect at birth, and they are still perfect at this very moment, no matter what they have done, good or bad. There is no such thing as a bad child, or a bad person. We have all been sold at auction into the slavery of our parents, our government, and our God. If we stop serving them, we feel unworthy of being just who we are.
We are all nouns, we are persons, places, or things. “You are a bad chair!” “You are a sinful tree!” These are ridiculous statements. “You are a bad child!” “You are a sinful person!” These are equally ridiculous statements, unless of course you believe them. When I witness people vehemently defending their inherent impurity and need to go outside of themselves for their own purification, I imagine a slave kissing the whip that is covered in his own blood, and justifying the need for more. I want to ask the poor child, “who taught you to believe that you are bad?” I want to ask all of us poor slaves, “who taught us to lose faith in ourselves?”
Our actions are our verbs. Verbs are action words. “You pinched me you chair!” “You fell on my head you tree!” Now that is fair and valid, and that makes sense. A chair that pinches you is not a bad chair, and a chair cannot be made responsible for its goodness or badness, it is just a chair. It is still an awesome and wonderful chair despite the pinch. A tree that falls on your head is just a falling tree, and even if our head hurts, it is not the tree’s fault. The tree will now save your life and keep you warm all through the cold winter, despite your headache. It is just a tree. The goodness and badness is just your belief system. When you pinch me, I say, “Ouch, that hurts!” What you did can be considered bad, but you can never be considered bad. When the beautiful child that chose me to be its parent hits me over the head with a stick, I say, “Ouch, that hurts! That is a bad action to do to your guide!” There is no way for the child to be bad, even if we believe that his or her action is bad.
This perspective shift is fundamental, but just agreeing with it or believing it does not take away that we don’t love ourselves, or trust ourselves, or believe ourselves to be good and perfect no matter what we do. We of course reach out to God or belief or action outside of self to assure ourselves that we are loved and good, and our acts beyond and outside of ourselves reassure us that we are not perfect or good unless we believe or act. We are in willing slavery to the servitude that purchased and raised and reared us, and wearing rose colored glasses we hope for love and acceptance and forgiveness from a source that usurped our own self love self acceptance, and self forgiveness, and everything remains rose colored.
For us to return to the heart of a child that knows and believes them self to be loved and prefect inherently, we would need to grieve and embrace therapy for as many years as we have been serving as faulty people, kissing the whip of servitude to our parents and society and religion. Our family’s and society’s biggest hope is to guide and mentor our children as best we can to believe in themselves as beautiful, perfect people, who at worst might engage in bad acts. We must shelter our children from our own slavery and servitude to our own parents, and to our government, and most of all to our own belief in God or religion. Our two thousand year old, archaic, mythological religions maintain us all in slavery to “other”, and to the need to seek something that ironically we were born with. A child left to find their own belief system without manipulation or coercion or molding will trust in the inherent goodness of self, long before we can heal or cure our lack of our own belief in self at the hand of God or religion.
There is no such thing as a bad person or child, and you have never been bad in soul and heart for a second since you were conceived. But you may have done bad things. Bad parenting is the verb of a good person doing bad things, and a child that acts bad is the result of a parent that acts badly. “Me” as good, who “does” unfortunate things, is still “good me”. Every criminal and criminal act, every aggression and every war, is fueled by the investment in bad as self, and the perverse demonstration of badness as self, both by the perpetrator and victim. This can be lived out on a personal scale or patriotic countrywide scale. We can take the gasoline off of the fire of our own loss of self and trust in self, and that of our fellow wounded ones in our world, that harness their badness for our belief in their and our own inherent badness. We can do this by accepting ourselves and others as good.
We are good and our children are good, and we don’t need any help from outside of us to be return to good, we and our children are already good. As for our acts that could be bad, we all need help from other good people who have done good and bad things, we need guides and mentors. We do not need to be raised or reared anymore. We do not need to be whipped anymore. And we do not need to kiss our parent’s or our government’s, or our god’s whip anymore. Let’s just say we are good. Let’s just call it good.
See you tomorrow.
yourpersonalmuse@gmx.com
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