What Your Parents Did

Anger toward a parent is how the seed is sown. It is the moment of the initial invasion and no one, not a single human being who has ever lived, will live, or who lives today can avoid it (with two historical exceptions) Nor can any of us live peacefully until we forgive our parents.

First Dad, then Mom - in that order. Each time the thought of what they did, how they did it and what happened, as a result, arises it should elicit an opportunity to love and not judge.

When memories – even those going back decades provoke the temptation to become upset are not met with neutrality, then bitterness rises and gets stuffed.

You can never know love for another human being while suppressing anger that way – and parents don’t even have to be present or alive for those memories to deliver rancor.

The memories of dead parents destroy children who hate them from the grave.

But if we forgive, not hate, them on the spot, no matter what they did – as many times as the temptation to become bitter arises – 1,000 times day for a lifetime if necessary, we can expect to have a long, and healthy life.

That’s because once we’ve learned to live without embracing anger, we cease feeding a despicable Self, the hate-energy It needs to grow and satisfy It's insatiable appetite for judgment and playing God. It starves. Self reduces. We come under God’s will instead of Self-will.

The temptation to hate parents, even though we may hold fond memories for them, never ceases. And we are always to be on guard – in other words, awake and conscious – or else we are doomed.

If you cannot forgive, meaning stop resenting, your parents, you will never be able to stop hating others either. God does not enter. And that means a life unnecessarily overwrought with sorrows and pain.