Roy Masters - From How To Survive Your Parents
Crime, delinquency and mental illness, although rooted in individual willfulness and ambition, are actually planted and nurtured by culture. This is precisely the reason why nations cannot solve any of their problems. The stubborn pride of man traditionally points at the symptoms of sickness (which are the result of corrupting cultural influences) and labels them the disease itself.
Traditionally, parents tend to blame their problem children rather than admit that the offspring are projections of their own troubled selves. Parental help is rejected by troubled children because parents are the root-cause of the problem, and their "help" only drives children deeper into a psychotic state.
Let’s get straight to the heart of the principal cause behind national and family strife: People become dehumanized through the very weaknesses which culture promotes, namely, national pride, sexual pride and the pride of ambition. The effect of ego-reinforcement which we derive from effort, from striving and pushing, actually reverses the positive effects we are trying to achieve. The harder one tries to " make it big" for oneself and family, the worse off everyone becomes.
Once we become infected with the spirit of pride and begin striving for superiority, we actually become inferior creatures of habit, responsive to motivators who literally consume our substance while glorying in both our successes and failures. The pain of our loss at the hands of a motivator compels us to become destructive, to apply degrading pressures to others, especially to our families.
Pride is very arrogant and defensive regarding its culturally implanted imperfections. This being the case, it follows that the error of your way is almost undetectable (to you, at least). The next time your beloved son comes high on something or other, notice how in his eyes you will seem to be the bad guy for observing his errant behavior. Not surprisingly, children have a special appreciation for their buddies who do not see their wrongs, just as you parents have your entourage of friends (fiends, really) who accept you as you are. You may see your children’s faults, and they may see yours, but you rarely see your own mistakes, because you are all too fixated on one another’s evils and too busy judging to discern your own faults.
Sensuality and an unreasoning psychology evolve out of the fall from grace to pride. Wherever you find pride, there too will you find many uncontrollable lusts, attended by a host of sympathetic, exploiting, friendly fiends, sucking and nourishing themselves on the dying by seeming to worship those contemptible weaknesses.
When we are lost in any successful appeal to our pride, we awaken amid a world of sensuality. If our self-consciousness does not become repentance, the condition worsens and terrible fears, anxieties and guilts develop.
Primitive desires are awakened by the tempter, who then accepts the degenerating creature-self as the real man. The reason for re-emphasizing this point is to impress upon you the fact that, in order to have authority to correct the evolving beast of pride in your children, you yourself must be in the process of outgrowing your own childish pride and sensuality. Failing that, your very presence tempts your children to misbehave. And when they fall to temptation, their vile ways tempt you to be even more self-righteous and judgmental.
Pride causes some people to try to compensate their secret shame, while others pridefully flaunt their shameful nature. Those who conceal their sins form the main body of pretentious social climbers and hypocritical achievers. Save for a minority of seekers and finders, humanity is made up of drop-outs, criminals and low-life degenerates.
You must realize that any imperfection of the ego (pride), no matter how nobly camouflaged, tempts others. The inherent wickedness of your pride, draped in false piety, is constantly tempting your children to become prideful, sensual animals just like you—animals who cover up and suppress their evolving desires, or animals who openly and "honestly" express their contempt and vileness. The latter, comparing themselves with your phoniness (as you compare yourself with their wickedness), see themselves as being more honest because of their lack of pretense about being the weirdos, perverts, crooks or degenerate animals you have made them.
The default of virtue, by its very nature, presents an irresistible tease which provokes others to become beasts or hypocrites just like you. You parents shape the destiny of your children in their formative years. You set them up for conflict and tragedy. Then the educational system adds it share of cruelty. Friends and lovers tempt, too. As we grow older and more degenerate, we fall into the clutches of medicine man and welfare workers who ensure our final demise. When society has finished all its deadly work, the scene is like a battleground strewn with the dead and the wounded, with field hospitals for alcoholics and battered wives, with hot lines for the suicidal, and with murderers, rapist, thieves and drug addicts lurking deep in the trenches. Madness and horror are rampant as far as the eye can see.
Where the appeal of the ego (or pressure or cruelty) finds its mark, death enters, preceded by dehumanizing spiritual, psychological and physical changes. We are never better off, or more superior, as we thought we would be when we fell for the lying promise inherent in every ego-appeal.
Teach, tempt or challenge any child to be prideful and you set the stage for his ultimate destruction. It takes about twenty years of hard work to destroy a child’s mind, and to succeed one must work steadily at it. That destructive handiwork starts the day a child comes into the world. Compulsive parents, lacking the redeeming quality of humility which would teach them to love, cannot rest until their murderous work is done and the only "rest" they find then is in the grave.
Through cruel, inhuman pressure, often disguised as loving concern for his well-being and success, the real spirit of a child is slaughtered, and something awakens which is unholy standing in the place of the holy—an inferior creature full of fear and guilt, dependent on its corrupters for lying reassurances and motivation, even when that motivation is hate. From this point on, the corrupted soul needs a corrupt external model to inspire ("out-spire," really) the growth of the newly-implanted identity. You and your conformist children have your culture, and your rebels have their counter-culture motivators.
When you see your children following the wrong crowd, realize that it is because your hypocrisy has excited in them a spirit of prideful rebellion. Your rebel offspring is on the outside what you are really like inside. Your child may not know it because he is trying so hard not to be like you but, like it or not, he is really a projection, a mirror image, of your secret life of failure and sin.
That evil, which you fail to see in yourself (but which you see in your kids), came by way of your parents’ failure and the failure of fathers ever since the fall of Adam to Eve and of Eve to the serpent of temptation. You are what motivates you. You have merely covered your evolving impieties with religiosity, hard work, medicine, drugs, alcohol, and with a whole smorgasbord of social pacifiers.
You might well ask, "How do I regain that original innocence?" The answer is that you cannot, unless you come to understand the mysteries of pride and deception. You must yearn to know the purpose for which you were created. Then, and only then, will you see the mystery of how pride ushers in your personal downfall, as well as the destruction of your family, of nations and of the world.
Those who fall to and are ruled by deception also learn to rule others through it. Most people are dependent upon deception in one form or another for everything are and everything they have. The conforming child will cling to the lying love of parental deception, while the rebel child will cling to scum (who have the same lying nature you can’t see in yourself) for their reassurances.
Rebels have their Fuhers, hypocrites have their presidents, and the intrigue between the rebels and the squares keeps hell on earth alive, evolving to power through the warring factions.
Developing a hard survival-shell is the way every ego protects implanted sin. As an extension of the wrong, the corrupted soul defends the indwelling sin against observation. We feel wrong when we are exposed, so we think that those who make us feel bad are cruel and unkind. Like criminals running from the law, we slink into the dark theater of our minds for the velvety companionship of shady friends.
Right there you have the reason why the ruling class of seducers and corrupters has so much going for it and why it is so easy for both underworld and overworld tyrants to create legions of loyal "patriots," drug addicts, criminals, perverts and revolutionaries. Your ruined children are drawn magnetically to various forms of corruption because they need cultural reinforcements for the pride which their parents have inculcated into them through mindless, cruel or neglectful ways.
In this vast social con-game, every egotist, as he is "taken," assumes the identity of his god, the taker. Then running from his shame, striving to feel more and more omnipotent, he learns to steal. Stealing may not be wrong to him, because it fills the ego-need to feel good, like God. It feels like he is only taking what rightfully belongs to him, the king! (For this, and for many other reasons of pride, the world admires takers more than givers.) The pattern is for the taken to become the taker, just as the person who has been bitten by the vampire himself. Every ego is infected and fascinated with the lie which makes him feel as good as God, and this need gets worse as it is gratified because the guilt increases.
To be "promoted" to the rank of a taker, "king wrong" and deceiver, one must first allow oneself to be taken (fall to temptation). That is why your child’s misguided ego does not mind being taken in by his wicked friends and phony gurus. As he surrenders himself, the victim earns the right (through sacrifice) to be fashioned in the likeness of the taker. A mysterious psychic change occurs in your child as he is corrupted—with each encounter, he becomes a little more like his source. If he surrenders himself completely, " unselfishly," (as kids do with friends and various cults), he receives an illusion of perfection as he becomes one with his "god." So it comes to pass that he learns to turn slavery into a glorious achievement; descending is seen as ascending to glory. It is his giving in to parental pressure to avoid arguments, his being rewarded for weakness with a brownie button of approval, that has set the stage for this sort of thing to happen.
From the moment your child is first taken in, he will give his all to his parasitical cult leader or lover. He will beg for alms in the streets, cheat his clients and customers and turn everything over to his bloodsucking mentor who rewards every weakness as a religious virtue. All sinners worship and identify with idols in order to become the object of worship themselves. (Careful, you enshrined mothers; your sons could become homosexual in this fashion.)
One moment your child can seem to be a decent, family-centered, home-loving kid; and the next, he is the enemy. All your efforts to reform him—your ultimatums, your pleading, your being kind one moment and cruel the next—only refuel his rebellion, making all the ego-reinforcing pleasures of sin more alluring.
Teach, tempt or challenge any child to be prideful and you set the stage for his ultimate destruction."
As long as your pride stands in the way, you can never correct children; that is an impossible feat. You can try being nice and try being mean, but nothing works. The absence of divine authority in you merely increases the pain of conflict in your children and whets their desire for the very things you forbid, hardening your rebel offspring and increasing their appetite for ego-soothing drugs, crime and degenerate, supportive friends. If I were the devil, one role in which you find me (other than extolling the pleasures of sin) is that if zealously pressuring and exhorting others to virtue. Some, sensing where I was coming from, would reject the values I was teaching, thinking that they were thereby rejecting the wickedness of hypocrisy. That is just one of the ways I would trick them into finally accepting evil as good. Between the blind acceptance and the resentful rejection of the phony "virtues" I would be holding up and cramming down their throats, they would become mine! You see, if they hypnotically accepted my flowery words of truth, they would be unconsciously accepting the malignant spirit behind those words. See how powerful evil is when draped in religious garb!
Love never pressures children toward anything. It is really your secret wickedness which causes you to apply pressure to your children, and that wicked nature is reflected in them, manifesting in either hypocrisy or bestiality—apparently opposite extremes. The classic parental panic syndrome does nothing but reinforce the particular problem that was first hatched by parental pressure. Your frustration literally feeds the wrong you have projected into your children, providing their resentful nature with the sweet nourishment of revenge. Anyone can derive this wicked kind of strength from someone else’s struggle to reform him. Children can also feed on your guilt based sympathy, taking advantage over and over again until you feel like disowning them or joining them for relief.
It is just possible that after struggling to change them, you may end up being changed by them. What else can you do but disown or accept your weird, wicked creations? Some parents actually chase after the perverts they have created all the way to hell. Their motive? To hold on to the false security of their love. Now it’s the parents’ turn to become the victims of a sub-culture lifestyle through their children’s domination. They become super reverent and fearful of their children and of a vile system which is even lower than the social order which spawned them as parents.
Then comes the holocaust.
Baby egos come into the world inherently vulnerable to pressure and suggestible to sin. Without the protection of a loving parent, they are at the mercy of the world. For God’s sake, don’t you be a corrupting influence to them, too.
It is the pain—the pain of sin at home in you –that compels you to make your children fail through pushing them to achieve. And they will be driven, just as you were, either to the failure of success of the outright failure of failure. Under this system, which is born of pride, you are just as damned if you don’t correct your children as if you do. You are helpless. You can only protect the very evils you are trying to correct, because what lives in you also wants to live through your children; you prepare the way for it through emotionalizing them. The pain of your own dying to others forces you to try to recoup your energy loss through baiting your child. The hell in you survives through someone else’s fall—such is the dog-eat-dog system under which we all live, making each other’s lives wretched until the day we die. You are no better than the tyrant you hate, but the excruciating pleasure of your unearthly preoccupation with each other blocks you from seeing the harm you are doing.
Surely you have seen that children derive pleasure from teasing and inflicting pain on other kids. Street creeps get the same sort of pleasure and relief from pain by beating old ladies’ heads in. Sad to say, most parents are on the same level; very few know the meaning of emotional maturity. They continue to enjoy that fiendish delight that comes through teasing and creating problems in their kids. (Children make especially good targets because they can’t fight back.) Many people can recall being degraded in some particular way as children, and then having the urge to do that same thing to someone else. The pain of your own suffering (at the hands of your cruel parents and others) drives you to seek the pleasure of having a victim of your very own. In your formative years, you were debilitated and drained of life through tease and challenge. When you become a parent, you find yourself seizing upon the opportunity to do the same thing. The moment a child is born, everyone begins systematically eating away at his guts. Continued...
ADDITIONAL CONTENT
Listen wherever you are to stress relieving meditations and life changing messages...
Browse hours of video content related to meditation, overcoming stress, and a wide variety of subjects we encounter as we search for God.