Proper Discipline

Roy Masters

Funny thing about people—if you leave them alone to be free, they take liberties; they become wild and ruthless. Then, when they force you to lay down the law in order that society may survive, you (the rule maker) become a despotic tyrant. This principle marks the beginning and the end of all relationships and of all cultures—it’s just a matter of time. The only variable is how much time it takes. 


You must seek the way that is truly FREE. Through God’s grace you must become as one who can never be ruled, simply because you don’t need law. You must become as one who cannot be seduced to rule. You must become one who can breed this marvelous quality of freedom in your family. For without grace, a person is led to the many lawless freedoms that eventually demand restraint, and the spirit that leads to all these false freedoms rises from the pit as reformer. Only one who is perfectly free has the authority to set others perfectly free from that prison system of law and lawlessness. 


Since the beginning, the oppressed have carried within them the natures of their oppressors. All cowards are bullies; strong before the weak, weak before the "strong". 


"The weak" in your case are your children. Before them, it is safe to be mighty. 


You carry into marriage the temptations of the past, with its "karma" of misery and suffering. The plan for the soul’s salvation is in the Light (where meditation brings you). The secret of the law of Light is patience. The soul living in the Light, never being intimidated and never intimidating, is saved. 


The patient soul does not respond, nor does it cause others to respond. Patience never fails, nor does it cause others to stumble. Not submitting, it not only cannot give up power, but it takes (wrong) power and authority away. All the valleys are raised and all the hills are lowered—all become equaled before the Light. 


Look now at the lifestyle you have inherited, and look ahead to what you are compelled to project (impatiently) to your offspring. Therefore have compassion upon your children; free them from this loathsome legacy of sin and death. 


Let me tell you more: your impatience is born of pride. It stimulates others to grow pridefully—first as psychotic subjects of their "creator", and later on as carriers; infectious, impatient, prideful perpetrators of the sin of pride. 


The authority to pass on the military chain gang of pride lies as much with the victim as with the cruel tyrant. Tyrants beget tyrants, and tyrants also produce slaves. Slaves create carbon copies of themselves as well as their own opposites. I tell you truly that a boy can really hate the mother who sees no wrong in him. When she caters to his ego, the child’s soul puffs up with the madness of conceit and takes advantage. Out of anger and fear of violence towards her, he can also suppress his emotions into submission—to become a slave appeasing a sweet Hitler. 


Therefore, just as you must not be impatient, neither should you appease impatience. Never appease your children, your wife or anyone. You would never feel the need to appease if you didn’t feel pressure. Less and less pressure is felt as you grow in patience and in grace, as you refrain from responding with resentment and pride. Through the medium of your impatience, pride projects through the medium of the victim’s resentment, setting up the system of slaves and tyrants. You carry the seed to become one or the other. 


Protect your children from tyrants who try to enslave them, and from the sticky-sweet ones who will spoil them rotten and then raise them up as private love-hate objects. 


Protect them against the patronizing mother—and from the patronizing father who has become a mother. 


Protect them against the violent, manly woman. 


Protect them against friends who look up to them and comfort them—and friends who humiliate them. 


Make no mechanical rules. Use your God-given wisdom and strength to keep them secure from the many subtle ego appeals, manipulations and pressures of the dog-eat-dog system of pride. Talk to them about what is happening around them. 


Subject them mostly to the cleaving edge of your love, the love that keeps them from being entangled with the world, the love that neutralizes pride because it is not proud. If you can keep them from the evil force with your good force, then they will one day experience your kind of freedom. 


The good force does nothing but cancel out the sick suggestions of the world, leaving your child free to realize the true path for himself. If any child is protected by such persistent love as this, the chances are he will eventually begin to choose the right way over the wrong, the way that never takes advantage, and of which no one can take advantage. 


If all men and women were to be free like this, we would have a world with no rulers and no followers—a world where suffering would no longer exist, and God’s unfolding plan and glory would everywhere be seen. Governments would be reduced to administrations of God’s Kingdom-on-earth as it is in Heaven. 


"Therefore, take hold of faith

and, with patience, love."


Love does not spank a small child simply because he "won’t mind" or because he is forever getting into everything. It is evil to condition a baby against danger with anger or fear. 


Constant vigilance is your parental duty. A lapse of consciousness (yapping on the telephone with a friend, for example) can leave your child to drown, to get run over by a car or the like. Your love is represented by awareness. Your awareness is your child’s protection until the day his own awareness begins gradually to take over. 


Children naturally take up a lot of your time, a big chunk of your life, but give it willingly and not grudgingly. Be careful not to resent those imagined restrictions on your "freedoms", or the demands on your time. Give the time demanded of you patiently, dutifully and unselfishly, and the good Lord will then extend His eternal time to you. Learn to be patient, observe, and so resolve your willfulness in favor of what is just. The naughty child in you, who never knew parental love, will grow to become a parent with love. 


Patience is the panacea for all human ills. Patience "teaches" good to others, just as impatience teaches violence. Patience awakens and raises the consciousness, just as impatience lowers the consciousness into dreams—and into slavery. 


Love never pushes children toward anything, whether potty-training or schooling. If you have to remind them ten thousand times to do such things as clean their teeth, then do so. Do everything patiently and persistently until they grow to see the value of any discipline for themselves. Surely you don’t want to develop robots or rebels, do you? Then don’t scream and holler, rant and rave, push and pressure, or otherwise set them up to answer to that sort of authority later on in life. Make them aware through being aware yourself—through patience. Responding with their own growing awareness, they will one day come to recognize their responsibility and take over your job. They will be newly respectful toward your vigilance and care. 


However, if you fail, if you push and pressure, they will rebel and, through pressure or neglect, grow wild and undisciplined—with obvious consequences. You will be troubled and constantly worried wherever they go, knowing deep down inside that they are not protected by the spirit of understanding which every human being ought to carry with him. You may live in fear that something bad will happen, and you will be tormented by fear. Your mind (you in them) may be with them wherever they go, but that sort of low-grade awareness cannot protect them, simply because you are not God. Your fear for them may be picked up and become translated into their own fear for themselves. Your children can become insecure, dependent on others for "protection" and, in the end, they will be victimized by those in whom they put their trust. 


You will experience your children’s pain, their suffering—even their failings—as your own. You put your failing spirit into them through pressure and life-long impatience (hatred). You have pain because your conscience pricks your pride into awakening regarding the failing of that kind of "protection"—but you resent it. You cannot hurt another without suffering what they suffer. Such a sin is as often one of omission as of commission. Failure to love hurts, and you feel the torments of your victim. Your failure to love anyone is your failure to save them—and to save yourself. 


You owe your child love, and one aspect of love is protection—protection from your own weakness or wickedness, through patience, and protection from the cruel, violent, seductive and impatient world. 


Protect your child even from your own parents if need be. Don’t allow your parents to lay on your kids what they did to you. If you have very stubborn, sick parents, the best thing to do is to get far away and live in a private world with your own little family. (Careful! Don’t be paranoid about this.) You may even have to protect your child against a mate—a weak, patronizing, or over-strict husband perhaps. For your child’s well-being, you may have to separate. But the biggest danger is that you, the defender of the faith, could be the psychotic parasite who is destroying your own child. You could hypnotically turn Truth around and, with a jaundiced eye, use it against the good soul who is trying to protect your child against you. (Beware! There are counterfeit meditators, just as there are counterfeit Christians.) 


Above all, watch out for the vile school system. Carefully monitor your child’s emotional state when he comes in from school. Make sure the child is not being pressured and degraded by an impatient teacher. The chances are that your child will be singled out for persecution and destruction if he is aware and naturally bright. Be strong with the principal and the teachers. Give fair warning to all teachers that you want your child exposed to information, but you don’t want knowledge shoved down his throat. Let the teachers know, in no uncertain terms, that you will daily shove yourdemands down their throats (so to speak) by your "obnoxious" presence, if they start their monkey business. Give them some of their own medicine. If "it’s right to pressure" your kids, then they shouldn’t mind your pressuring them, should they? But do it with the strength which comes from knowing what is right, without the threat factor of resentment. 


Better still, keep your child out of public school as long as it is legally feasible and, if at all possible, start your own school with a few other sensitive, seeking people. Children learn better later, when they are older, and develop their own natural curiosity. What is more, a non-corrupted child will teach himself better than any teacher can. 


Once a child has been corrupted through pressure, he loses touch with his inner reality. He therefore has to be motivated—which is the very excuse the motivators use to go on pressuring your child. But if you let him recover, you won’t believe your eyes. 


Schools have always been very, very sick indeed, but never as bad as today. Children are committing suicide by the thousands every year, even eight and nine-year-olds. The cause is the combination of parental and school pressure. Children are squeezed, without protection, between these two forces. 


All violence against teachers is actually a turn-around of the generations of violence against children, against unspoken, invisible destruction. Schoolteachers (and parents) have for years been secretly murdering children with their impatient pressures, in the name of Good, God and Country! 


The kind of insane bureaucrat who runs for your local school/prison system does it for feelings of importance and power, rarely for what is good for kids. This kind will never ever admit they are wrong. They actually enjoy hurting. Even though kids are burning down schools, mugging and killing teachers, one another and themselves, school boards press on regardless, ignoring the facts, trying new approaches to "education". 


Children are being systematically destroyed mentally, emotionally and physically, by parent-school pressures. Parents are often as oblivious to what they are doing to their children as the schoolteachers are. Why is this so, you ask? Because of PRIDE. Through pride, they have become blind, unaware zombies, powerless to prevent even their own destruction under the system. 


Pride can never be wrong. The prideful dare not recognize any other way except their own. There is only one way for egomaniacs, and "their" way must be the only way no matter who dies or who must suffer. They are oblivious to the harm they inflict because they hate the truth, especially the truth of their own wickedness and failing, which they are compelled to pass on in order to relieve their own suffering. Hurting others has a strange way of relieving hurt, temporarily. 


If you give your spiritual and educational responsibilities over to other people, it shows you don’t love your children. If you really had love, you would see where that responsibility lies. If you had love, you would see the danger of delivering youngsters into the hands of bloodsucking ministers, Sunday School teachers, or any other sort of babysitter. Those who are eager to do this job for you are usually birds of prey, waiting for the likes of you to abandon your nest. 


Don’t ever leave your children with a babysitter unless he or she is extremely well-known to you and your child. You wouldn’t believe the terrible (even sexual) abominations babysitters commit with a weak, helpless child when no one is around. 


Face it: you are stuck in the role of parent. Your sexual need (a form of ego-selfishness) has trapped you. Now it is time to overcome your willful, self-seeking, roving mind. Stop hating the drudgery of being home, washing diapers and dishes; stop wishing you were somewhere else, doing something more "rewarding" and ego-gratifying. Learn to be a real, committed human being with your family. There is endless joy in learning to be a parent. The salvation of your soul is at stake—even eternal life. 


Do you realize that if you had been a whole human being in the first place, you might no have found yourself as an inadequate (perhaps single) parent in the second place? Your sin, your lack of wholeness, your prideful, greedy need to gratify the lust to be complete, is what drove you into the false fulfillment of sex. The fusion of a man to a woman is not and never can be real love; it’s just two selfish egos sucking on each other’s life. That selfish urge, and the eventual use of another person to gratify your pride, traps you resentfully, even if too eagerly, into marriage, the master/slave relationship. And the trap closes tighter when a child appears. 


Having become a slave through greed, use and abuse, chances are your ego resents all restrictions on your freedom. But those who do look forward to being parents are not as loving as they appear—they usually have selfish motives, too. Some women want to live their lives through a baby subject of their very own. They want to make good their failing at the hands of their own vampirish parents. A child offers the opportunity for parents to regain stature, to look good (like God) through prideful and willful maneuvers with their offspring, so that the parent’s ego can proudly proclaim to the world, "Look how marvelous I am! I’m not so bad. I’m not a failure because, look, I have made my child into a success…" On the other hand, the same wicked spirit can achieve the same deceptive sense of success in the opposite way, by downgrading and confusing a child so that, by comparison to the child’s failing, the parent can seem superior. False glory and self-righteousness are what you seek, and if you seem devoted to your child, it is only because you need him to attain that end. 


Every person who is spoiled by impatience and pressure becomes a victim. Not knowing the true way to salvation, he becomes right and superior by creating another victim. He lives through his victim, or in contrast to his victim. The pride can find comfort in comparing itself to those less fortunate, or in being responsible for (and involving itself with) another’s greatness. 


Let us say that your selfish parents spoiled you rotten and weakened you to depend on their false kindness and generosity, because it made them feel good and superior to be able to do such a thing. If you rebelled, the pain of failing to rebel creatively has followed you around and, perhaps, forced you to find a victim of your own. Now you are like your parent. At this point the only way to not feel like a victim is to victimize. It may not be the real cure, but it feels good; it seems as though it is the cure. That is why few parents can see the harm they do when they spoil, or otherwise demoralize their children with overt acts of cruelty. Sick parents feel good whether spoiling or degrading their children. 


Did your parents spoil you? If so and you are a woman, you could find yourself being too sympathetic to your boyfriend or your husband to obtain a needed superior feeling. For his need to feel superior, a man who has been spoiled usually will look for opportunities to take advantage of others and, in general, will act like the ungrateful, rebellious child he was to his parents. Through her "generosity" a woman may end up so hurt, so destitute, that she could be forced to go back and depend on the doting, indulgent parents she despises, yet now needs. Spoiled children always need their parents but they also hate them for helping them, because their help has hurt and weakened them. We are trapped in a system where our parents subtly degrade us and make themselves seem like beautiful beings from Heaven, while slowly strangling the life out of us. 


See how complicated it all is—yet how simple? The lesson is this: if you must depend on someone, gracious or not, get your pride out of the way. Never be humiliated. Take gifts graciously, or don’t accept them at all. However, refusing aid when you need help can be as much an act of pride as taking. Whenever pride is involved, you will feel guilty. Can you see how you can be weakened by taking as well as by not accepting when you need it? We all need help at times, and one must learn to give with grace as well as to receive graciously. While it is indeed better to give than to receive, without receivers there can be no givers. Gracious receiving allows gracious giving. And even where giving is not gracious, you may learn to defeat the humiliation by receiving gracious if you will, without resentment. 


Do you identify with all this? Doesn’t this explain the behavior of your own children, in the light of your apparent kindness? If you have real understanding of what love is, then you can never be victimized by "love" or hate, or by the process of giving and denying. And, not being a victim, it will not be in you to victimize. The ancient curse will be broken. 


It is also cruel to buy a child’s love and affection. Never compensate with material things to make up for your impatience, for your failure to be ever-present with them. Ambition, impatience and absence can make you feel guilty and cause you to bestow character-weakening favors and advantages, preventing your children from growing up fully able to provide for themselves. 


The finest heritage you can pass on to your children is the virtue of in-dependence—as opposed to out-dependence. Independence comes through the exercise of self-denial, money disciplines, sound judgment and investment. The knowledge that they can provide for themselves, being beholden to no one, is the basis of true confidence and freedom. 


Never justify your ambition for money (which keeps you away from home) by telling your family you are doing it all for them! That is a lie and you know it. Ambition draws you out of the home, frustrates you and makes you impatient; then impatience leads you back to ambition. Try to remember what I have said many times before: pride always leads to prideful emotion and emotion must always lead back to the reinforcement of all aspects of pride—and to conflict with family and self. 


It is good to let your children suffer from little errors of judgment. Never feel sorry for them; never comfort them unduly. For example, if they have spent their money impulsively and they want you to lend them money to buy this or that, it’s better for them that you say, "No"—with an explanation. As they grow older, encourage them to consult with you before making decisions about buying cars or dating girls. If you see them poised to make a deadly mistake, don’t be afraid to be strong about what you see. A twenty-five-year-old is as blind as a bat when it comes to such things as sexual infatuation. 


Wherever possible, it should always be the father who admonishes the children. A sensible wife should stand back and let him do his thing without her support. Her support always weakens his case! A real man never ever needs any backing from a woman. There is no poison worse for a child than to hear the background cackle of his "amen-ing" mother when his father is trying to straighten him out! A woman’s support ruins a man’s correction. The correct thing for a man to do under those circumstances is to turn his attention away from the problem with his child and admonish his wife. Having taken care of her, he can then turn back to correcting his child all by himself. Furthermore, it is even worse for a man to side with his wife against the children! 


A man must be careful when correcting his wife and children. While seeking souls more often than not welcome loving correction, unseeking people really hate it with a passion. If you have one of these incorrigible wives or kids, watch out! They will misconstrue your intention to restrain them for their own good and get you into trouble with the law. Watch out for that trap. Only your intuition can protect you and show you just who is who. And be careful you are not a hypocrite using this text to recapture your prey. 


You must know whom to help and whom not to help. Your own salvation rests squarely on knowing the difference. You must be sincere in order to recognize the difference, and you must be sincere in order to have the strength to take the correct course and follow it to its ultimate conclusion. Test to know the difference. A woman can put up a good fight to test the persistence of your love! 


As you must see, all true knowledge is revealed in mystery, and no pretender or fake meditator can ever cross this border to save children, wives or husbands; to have happiness and, eventually, eternal life. They will all fail by not going far enough, or by going too far. 


It is sheer folly to praise or to condemn your children. Praising builds egos into conflict; so does condemning them. Never think for one moment that condemning diminishes pride one bit, for it does just the opposite, swelling a child’s pride through his secret resentment and judgment. 


Once corrupted by praise, children often become addicts. Because praise actually seduces, corrupts and weakens children, they develop a lower and lower sense of self-worth. Addicted to praise, they will literally sell their minds and souls for it. Praise, like all its cousins (music, drugs, alcohol, etc.), actually lowers their worth under the pretext of raising the spirit, because of what they must lower themselves to do to obtain it (praise). 


Guilt associated with praise may drive its victims to seek condemnation. They begin to fear success and unconsciously make silly mistakes to make you mad, hoping to get you to neutralize the pain caused by your approval. Of course, that could cause you to think you are not praising them enough. Plenty of trouble here! You may drive them out to seek lowly company, people who will degrade them, in the hope that degradation will release them from the pain of your love and positive thinking. 


Alas, on either end there are agonies of swollen pride. The cruelty of degradation then could drive them back to the cruelty of praise, until one day they become afraid of making changes and get stuck in a rut as permanent victims of praise or condemnation. The pain could make them want to shoot themselves and all those who are involved in love/hate games of praise and condemnation. 


So, acknowledge good performance, but never praise it. Acknowledge bad performance, but don’t condemn it. There must never be condemning or condoning in your words—no emotion or exaggeration of pleasure or of displeasure. If your child draws a good picture and shows it to you for comment, appraise it honestly without emotion. Give your honest opinion. Is it quite good? Then say so calmly. Don’t pump up the child’s ego by emotion-charged exclamations of "Magnificent!" and "Wow, you are going to be a great artist!" (You could get them hung up on an artist’s trip when they have no talent.) If the work could stand improvement, then you might do well to ask your child if he welcomes constructive criticism. Chances are, you will receive the go-ahead and then gentle criticism will be welcomed and taken under serious consideration. 


As I said before, it is reaction that sets up in you the nature of your corruptor. You inherit his way of corrupting others through emotionally-loaded praises and condemnations. Now you fall under a compulsion to praise or to damn, to be praised or to be damned. Either approach breaks down the character of the victim, feeding the transplanted demons within. Corruption is the way of life for "demons", who feed on your fluctuations between being super "nice" and super cruel. That patronizing "nice" is not so nice. 


Evil has both a "nice" and a cruel side, just as good does. Evil weakens with "niceness" and weakens with cruelty. Good strengthens with its goodness and again strengthens with what "hurts", because it helps. Evil "corrects" you when you are right, or praises you for being right, accepting and praising you until you become wrong, and again when you are wrong. It’s terribly confusing—unless, of course, you are in your center. It’s all in your attitude. Love knows that fine line of difference between acknowledgment and praise, between correcting and condemning. Because love knows the difference, love begets a child of love, free from the conditionings of the world. 

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