The Challenge and Responsibility We Call Parenting
The miracle we are is a constantly changing interplay, a constellation or radiant galaxy of trillions of independent but interdependent cells relating, communicating and cooperating. No thing is ever the same, not for a blink. As we now know there is no such ‘thing,’ as an atom, only movement. We are that, only movement.
We honor that impermanence, that we are a river moving or we misconceive. We create an abstract, somehow fixed notion that we are static, a me, mostly as a defensive strategy to avoid anticipated and self-projected fear.
Love, complete safety and play are twins. In that state of complete attention the fear that created the phantom image ‘me’ is absent and the false-fixed projection disappears. Like a light switch, up is love with its embodied safety and playfulness. Down is self-centered defensive fear personified. There is no midpoint. We are either love or fear with its images.
Fear grabs the newest causal-centers of the brain with its celestial capacity to change the nature of reality and enslaves it to the projected image, the most primitive flight-flight reflexes now imagined and reified as a Baptist, Hindu, Republican or a Michael. As long as there is fear, this devolutionary movement of the highest capacities being hijacked by the most primitive takes place. When the imagined fears are not, the primitive, less complex brain centers are quite and the casual-creative capacity flows to enhance, expand and uplift everything, playfully. Like Midis, love sees only love.
Jerry Mander author, The Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television, the best about TV and media in general noted way back in 1970 that media has a very difficult time representing the sacred or love. When pressed through the technology sieve the sacred ends up looking kinda hokey. BUT, media has an easy time representing fear and violence. That, it not only does well but with compound interest. In this way commercial media-advertising-technology is essentially Machiavellian, using clever lies and tricks in order to get or achieve something: clever and dishonest by design. Those who control media-technology know this which was the overarching theme of Jerry’s book. And these toxic-commercial image making photons are shot directly into the brains of billions unsuspecting human beings, who predictably react as Pavlov dogs when the bell rings. Because of this, media based technology is the handmaid of the lowest fight-flight brain. Fox-Not-News is the most blatant example. Where that is the other, love and compassion is not! It is that simple.
A brain completely enchanted with fear as image is incapable of perceiving anything else. Even when projecting safety it is in response to fear and therefore is fear in disguise. Our only hope, and this is a big stretch, is to allow our young and precious developing hearts and minds to experience safety, play and therefore love deeply enough, long enough so that, when fear does pop out of the box, it is seen for what it is, a hoax and is transformed by the light of insight.
Developing this sensitivity, awareness and transformative insight is the challenge and responsibility we call parenting. But, first things first. We must be the change we hope for our children. We must see the hoax and transform our fear into love, and become what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls the model imperative. Nothing less will meet the challenge. With this imperative in mind it is important to distinguish between a ‘real’ experience and a concept or idea. Unless our ideas, study and insights are translated into ‘actual behavior’ they remain thin and superficial, almost nonexistent. And this includes the thousands of hours we spend relating to computers, tablets, phones, in school and on the internet. It is not the thought that counts. It is how we treat each other; love or fear.
Michael Mendizza