“First, you are a god. Your kids look up to you and worship your almighty power. You gave them birth and you can kill them. They know your might. They know the power you wield. They know it long before they know anything else. It’s instinctual. Those are the breaks. And then you begin to transmit this power to your kids. You praise them. You build them up. You make them golden. Each pat on the back, you transfer this immense power that you have onto them …
and eventually the powerless become the powerful and the powerful become powerless again.
That is the story of parenting – that is, when it is done right – it’s a story of empowerment, a story of creating gods. Only gods can make gods. Powerless have no power to give. Each parenting moment is a voluntary zero-sum exchange: your power wanes, your kids’ power gains.
It’s the thermodynamics of love, a dissipation of heart-heat into the Universe. In the end, roles have fully reversed: parent-gods are nothing but fallen angels, to be reminisced in passing through psychoanalysis, as the newborn gods edit their origin stories. And the kids, once helpless, powerless, and frail sail on into the future, with the confidence of immortals, leaving behind two broken parent-hearts, powerless to stop time.
And then, again, a moment comes – the wheel of cosmos makes yet another turn – and the new power-drunk generation of gods gets bored with playing and the kids – they always remain kids to you – your kids go on to have their own kids, repeating the cycle of parenting Samsara.
Whether you are there to witness it or not, doesn’t really matter. You are powerless to stop this cosmic centrifuge. The undifferentiated proto-matter of sentience needs a monkey wrench to keep stirring it into becoming. Beings are born. The agony-ecstasy of love continues. The restless Universe keeps chasing its own tail. And, yes, sometimes – in fact, often, in this human realm, - things break down. When parents refuse to give up their power, they breed groupies, not gods. Groupies that worship them. That is what you folks on this planet call narcissism.
And these empty ghosts, ever yearning for power, set everything on fire. With no fuel to burn, with no heart-heat to power their own lives, they see everything and everyone as kindling, not as kin … ”
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