Sunday, August 28, 2011

God! (contd.)

Hello.. Last blog I left at External Parent.

I came across this book "I'm OK, You're OK" by Thomas A. Harris. It had in it
the concept of PAC (Parent- Adult- Child).. It's a simplified version of
Superego-Ego-Id model of Transactional Analysis, proposed by Freud, made
especially for layman.

I'll summarize it as:

Parent: it's the part of a person that has been "taught".. It mostly consists
of tradition, teachings, prejudices, etc.. Imagine it as a part of your
personality that stores information about what elders teach you.

Child: it's the part that the child "feels".. It mostly consists of all the
emotions like, anger, happiness, depression, guilt, creativity, etc..

Adult: it's the part that analyses the data from Parent and Child and after
testing/processing the data it accepts or denies the data..

For example, you are taught that you shouldn't touch boiling water.. This
data is stored in your Parent.. When you grow, your Adult develops. You touch a
bowl of boiling water and u feel pain.. Immediately the Adult accepts the Parent
data..

Similarly data from Child is accepted or rejected.. A child who has been
loved very much, will have a lot of data on feelings of love, and a child
DEPRIVED of love, won't have that much data related to love, and would grow up
as a hard hearted person.

Thus, a healthy P-A-C keeps life running smoothly.. For more details, check
the books, I'm OK, You're OK, Staying OK, Games People Play.

Now what's an External Parent..?

The Parent (esp. the data accepted by the adult) always tell us throughout
our lives what we should do and what we shouldn't. Like, we shouldn't lie, we
should be humble, we should be truthful, we should respect elders, we shouldn't
steal, etc. etc.

So, ultimately, we depend on he Parent to tell us what's right and wrong..
Whenever you plan to do something wrong, the Child in you feels the same "guilt"
or "anxiety" that you had felt when you were young and you did something wrong
and your parents scolded you or punished you..

When things go wrong or right, you blame or congratulate the Parent in you
and the people responsible for shaping your Parent, like actual parents,
guardians, elder brother sisters, uncle aunts, teachers..

There's a peculiar human tendency of externalizing their Parent.. As in,
humans sometimes make some other person responsible for their actions.. For
instance, you tell your friend to scold you if you don't study properly.. After
you have externalized your Parent onto that friend of yours, your Child goes
crazy.. Because the Child can sometimes be crazy and is always kept under strict
check by the Parent or Adult.. Externalizing the Parent is an indication of a
weak Adult.. And now that you've successfully externalized your Parent too, the
Child feels free to do ANYTHING it wants.. If things go wrong, blame it on the
external Parent..

So, in the above example, after telling your friend to scold you if you don't
study, you go on to play and have the time of your life, and you fail in your
exams, and then you come back to your friend and scold him/her that he/she
didn’t scold you enough, etc.. And I am sure you could relate to such other
examples, either being the one who externalized your Parent or had been the
Parent for someone else..

In the present society, God is this External Parent.. Externalizing your
parent, makes you feel LESS RESPONSIBLE for the issue at hand.. Like you say,
God is responsible for making this universe and stuff, He knows the future,
He'll take care of everything, and YOU activate your Child in full mode and
"feel" that you're not responsible for all the destruction that you're doing..

This is what Man is doing nowadays.. Externalizing his Parent onto God, he
"feels" he's not responsible for all the chaos and destruction that he's causing
to Earth. He thinks he is not responsible for all the cruelty, all the killing,
massacre that he's doing.. After doing bad things, Man looks at his External
Parent, "God", to see if He punishes him.. But your external Parent can’t punish
you enough, can he.. Some who get punished enough, become reformed, while most
others continue their bully.

I don't know if God exists or not.. Maybe he does.. But even if he does, I
don’t think even he'd want to be an External Parent for all of mankind….. and the most give-away proverb that supports this assumption is, "God helps them who help themselves".

So, I think it's time we started helping ourselves, rather than waiting for God to do miracles.....

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