"... my childhood sucks ..."

Today on Designing God, I invite you through a personal journey of mine where the scope of my reality was contemplative and imaginatively ambiguous. This is a time capsule I've unearthed earlier today when I encountered a picture of a little boy in a shopping cart.

Are we satisfied with our childhood? Today, when problems occur in our personal life, we usually attribute it to our upbringing. We can't resist the urge to blame mom and dad for fucking us up the way they did. But how much left is there to blame on ourselves?

Mom and Dad could be at fault for doing things to you that they regret. Some parents divorce, others mistreat their children, sometimes there is a death that takes one or both the parents. This is obviously out of our control and it could be justified in saying that the blame cannot be upon us as an individual.

But what about that other sector of human development that contributes to our moral perception? Sure, our genetic predisposition is vital to consider, yet exterior influence hardly involves parental conditioning. Mom and Dad aren't always around to change the way you think.

The list is endless as to what affects Personality. From informal information to personal experiences. Regardless of institution or group one belongs to, Mom and Dad were not present at every single step of the way. You are what you are because of the blank canvas you were born with that later became colored by life's ubiquitous contaminations of external and internal stimuli, in other words - shit happens.

But this brings me to another important point about the furtherance of understanding our flaws. Humans are not perfect, but the subtlety of our mistakes are caused by exterior (environment) and interior (genetic) influence. What, however, do we call this "thing" that gets affected?

The "Me" in the sentence, "My parents messed me up" is evidence of a unblemished entity that witnesses these occurrences. Some say that this "me," or "I," or "ego" survives death and becomes habitable to another life form - reincarnation. But I'm not here to talk about death. The interesting thing about our consequentiality of ideas and the furtherance of absolving ourselves from blame has little to do with remaining an innocent being through means of the Lie. We inherently understand that at a deep level, our "self" is an unblemished source of light and love.

That with which we cannot touch is most certainly real because it is us.

So if you hear some jack-off yammering about his parents, his environment, and stating the ultimate cause of his complaints springs forth from his origins, please do yourself the favor of slapping the prick and remind him that he's beautiful just the way he is.

A Day In Jupiter

I've just recently been on a three day outing with my cousin in Jupiter, Florida. Well, it's not much of an outing since we've been here at his mom's house. But once in a while we'd hit the road and check out a few spots.

Jupiter, Florida is a city where many would find it tempting to joke about it's title. Mostly anyone can't resist interrupting without referencing the 5th planet from the sun. So please, lets put that aside.

My stay here has been a bit interesting. Mostly fun when I've had the opportunity to spend more time with my cousin Chris. Times are tough and money isn't cycling through him as it once did. This family is on my mother's side. Her mother's sister currently lives here. They resided in New York for 30 years and now they're residing in South Florida. Chris is here to help take care of my grand aunt along with her husband who's now suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Chris is one of my favorite cousins since he is very well informed of political jargon, as well as a spiritually attuned meditation practitioner.

One particular reason why I'm writing this blog is to comment on my Tia Blanca. She's now turning 68 this coming month and I've neglected to ask her all these years about my origins. So this time around, I had breakfast with her and we started talking about our family's history.

She remembers names and stories of most of my ancestry dating back to the time of the Depression. I never knew some of my family members were from Spain. I only heard that I had a great-grandfather who came from there, and that he was almost 7-feet tall. My brother, it is believed, inherited some of those traits because he too is a tall individual. This brings to mind the power of genetic inheritance. Respectfully, I have a deep appreciation for all the family members that passed on, but I cannot help but marvel at the mechanism that makes us living creatures - sexual reproduction.

It took 3 generations for my great-grandfather's gene for height to be manifested in my brother's genes. Upon seeing this picture of my great-grandfather, I couldn't think of anyone else except Ivan.

So, my most profound experience of this scientific revelation is that we cannot escape the effectiveness of nature. As complex as the genetic code is, as mysterious as the skipping of generations might be, it is a fact that these phenomenon occur in nature regardless of what species you are.