From Bryan Eden/alice-miller.com: “Dear Friends — I am writing to you about the future of spirituality and the hidden holocaust of suffering that cries out for our next great awakening. Humanity’s progress toward peace, love, prosperity and happiness is being held captive by an invisible plague of cruelty and violence. This scourge of the soul is ruining billions of lives and perpetuating the pain of war and injustice from generation to generation. In the name of love and life we must open our eyes and see what has never been seen before.
The darkness I refer to is the world’s permission for adults to treat children with physical and emotional cruelty. There is a catastrophic lack of awareness in billions of parents of a child’s fundamental rights: to be loved, to be understood, to be respected and taken seriously and to be protected from emotional and physical abuse. The overwhelming majority of adults — even those with good intentions — simply do not understand how they act out their own emotional problems on their offspring. What we call Christ — primal innocence and pure love — is crucified billions of times in every new generation. And yet we still ‘know not what we do.’
. . . Past spiritualities assigned the origin of our emotional pain, negative attitudes and destructive behaviors to causes such as Original Sin, the karmic repercussions of past lives, or the intrinsic inability of the self to satisfy its desires. If a spiritual/religious path is a form of medicine, the accuracy of the diagnosis will greatly affect the completeness of the cure. I believe that there is both more love and more truth in the notion that the real source of people’s pain and destructive behavior lay in their unhealed childhood wounds . . .
The spirituality of the future must be a force for awakening the masses to the reality of how children are treated — and the path to correcting this. The sacredness of understanding, respecting, loving and protecting children must in time motivate a worldwide spiritual movement.
The spiritual revolutions of the past seized the imagination of the masses and embedded new attitudes in cultures and societies because something in them spoke to core human needs. In the case of Christianity, it was the need to fulfill our natural instincts for peace, love and brotherhood. In the case of Buddhism, it was the need to release our minds and bodies from fear and tension and heal our hearts and our world through the power of compassion.
. . . The spirituality of the future will and must emphasize the need for conscious parenting. It will champion the right of children to be free from violence and nurtured in the service of their unique selves. When these words — ‘the cycle of pain stops with me’ — reach the heart of humanity in the way that ‘love thy brother’ and the Buddhist vows of compassion have, we will emerge from our long, dark night of the soul.”
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