Picture a household where each member adheres to moral law and contributes to happy companionship by deferring to the others' wishes. Such an unselfish atmosphere develops contented, balanced individuals. Children and adults thrive in expressed tenderness and associate home and family with the love shown them by relatives.
But probably most families are a blend of pleasing and displeasing elements. We cannot remove or reduce the discordant elements by shutting our eyes to family flaws. But we can do this by learning to discriminate between them and those genuine, precious essences that endear family to the heart, and by persistently praying to know the powerlessness and nothingness of qualities unlike God, the All-in-all. We can get a progressively higher view of family, not as a collection of mortal, material personalities, but as a limitless, harmonious spiritual idea of Mind, God.
This liberating perspective retains all that is genuinely valuable and satisfying in the human sense of family. It discards only negative mortal traits such as unkindness, faulty judgments, superficial standards, subtle or obvious dominations that hark back to primitive tribal traditions. It exposes and corrects attitudes of superiority, inferiority, prejudice, rejection, which create imbalances in family relationships.
