We were designed to be intuitively impelled. Without this, we are ships without rudders, at the mercy of everyone’s opinions and selfish motives.

The animal has no conscious awareness. Its instinctive (parallel, but not equal to, intuitive) responses lead it to food and water—and survival.

Our egocentric needs alienate us from a higher order of relatedness, so we find ourselves responding to the same pressures to which others have fallen. When we respond with excitement and anger, we are bound to an invisible enemy.

The rebel and the conformist are equally his subjects, and the result is accumulating tension and fear. If we become angry and try to prevail, we are evolving in his system.

We then become more vicious than those who served us so unjustly, and it is not long before we become just like them—enabling them to hide their faults behind our greater fault—greater because of what we have become as the result of our response.

Responding emotionally, we cannot live a good, true or useful life. We are dominated by the wickedness of others—whose wickedness we shall come to need to provide the energy for our rebellious “independence” and for the sense of rightness that arises from judging their wickedness.

We now find that we are unkind to those we would “love” to love. We take out our resentments on them and make them worse.

If we yield to pressure to avoid seeing the growth of violence within, we are aiding the enemy and standing in silent support of wickedness.

“It takes real courage and strength to be patient.”

We may find ourselves hypnotically attracted by danger and trouble, often feeling the subconscious desire to yield because of our tendency to conform to pressures of a spiritual nature.

Typical of this is the compulsion to throw oneself off a high building. Confusion and hostility are rarely triggered by true

kindness.

They are usually sired by our response to someone’s malicious intent, whether it be expressed in the form of needling us into rash judgment or in the form of sticky sweetness.

If we went back far enough into the past, we would discover that the injustice of the persons we resent was relayed to them by their reactions of hatred toward preceding generations.

If you take out your resentment on your family, you then become the tempter. We must surely see that it takes real courage and

strength to be patient.

Any fool can be excited—and all fools are!

To live unto God we must accept the essence of grace to enable us to gaze unflinchingly into the face of our tempters and tormentors, unaffected by their flattery or criticism.

We must not be threatened by wickedness, nor should we covet apparent advantages or superiority.