Resentment, especially the resentment our parents set us up to feel toward them, lies at the root of all our sins. It accounts for our readiness to take offense, the failing response that gives our intimidators the edge and fills them with a sense of power and victory.

You soon learn to transfer the resentment you feel toward your parents toward all authority figures, and you can no more win with them than you could with your parents, because they, too, use your resentment to keep you responding in an inferior way and giving up power to them.

Many of our elected authorities are really failures who have learned the subtle art of “succeeding” by making others fail. They learn to do unto others what was done to them, and their “sense” of success rests on lording it over you and making you fail.

How? By capitalizing on the harebrained reactions that spring from your resentment of their impatience and cruelty. 

You really add sin to sin when you add resentment to resentment by resenting the awareness of your failing. It’s bad enough to resent your adversary, but to resent realizing your wrong is tantamount to hating God.

When you resent your own awareness of wrong, you see the Truth that could save you as the enemy that condemns you; and when you turn hostility inward on yourself in this fashion, you can dig yourself into such a deep hole of depression that you might see suicide as the only way to get any rest from pain. 

Very often, the resentment we feel toward others represents an attempt to escape the judgment we feel against ourselves. We “conquer” our sin by projecting it onto someone else.

When you realize that resenting others is wrong, you may find it almost impossible not to resent yourself for having resented; but if you don’t find the patience and humility to face up to resentment without judgment, you are in danger of becoming so much like the prideful people you resent that you, too, will become an enemy of reality. 

"Good is an impulse that springs from the innermost being, and you will never know true happiness until you become the extension of that impulse"

Every wrong person wants to look good. Some acquire the “look” by immersing themselves in religion, others find it in music or another of the arts, and some are driven to satisfy themselves with the illusion of power and glory to be found in a bottle or a shot in the arm.

The pressure that drives them continues to reinforce the inner evil, even though their new behavior patterns might be making them look good on the surface. Every egotistical soul is hung up on appearances, wanting all the attributes of virtue, grace, and piety, but only on the surface. 

In the process of being prideful and maintaining a separate existence as our own god, apart from God, we all try to avoid seeing ourselves as we are by escaping into illusions. And we never have to look very far to find some imp of Satan who will be only too happy to help us with our self-deception. 

Is that the way you want to go? If so, don’t look to me for help. I’m looking for those who want to wake up and shake the dust of the dreamworld fantasies off their feet, those who want to lay down their sick ego-life and take on a spiritual life.

As the Good Book says, “Whosoever shall preserve his (ego) life shall lose his (spiritual) life.” 

I am begging you all, before tragedy descends upon you, if it hasn’t already: Know the reason for your suffering. See that you are living under a system of things, and that under this system nothing can ever go right for you.

Under a system that glorifies your right to react to stress with resentment, you can never make a right decision. No noble instinct can stir in your heart, unless it springs from the prompting of conscience that you find so unwelcome in your present state of allegiance to the world. 

Good is an impulse that springs from the innermost being, and you will never know true happiness until you become the extension of that impulse. As long as you live in your imagination, you will be unable to respond to that impulse; neither can you know its Source.