Power Over Resentment

Roy Masters

While you cannot help a spontaneous reaction such as the kind you have when someone drops a firecracker behind your back, you can help the other (more conscious) reaction—resentment toward the person who exploded the firecracker and against yourself for being so weak.

Resentment is under the power of consciousness, while being frightened and vulnerable is not. Recognize that because resentment is the wrong willful way to deal with anything, it contributes to your being sensitive, weak and vulnerable.

After responding to any stress, you are bound to become conscious of your increased vulnerability and helplessness by means of the subtle changes that have occurred, and that consciousness is all to the good!

The trouble now is that your will enters in and resents being made aware, as though your conscience were the problem instead of being the key to your solution. So you try to make it go away by being upset with the problem it showed you.

I know you don’t really want to go on being rotten, but you must not resist that inner knowing. Realize that your perpetual willfulness is only making matters worse.

The will to gain power, love and recognition is the problem to begin with. You have, perhaps without realizing it, been playing God. As a god/creator, you thrive on creating effects and reacting to them with love and hate.

It is the pure light of realization that humbles and then saves you—not the learning you get from Roy Masters, or any other person, institution or written word. Realization is living knowledge from God, which enables your will, through repentance, to be resigned to the Divine will and to become as one with it.


"The ego in its willfulness is always in motion, escaping into the knowledge of its being, struggling with symptoms and problems in an effort to know itself."

When people are awakened to meaning, they often interpret it as their own cleverness that they have discovered and immediately puff up with pride.

So be careful that you are not tempted to struggle with or intellectualize what you are given to understand. There is no need to commit Truth to memory for future use. Truth is ever present, as a light is a guide to the eye. 

The simplicity of understanding relieves you of the burden of having to strive, change and grope your way (from memory) like a blind man. The light endows you with faith and patience, a quiet knowing that things will change without knowing how and why.

Do you see all problems arising from one? It is the sin (that is, your ego) of descending into your mind and from there struggling with the evolving grossness of flesh.

Trying to be better is another one of those efforts of will that backfires as an extension of the original sin of pride. Your struggle also means that you are not ready to be still, to face the truth, to give up the selfish will.

The ego in its willfulness is always in motion, escaping into the knowledge of its being, struggling with symptoms and problems in an effort to know itself. Pride, by necessity, can only effect changes by inter-reacting with these problems, trying to prove it can conquer and heal, ending up proving just the opposite.

When it cannot create in a “positive” way, it takes pride in destroying as if destruction were creation.