Release Harmful Resentments and Be Happier
Key Lesson: Resentment is an unseen gravity, a deceptive force embraced by fools. For though it grants us what seems a safe course and temporary anchorage for our anger, by its guidance we always run aground and are left stranded in a dark harbor through whose cold waters swim the enemies of our soul.
Two Ways to Raise Your Level of Spiritual Freedom
Here are two proven ways you can learn to work in the Now to ensure that you reach ever-higher levels of personal freedom. Our honest examination of these spiritual assertions -- based upon our own life experience -- proves our need to realize their promise. For best results, first meditate on what each statement means in and of itself. Let the freedom it illustrates awaken in you the remembrance of that part of you that knows its inherent truth. Then, consciously allow your mind to contrast your present level of freedom with that of the example you just meditated upon. By this practice you will see that each of these statements is seeded with an implied spiritual practice, a work meant only for you that you alone can read due to your present condition. With these thoughts in mind, there is one other important point to remember.
Our intention in this exercise is not to create a set of pleasing self-images for us to go out into the world and imitate. All forms of imitation are spiritually disastrous. Nor should we allow any part of us to sit in judgment of us, all too glad to point out how badly we have missed the mark. Our sole task is to increase the consciousness of ourselves. That's it. This awakened awareness, the Living Light within us, working in concert with the self-knowledge it has helped to seed in us, not only reveals what stands in the way of our true freedom, but also sets the stage for its removal as well.
1) We are spiritually free when we no longer want anything to do with sitting in judgment of others, regardless of their perceived transgression. We realize that we live in an intelligent universe whose unerring system of justice ensures that no act -- good or evil -- goes unrewarded.
Implied Exercise: Learn what it means to leave those who would punish you with word or deed to the bitter fruit of their own designs. Let go of the judge in you by recognizing we cannot hold someone's feet to the fire without suffering getting burned ourselves.
2) We are spiritually free when not one part of us harbors any hatred or resentment for any other human being, regardless of how badly that person may have once treated us. We have seen for ourselves that giving any dark state of hatred or resentment any reason to exist is the same as supplying it with a hidden refuge in ourselves.
Implied Exercise: Once we can understand that everything we resist in life increases its weight by the magnitude of thought spent not wanting it, then we realize that it isn't our enemies who are burdened by those black wishes we hold for them, but it is we who are held hostage in the darkness of our unenlightened self. To see that it is hatred that hates is to let it go.
