If you take resentment against someone, it’ll bear a wound on your heart and your life will be hard. Now, whether you forgive a person or not, that’s unclear, but if you keep a feeling of offense, it will creep into your subconscious. Outwardly you may forget about it, even grant someone forgiveness. If the feeling of offense remains, though, it’ll start ruining your health and life in as much as that energy possesses great destructive power. It exists as a protest against the flow of life and is a type of aggression – hate. Resentment is a fireball that you carry inside yourself.
The method for living without resentment: learn to see God in everything. For, whatever may happen happens at his will. Learn to see God in every situation, and in every person – see a Teacher sent by God to help us become closer to Love. This turns out to be best of all for times with those who have acted “unjustly” with us. One of the main conditions of a successful education is respect and – even better – love of your teacher. This applies to education at the preschool level as well as with the most enlightened Master of the highest order. If a person doesn’t respect a teacher, or even worse, despises or makes fun of him, then however smart the person is, he’ll hardly master the material or won’t be able to grasp it at all.
In a large sense, all our life in this world is a school into which we’ve come to learn selflessness, service, and the main thing, how to increase love in our souls, to be loved, to live in love, and to be the presence of love.
In this school all the people around us are our Teachers, especially those close to us. If we start to treat others with respect and gratefulness and live in awareness, then we will have less need of hard and painful lessons. We’ll begin to make great progress and will do so very fast in all aspects.
Take yourself to case with this rule: as soon as you remember someone that evokes the slightest aggression or offense in you, bow all the way down to him that very second. If you’re among people or, as now, are sick and infirm, then do so mentally. It’ll be easy then to follow the commandment which, as I remember, you’ve taught others for so long:
“…Love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5:44)
Bowing down speedily wipes out subconscious resentment and aggression, and – the main thing – pride, the source of all our woes and suffering. In order to take offense, you must have built up a lot of pride. Remember that.
