I spoke earlier of rigid concepts of right and wrong. There is only one way to avoid this problem. Only true compassion and love will lead to an understanding of the nature of good, and only these qualities will serve to annihilate the erroneous and distortive concepts of evil.
The simple fact is that as long as you believe in the concept of evil, it is a reality in your system, and you will always find it manifested. Your belief in it will, therefore, seem highly justified. If you carry this concept through succeeding generations, through reincarnations, then you add to its reality.
Let me try to throw some light upon what I am trying to tell you. First of all, love always involves freedom. If a man says he loves you and yet denies to your freedom, then you often hate him. Yet because of his words you do not feel justified in the emotion. This sort of emotional tangle itself can lead to continued entanglement’s through various lives.
If you hate evil, then be aware of your conception of the word. Hate is restrictive. It narrows down your perception. It is indeed a dark glass that shadows all of your experience. You will find more and more to hate, and bring the hated elements into your own experience
Now: If, for example, you hate a parent, then it becomes quite easy to hate any parents, for in their faces you see and project the original offender. In subsequent lives you may also be drawn into a family and find yourself with the same emotions, for the emotions are the problem, and not those elements that seem to bring them about.
If you hate illness you may bring upon yourself a succeeding life of illness, because the hate has drawn it to you.
Now: If you expand your sense of love, of health, and existence, then you are drawn into this life and in others towards those qualities; again, because they are those upon which you concentrate. A generation that hates war will not bring peace. It generation that loves peace will bring peace.
To die with hatred for any cause or people, or for any reason, is a great disadvantage. You will have all kinds of opportunities now to recreate your personal experience in more beneficial ways, to change your world.
In the next life you will be working with those attitudes that are now yours. If you insist upon harboring hatreds within you now, you are very likely to continue doing so. On the other hand, those sparks of truth, intuition, love, joy, creativity, accomplishments gained now, will work for you then as they do now.
They are, you see, the only true realities. They are the only real foundations of existence. It is foolish, as Rupert once said, to hate a storm or Shake your fist at it and call it names. You laugh if you think of children or natives in such activities. It is useless to personify a storm and treated it as a demon, focusing upon its destructive elements, or those elements that to you appear destructive.
Change of form is not destructive. The explosive energy of the storm is highly creative. Consciousness is not annihilated. A storm is part of creativity. You view it from your own perspective, and yet one individual will feel within the storm the unending cycle of creativity, and another will personify it as the work of the devil.
Through all your lives you will interpret the reality that you see in your own way, and that way and will have its effects upon you, and in turn upon others. The man who literally hates, immediately sets himself up in this fashion: He prejudges the nature of reality according to his own limited understanding.
Now I’m emphasizing the issue of hate in this chapter on reincarnation because its results can be so disastrous. A man who hates always believes himself justified. He never hates anything that he believes to be good. He thinks he is being just, therefore, in his hatred, but the hatred itself forms a very strong claim that will follow him throughout his lives, until he learns that only the hatred itself is the destroyer.
You may take a break. (cont. in next post)
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