A Reading from Roland's Soon to be Released New Book - Unholy Passions and the Power to Change

We suffer because we are deny ourselves love. Our bodies suffer when we deny them love. And other people suffer when we tempt them to judge or resent us, thereby cutting themselves off from love.

Love is from God. When we walk in His Light and find a bond with Him within through a change of heart, we then experience His love—first His correction, then His forgiveness, followed by His protection. When we experience His forgiveness, we can forgive others. 

We must then also be honest with people. When you are not truthful with others, you are denying them love.

Why do we deny people love? Here are some of the reasons.

We do not understand that love must include truth. So we soften our words, hold our tongue, and try to never make anyone uncomfortable or feel bad. Thereby we allow them to continue in error.

We do not have faith in the power of Truth, and so we want people to be comfortable and experience a little happiness, without discomforting honesty.

Pain is the number one way to make people comply. That is why cruelty, deprivation, and punishment are rampant in this world. Pain is the way that the world gets obedience. It works in several ways. One way is because cruelty tempts the victim to become resentful. And when we are resentful, we thereby fall from love and all that is truly human. 

This causes a terrible psychic pain. This change for the worse, when the soul senses itself falling and failing, is so painful that it makes the soul cry out for relief.

Chances are it will cry out for love from the very one that degraded it. Later in life, the pain associated with the traumatic fall makes the person want to do anything to make the pain go away.

 Thereafter, whenever the victim remembers the cruelty that first degraded him, the pain makes him want to conform to anyone stronger in order ease the pain. Unfortunately, the pain can also make him want to lash out in violence and rage against whoever is weaker and happens to innocently bring the painful memory to mind.

Change is painful, even change for the better. The renowned waterfront philosopher Eric Hoffer aptly titled one of his books The Ordeal of Change. There is a dying or disintegration of a former way of doing things or of a former identity, and there is a taking on of a new way with which one is uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

Most change is for the worse. In the moment when we are treated cruelly (which can take a thousand forms, and usually first occurs in the family), and we respond with resentment—we die a little as the innocent human being we were and we take on a new way, the way of the cruel beast. 

The cruelty can also make us doubt what is good and true. This doubt also makes for our changing for the worse, as we become a part of the world which made us doubt, and we give up the ideals and innocent pursuits of youth to become shallow and ambitious, just like the ones who tempted us. 

The suffering makes us cling to the new dominant ones for reassurance for the altered thing we are becoming, and for comfort to assuage the pain.

Every time you react with resentment or judgment to some cruelty, a change for the worse occurs in you. A little bit of you dies, and it is replaced by a piece of the new order—the one behind the cruelty.

But pain can be a good thing when it is pain from our conscience, making us aware of the fact that something is wrong. Every tension tells a story: it tells of conflict. It tells of long ago when you were forced or seduced into doing something that was not in accord with what you knew was right in your heart.

Every reaction tells a story: it tells of a faithless, angry response. It may have begun when you were a little child and someone was pressuring you. Every symptom tells a story. They tell us that we have been reacting wrongly to the stresses in the environment. They tell us that we have been prideful, and thus doubly sensitive to the vicissitudes of life, which we take personally.

Then there is the awareness of conflict within with an identity that is not us. It causes the pain of seeing how we are just as impatient as our parents or whoever harmed us. It entered us in those moments of unconsciousness when we indulged in some illicit and forbidden thing, which includes hatred.

We are all dying, and in the process we are slowly becoming the very thing we hate. It is the netherworld identity that drives us and compels us to cruelties, impatience, and atrocities. It came from the impatient authorities we once hated, and now in us, it does unto others what was done to us.

Be glad if you are aware of this internal conflict. Realize that of yourself, you are powerless against it. But if you turn from your wrongs, through seeing that they are wrong in the Light of Truth, and call upon God with helpless regret and a cry for help, then He answers and deals with the identity.

In absolute terms, there is only one change for the better—it is the change that occurs when we experience repentance in the light. We see our wrongs and lament them. We see the lies of the world and how we were misled. We see our own lack of commitment to what is right, and thus our weakness that permitted us to be led astray.

We then turn from our wrongs and begin to live anew as a simple person instead of the hard ambitious resentful thing we had become. 

After this live giving miracle is implemented in your life, we will then have conflict with the world, instead of conflict with your conscience. This conflict with the world is a positive thing, meaning that there has been a change in us that makes us incompatible with the world. Now instead of copping out on principle, you hold up the light. Instead of saying nothing and letting evil flourish, you speak up. And when you encounter opposition, as you surely will, you hold your ground and remain patient instead of resenting. 

In exchange for your willingness to see and admit wrong, God gives you a new identity. And now your soul will instinctively seek solace and reinforcement from its Creator, the Source of its new identity.  No longer will you reach out into the world for clammy false love; instead you will look within to the Creator Who made thee. 

Eventually, we see in the Light the identity that made a home in us. This time the combat is not your battle. You see that its thinking is not your thinking, its hate is not your hate. Ceasing from struggling with what is not yourself and your true wishes, you turn the responsibility to do battle with it over to God. 

One day the identity will leave, and when it does you will see just who it is you were doing business with, and just who it was that prompted you to cruelties and foolish deeds.

Remember, it is through struggle that we evolve. But when you struggled with evil using anger, hostility and resentment, your struggles only made you evolve as a bigger beast in the dog eat dog order of things. To "know" evil is, in great measure, to be familiar with it by having reacted to it with resentment. Resentment leads to struggle and then fear. And what we can't win over, we eventually succumb to, giving ourselves up to it to ease the pain and for peace.

The drug dealer, the molester, and the thief usually did not start off admiring the victimizer; instead they started off by resenting the victimizer. Their resentment led to involvement and struggle. It lead to study and it led to a familiarity with the ways of the victimizer. Years later, the person, within whom has been evolving the identity of the victimizer, one day merges as the victimizer himself. 

Or the victim might continue with a battle against the victimizer—perhaps now as a policeman, social service worker, advocate, or attorney. But underneath, the identity of the victimizer is alive and well in the victim. The opposite external stance may be a reaction formation and an attempt to cover up and deny the truth about what victim has become inside.

Remember this—the soul need not identify with what has gone wrong inside. Identifying with the internal wrong as been our classic mistake. We tend to identify with error and then defend it as if it were our own true self and our own idea. The soul identifies so completely with the wrong internal identity that it thinks that what the identity thinks is its thought and what the identity feels are its feelings. Such is not the case.

The solution must now be obvious. Meditate. Stand back. Look at it, observe it. Put a little distance between yourself and it. Shrink from it and cleave to the Light of Truth. 

By identifying with the Creator, you no longer need identify with what has gone wrong with you. And how do we identify with the Creator? By loving Truth. By loving innocence. By believing the Truth. By yearning for the Creator. By meditating for mental distance from error. 

Do not defend any of "your" wrongs. In each and every moment, immediately acknowledge error which the Light shows you. Do not defend the error, do not struggle with it. Do not seek to make yourself innocent. Instead—cast the entire burden of your salvation upon the Lord.