From the stronghold of your soul, chase all your foes away: ambition, anger, hatred

Book excerpt: Anger is one of three self-destructing states of mind; the other two are worldly love and delusion. Bhagavan Das posits Anger in the mid-point of the not-Self continuum: Hate towards Equals gives rise to Anger; towards Superiors, to Fear; towards Inferiors, to Scorn. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. Socrates defines Anger as raging and seething of the soul. Aristotle, as boiling of the blood around the heart. Plato suggests that though pain, fear, anger, and other feelings are given to men by necessity, “if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously.” In order to help men, the Gods protected the heart by surrounding it with the soft and cool thicket of lungs to chill out the heat of anger. “Dig not fire with a sword but by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect,” advises Pythagoras. If Love is the fever of the species, Anger is the self-consuming fire. Indeed it is life atoms that a man in a blind passion throws off, unconsciously, and he does it quite as effectively as a mesmeriser who transfers them from himself to any object consciously and under the guidance of his will. Anger is an insurmountable obstacle between reality and illusion. That is why abstinence from Anger is one of Duty’s ten virtues. “Act then, all ye who fail and suffer, act like him; and from the stronghold of your Soul, chase all your foes away — ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire — when even you have failed” says the Voice of the Silence. To take the Kingdom of God by violence is Kabbalistic parlance for reaching Nirvana by artificially-induced conditions. To Dare, to Will, to Achieve, and to keep Silent, is the motto of the true Occultist. “The science of the gods is mastered by violence; it must be conquered, and does not give itself.” One key is the sacrifice of Prometheus who, by allowing men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, transformed the most perfect of animals on earth into a potential god, making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” We cannot attain Adeptship and Nirvana, Bliss and the “Kingdom of Heaven,” unless we link ourselves indissolubly with our Rex Lucis, the Lord of Splendour and of Light, our immortal God within us.