Page 39 - Mystic Pathways through the Bible

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another’s personality is actually the Divine Self lulled into inertia or sleep. Your task is to adore God, no matter how much God may be sleeping within that individual. Such adoration requires patience and endurance. Those who appear to behave in a hateful way have within them the same potentiality, the same sweetness of the Self that you have. It is by awakening their minds to the perception of their own potentiality that you will most effectively help them conquer the defects of their personality.
Crudeness should never be answered with crudeness. Cruelty can never be corrected by cruelty. The goal in virtuous human relations is to awaken others, not to crush them. Strive to in uence others by virtue, not by hatred; melt the hearts of others by your righteousness, not by proving that you can match or even surpass their maliciousness.
When you force another person to do as you want, there is no ful llment in his heart. There is only agony and insecurity. Unfortunately, thousands of families and businesses maintain “harmony” at home or at work through threats that generate fear. But there is no real virtue that arises due to such methods. When you terrify another person into a state of passive virtue, you are treating him as if he were a circus lion. In the circus, bloodthirsty lions are kept as meek as sheep under the power of the electrical whip. However, their meekness is not authentic.