Bondage and Freedom

Author(s): Chitrabhanu
Publisher: Divine Knowledge Society

Page 23

his wife and children mercilessly, he quarrels violently with the neighbours over trifles. His ungovernable rage makes him do savage deeds and some day he may beat a man to death or knife him. He is found guilty of man-slaughter or murder and given a life sentence. Is it not his anger, unschooled, unrestrained, that is responsible for this? It separates him for ever from his dear ones, from all mankind. because he is a menace to society.
The man with a disciplined mind can keep his anger under control..It is not as if he knew no anger or that he was never given the cause for being angry. But even when greatly provoked, he governs his mounting anger and finally masters it.
As dangerous as anger, are envy and revenge. When a man's heart is filled with envy because someone has marched ahead of him in life or when it is filled with revenge because someone has done him some real or imagined wrong, his passion knows no bounds and leads him into doing dastardly deeds, brutal deeds, and sends him to jail.
Greed, anger, envy, malice-it is these passions that undo a man. They make him forget his humanity; they cannot be seen, they are our invisible-and therefore, all the more dangerous-enemies. We must fight them down from the earliest stage. We must rid ourselves of them else they will get the better of us, and finally destroy us.
We all have desires-none of us is free from desires;
14