An Answer for Anger? | Steve Beckow

By Steve Beckow, May 3, 2025

(Golden Age of Gaia)

As a student of awareness, I began looking at anger this morning and decided that it was a response to not getting what we want.

So how do I go about short-circuiting that?

The ultimate answer is: Just stop.

But let’s look at the interim answer, anger for beginners.

The assertiveness people would say one thing. The spiritual people another.

My own personal choice is to reduce my wants.  To want less. And to never let a material possession come between me and my friends.

Reducing one’s wants, in my books, is a well-respected approach to Realization.

Remember the passage, “I the Lord am a jealous God”? God will allow us all manner of what the Mother calls “scenic detours.” But, if we want to know Her, we have to be finished with detours.

We have to want the Lord Our God, as Jesus said, with all out hearts and all our minds and all our souls. (1) Not forever, but just until we realize Her.

Ramakrishna used to say that yearning is like the rosy dawn, after which comes the sun:

“Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn, out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.” (2)

“A man does not have to suffer any more if God, in His Grace, removes his doubts and reveals Himself to him. But this grace descends upon him only after he has prayed to God with intense yearning of heart and practised spiritual discipline.” (3)

Serving the Mother is also “practicing spiritual discipline.” The discipline is called karma yoga, seva, or service.

Not to worry. The vibrations have risen since then. The spiritual journey is easier today. And it’ll get easier and easier to Ascension.

***

Let’s move from anger to realization.

If we think about it, love of God draws us near but knowledge of God brings the final mergence with Her, is it not? When we realize God at the ultimate level, we become One. The last act is one of awareness, knowledge, or Realization.

As an aside, we’re born into the physical domain to sharpen our discrimination between the Real and the unreal. As Krishna tells us:

“Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse the mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life’s only purpose.” (4)

Lose discrimination and you miss incarnated life’s only purpose: To sharpen our ability to recognize the Real when it appears to us or arises in us, as separate from the unreal.

Years ago, when I was writing about this, I used to say that the path Ramakrishna is describing is to discriminate between the Real and the unreal, detach from the unreal, and devote oneself to the Real.  (Serving the Mother is devoting oneself to the Real.)

Ramakrishna confirms it:

“The gist of the whole thing is that one must develop passionate yearning for God [devotion] and practise discrimination [between the Real and the unreal] and renunciation [of all but God – detachment]. (5)

I believe the renunciation is renunciation by the heart and mind. It doesn’t mean we can’t have furniture.

So for me addressing my anger involves a combination of just stopping and reducing my wants. This is easier for me than for most because, frist, I’m an urban monk and, second, I’m privileged, after my heart opening, to actually know what higher-dimensional love is like. As I said years ago, once you’ve experienced it, you work for it ever after, it’s that wonderful.

Footnotes

(1) Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. (Matthew 22:37.)

(2) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in Swami Nikhilananda, t***s., The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1978; c1942, 83. (Hereafter GSR.)

(3) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in GSR, 116.

(4) Sri Krishna in Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, t***s., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 42.

(5) Paramahansa Ramakrishna in GSR, 183.)