Beloved seekers of the inward Light,
There arises in the unawakened heart a fierce and familiar fever. We know it well. It is the urge to seek revenge.
When pain enters this life, the ego, that small self that believes itself to be this body and this name, reaches outward and names a source. This one issued my wound. And then it labors to return the same measure, or greater. In that movement it believes it will regain what was lost: control, dignity, power.
Yet I tell you by Gnosis, the power it seeks to reclaim was never actually taken by another. It was only veiled by the narrow sight of anger itself, the sight that cannot see beyond the limitations of the material world.
Anger contracts the vision.
This is its nature. In the Authoritative Teaching (NHC VI,3) it is written that when the soul is bound in wrath, she becomes blind, and she forgets her origin. Anger makes the whole of reality shrink until there is only one figure left - the one who injured. In that constriction, the material realm appears absolute. Harm done to the body or to the name becomes the final fact. Power is measured only by the ability to inflict or to withhold.
The ego, blinded, forgets what the Codices never forget: that what can be taken by another hand was never your true possession.
The divine spark within cannot be diminished by any external act. It remains, untouched, even while the surface of the life is torn.
As it is revealed in the Apocryphon of John (NHC II,1) - the Light is in the darkness, and though the Archons sought to seize it, they could not lay hold of the spark, for the spark is not composed of the things that hands can touch.
To believe otherwise is to accept the Archons' accounting as the whole of being, an accounting in which every wound must be balanced by a counter-wound, and every loss of control must be restored by force.
Revenge is the attempt to write that false accounting into flesh once more.
By extending one's pain to the perceived source, the ego seeks to reverse the flow, to stand again as the one who decides rather than the one who receives. Yet the act does not restore. It multiplies the very substance it would escape.
In the Gospel of Philip (NHC II,3) the Teacher says: "Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable." When we return darkness for darkness, we do not escape darkness. We confirm our marriage to it.
The pain that was personal becomes the shared currency of the lower world. The anger that narrowed the sight is strengthened by the deed. And the soul remains bound to the same limited field in which power is forever contested and never secured. What was lost was never the spark. What was lost was only the clarity that knows the spark cannot be lost. Awakened sight dissolves the premise. . When the inner eye opens, the material world is seen for what it is: a realm of shifting forms, of causes and effects that touch the outer life but cannot reach the Origin.
No hand can issue the true diminishment of the soul, for as the Gospel of Truth (NHC I,3) proclaims, "...since forgetfulness came into existence because the Father was not known, if the Father comes to be known, forgetfulness will not exist from that moment on."
No outer hand can take your belonging in the Pleroma.
And the one who appears as the source of your injury? That one is likewise veiled, caught perhaps in the same narrow anger, acting from the same contracted vision. The Gospel of Thomas (NHC II,2), Logion 70 whispers to us: "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
To meet that sleeping brother or sister with further contraction is only to confirm our shared blindness.
We must meet one another with the clear recognition: What cannot be taken needs no revenge to defend it.
The Path therefore does not counsel the suppression of feeling. Nor does it ask for the performance of a piety which pretends the wound was never felt. That is not Gnosis. That is masquerade.
It invites the deeper seeing.
That the drive to revenge is itself the last clinging of the ego to a power that was always illusory. When anger is allowed to be felt without being obeyed, the contraction begins to loosen. The figure of the other loses its absolute weight. The material limitations remain real within their own order, yet they no longer define the measure of the self.
In that loosening, another movement appears. Not the extension of pain, but the simple refusal to continue the chain.
Such refusal is not weakness, Beloved. It is not passivity.
It is the recovery of the power that was never absent: the power of the spark to remain itself, unextended into further shadow. It is what Thomas calls the bringing forth.
So let the narrow sight be named for what it is.
Let the urge to extend the wound be recognized as the ego's last attempt to govern a world it cannot govern, a world made by the craftsman who said "I am God and there is no other" (Apocryphon of John, NHC II,1).
And let the awakened eye, when it opens, rest in this truth: no outer hand can issue the loss of what is inward and eternal. In that rest the cycle ends. Not by victory over another, but by the quiet return of sight to the one who had forgotten that the Light was never in the keeping of the material world.
May the anger which blinds become the very place where sight is restored. The spark remains. The accounting of revenge was never the true measure. Open eyed, seek the truths of the Light,
- Pastor Mark Rubinoff