When we are hurt and disappointed by others, without realising it we may cultivate, somewhere in our imagination and unconscious mind, fantasies of their suffering and destruction. First resentment and anger grow in our hearts, and then a hidden wish for revenge. In the depths of this resentment and aversion, Ahriman opens the gates of darkness and hell upon our hearts.

If you think there is no Ahriman of anger within each of us, once again observe your passing thoughts with awareness: the moments when you are hurt and allow resentment to grow in your heart, and when you create revenge in your imagination.

If you imagine that the guards of Auschwitz, the fighters of ISIS and the Taliban, and the hundreds and thousands like them across history are made of a substance different from ours, you have not yet opened your eyes to your own dark side.

Talk with people and you will discover how far, in their hidden fantasies and in their aversion toward those against whom they bear resentment, they can cultivate fantasies of violence and crime in the mind, extending them first through imagination and then through speech. And there is always resentment at injustice and a hatred born of anger that serves to justify the anger and violence they commit.

The image of falling into anger is the image of a human being who once carried ideals—ideals destroyed somewhere in life through an encounter with the darkness of the world. Despair, resentment, anger toward others, and seeing oneself as a victim are the feelings that follow. In the end, the person surrenders to resentment toward others and hatred of life, and through that surrender betrays first of all the ideals once held in the heart.

At the root of many murders and even genocides lies a profound sense of victimhood and resentment, because only such a force can make violence, in its most extreme and demonic form, appear sacred. This is the sanctification of demonic violence that can carry any revolution toward mass and collective executions, and any war toward genocide. If you ask war criminals and the Robespierres of every revolution how they came to commit demonic crimes, they will tell you how deeply hurt and enraged they were by injustice and oppression. What they do not see is how that anger and resentment destroyed their highest ideal: justice and goodness.

Think back over your own past and over all the resentment you hold toward those whom you believe have wronged you. What do you wish for them in your heart? Is it not true that the more anger and resentment from the past we carry within us, the less capacity we have to love in the present?

And so the blooming of a flower in our hands is only a mirage if our heart is a hell. This is precisely why aversion to evil must never be extended into aversion toward human beings we regard as evil. As Nietzsche is rendered here as saying:

“Whenever you stare into an abyss and a dark well, that darkness stares back into you in return. Therefore beware, lest in fighting the monster of darkness we ourselves become a monster.”

Aydin Areta