“We come into the field of this Mercy, on one level, by exposing a given error, and thereby invoking the Truth hidden behind it—but I could expose spiritual error until Doomsday, and never really know, in the marrow of my bones, that God holds the universe in the palm of His hand, that all acts are God’s acts, and all God does is good. Only if I make every criticism of another’s ideas an occasion of death to self can I move toward this knowledge.
“But how can scoring points on one’s opponent with the sword of the discursive intellect be a death to self? If I win, I feel good about myself; I feel powerful; my ego gets fat and sleek. The only way I know to dedicate intellectual jihad to the spiritual Path is to admit that criticizing other people’s ideas causes pain to both self and other; and then to feel that pain completely; and finally to let it burn out those places in one’s soul where the errors in question, and consequently the need to criticize those errors, had taken root. It is to interpret esoterically, and in line with the rules of the greater jihad, the doctrine of Jesus that ‘he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword.’” — Charles Upton
BEATING THE POISONED DRUM 