Monthly Lessons Archive 2009

WANT THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH
     Your exercise is to draw a line down the center of a piece of paper and put Time Life as the heading on the left-hand side and Eternal Life on the right. Time life is legitimate in that you have a body and it lives in time and grows older, but you can’t be a free, happy, content, innocent, good human being if that’s all you have.
     Go out of here tonight wanting one thing, the Spirit of Truth, which is the only thing that can do something real for you.

REMINDER TO LIVE ABOVE THIS WORLD
     Here’s your exercise. When conversing with others look above their heads about a yard or so as a reminder that you’re above this world because you’re with the Spirit of Truth instead of the falsehood that you loved previously. It will remind you where you should live all the time — above the world.

WALK AWAY FROM PAIN
     What bothered you today that you brought here inside you? Are you willing to do something different and see through the hoax? If so then you have to take spiritual action which means walking away from what you’ve protected so foolishly — the cave of pain. You are going to any time during your day break that emotional stabbing that you felt inside. You're going to interrupt it and say in a spiritual voice, “I don’t want to associate with you anymore, and with the help of Truth itself I am not going to.”

NOTICE WHEN YOU MAKE DEMANDS ON OTHERS
     Always do these projects I assign to you. It’s essential and part of your work. Your homework is to know where you get mad, indignant, worried, angry and irritated in any way at all. The other person that you're  around makes you nervous doesn’t he? He’s glum or she doesn’t have a very pleasant facial expression and you're worried she might suddenly screech at you and you'll get your feelings hurt.
     You will notice that you are putting a demand on that man and woman that they treat you nicer. This must be detected by you.

FIND SOMETHING PERMANENT
     I want you to do good hard work with the following. Inform yourself as a sincere soldier in the army of Heaven that you are going to stop your destructive self-deceit as it begins to verbalize itself when you talk to someone else. You are not going to unload your junk onto their living room table, into their minds. The reason for doing that is you want something more than this very impermanent life, you want to find out what’s really permanent.

YOUR OBJECTIVE IS TO LIVE RIGHTLY
     Your objective and my objective is not to win over the world, not to force the world to conform to what we want it to do. Our objective is not to get anything from the world but to live rightly right now whatever situation we are in.

BE CONSCIOUS IN THE MOMENT
     You lose an object around the house because you place it in an unusual place and then can’t remember where. We’ve forgotten where we placed ourselves. If at the moment of any action, you know you’re performing it consciously, that would help you to remember it. Now apply that to your spiritual life so that you know where you are, what you’re doing, thinking, feeling and saying at every moment. Then you will not lose yourself.

UPON RISING ASSIGN A SIMPLE EXERCISE
     This exercise is to assign to yourself first thing in the morning a little simple exercise, which is something you always do in the morning. For instance it could be walking through a doorway or picking up your coffee cup. “I’m going to notice myself the next time I pick up the pencil off the desk.”
     Whether you succeed or fail, give yourself the next exercise, and the very right idea of doing this will help you to remember the failed ones because you’ll be keeping this proper work memory inside of you alive. Do this all day long, one ahead of you at all times, then watch how your work memory increases.

BE CONSCIOUSLY PASSIVE
     Sometime try being seated at home and not trying to promote an action. Sit down on the couch and be so passive, and conscious that you're passive, that there’s nothing in you screaming for you to do something, say something, think something, feel something. It will terrify you at the start —  you're not used to this different kind of a world. The world you are living in is a world which demands what you call action, which is simply uncontrolled force running through you and then expressing itself in the outer world.
     Just sit quietly at home and don’t try to do anything such as yielding to that impulse to talk to yourself. You will simply quietly sit there and see what is going on inside you so you can see the great tugs, the forces that have preyed on you all your life and you didn’t know it. We’re trying to catch the thieves and robbers in the actual act of robbing us.

STOP LOVING UNNECESSARY PAIN
     A single woman may think that the woman who has a man in her life has an advantage over her, and because she doesn’t she’s at a disadvantage. That’s called loving unnecessary pain. A man has his own particular envies. Maybe you’ve been a flop, gentlemen, in money making and you’re jealous of other men who seem to have more. Ladies and gentlemen, you are not placed as an inhabitant upon this planet to make money or acquire anything whatever except spiritual growth.

NEVER BE LURED OFF THE PATH
     I instruct you to never be lured off the straight upward path with anything whatever. Anything that lures you is wrong for you, and you can see your attention and interest being stolen by your own thoughts and by something attractive on the outside.
     Please stay awake at every second no matter where you are going or what you are doing and see how something is stealing your mind and trying to get you off that straight upward path that could bring you to your higher nature.

CRACK THE CEMENT WALL OF FALSE SECURITIES
     There’s only one way to crack through the cement wall that you have surrounded yourself with. I'm going to give it to you now and I want you to remember it and try to connect it and practice it. There’s only one way to break out of your building false securities, which is to suffer knowingly, intentionally, without looking for an answer. Now there it is. You can save yourself years of work if you take that home, write it in your own words and examine it.

START DOING IT FOR YOURSELF
     Somewhere you're going to have to start doing it for yourself, you're going to have to start taking these exercises and doing them right in your own home, right in that office and so on. If you don’t, the invisible,  poisonous fumes in the air of society are going to take you over and make you sick until you're not able to recognize them any more. We’re here to expose them and to get out into the clear pure air where the sanity of Truth and decency exist.

PUT SPIRITUAL DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND THE WORLD
     As you practice this exercise of putting spiritual, psychological distance between you and the world, that very distance is what destroys the influence, the evil influence, of the world over you. It cannot present its lollipops to you any more because you're not a child any more eager for them.

USE CONCENTRATED ATTENTION
     Let’s spend the rest of today with a special concentrated attention on noting what your mind does in response to an exterior event. Perhaps something unexpected or something you didn’t want to happen did happen. Concentrate on seeing how you insist that a negative response is necessary and you think you have to do it. There is never a necessity for you to harm yourself with any kind of negative response to any challenge whatsoever.

IT’S UNNECESSARY TO THINK WRONG THOUGHTS
      It is not necessary for you to think wrong thoughts. Now let’s find out what a wrong thought is. A wrong thought is one which has any self-harm in it such as hating someone. By the way did you notice your state when you had that dislike toward another person or did you just falsely enjoy it?
     If you want to grow, it is unnecessary for you to ever think a thought that hurts you. Now, don’t you think that it’s important for you to pursue that one thought, which is an invitation for the higher energy to teach you? Don’t you think it’s vital for you to understand in depth what it means? For example, aren’t you eager from now on to examine your thoughts as they arise and notice, for instance, a depressed thought, one of which could be that you've been left out and also that others have it better than you?

LIVE IN THE OTHER WORLD
     This exercise is to write down in mind and on paper the simple phrase “Live in the other world.” This means that a truly spiritual human being with a physical body living on this earth alternates between the liberty and knowledge of the other world and the mental rightness of this world.
     I have said there is such a thing as right thoughts, and when you're in thought you're not in consciousness of the spiritual world. For example when you're reading a book you don’t know you're reading it until you break it and remember that you read the book, right?
     Here’s an example regarding approaching the other world. Whatever you're doing, walking down the street, conversing with someone, thinking, you will find out what world you're in and interrupt it and go to the higher world.

THE LADDER TO HEAVEN
     If you will allow God to be your teacher, instead of your thoughts, and if you will forsake the false prophets within you, that is the prayer and the invitation, which when you're hearing a very penetrating Truth talk, you will allow a degree of inner silence and not permit yourself to make a quick automatic mechanical reaction. When you choose the moment of silence, as short as that flash of light is, there will never again for the rest of your life be any doubt about the existence of something higher than ordinary deceitful thought. That’s the first step on the ladder to Heaven.

BE HONEST ABOUT YOUR INNER CONDITION
     Wherever you are tomorrow, whatever you do, put the observation on yourself and just notice your inner condition. Notice what kind of person you are inside. Are you irritable, sneering, bragging, and so on? Then see what kind of thought went through you. This self-honesty alone can save you.

LEAVE PEOPLE ALONE
     The next time you are tempted to make a nuisance of yourself by calling on someone by phone or in person or writing a letter, in which you’re talking all about yourself anyway, don’t do it. Just stay in your own room, as uncomfortable as it is, and you'll find one day it will be comfortable.

A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT
     When you leave class this morning take the wisdom in this room with you, and when you fail in your spiritual memory, here’s what you will do. You will remember why your candle went out. That means of course that you felt bad, felt hurt or you had a regret over an opportunity that you missed. When you put together all the lessons, what a beautiful moment for you when less and less your candle goes out because you are more and more living from the inspiration from Heaven.

THE CAUSE
     Every time you feel hurt or you have a hostile thought, you will know that it wasn’t caused by the world outside but by the world inside which you have preferred.

ALL YOU NEED
     Has it ever occurred to you that the nature of your nature depends upon what happens when you see something and then how you react to it? Please start to know right now that you can have a new kind of reaction to what you see ten thousand times a day. You can see anything and you will not drag it into you and allow it to become a problem to you because you have no need to try to get anything from it. You don’t need anything. Your foundation of sanity and of spiritual rightness and goodness, that’s all you need in this whole world.

THE MORE AND MORE METHOD
     Please remember this interesting exercise for the rest of the year. You will remember it because I’ve given it a title, which is The More and More Method and here’s what it means:

     The more neurotic he is, the more he calls himself normal, right?
     The more deceitful he is, the more he calls himself true.
     The more ridiculous he is, the more he calls himself dignified.

     Let that process sink in, use it outwardly and inwardly. You can make tremendous gains in understanding your inner nature by seeing where you like to boast the most, where you like to give yourself an identity.
     I’ve given you three examples and now make up your own list.

CONSUME YOUR FOOD CONSCIOUSLY
    Today you're going to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. Your exercise is to know that you're at the breakfast table, the lunch table and the evening dinner table consuming your food. You will know you're there instead of eating and thinking about something else. Keep your mind where your body is. The purpose of that and the rich benefit of it will come to you as you practice it.