Monthly Lessons Archive 2012

GOD IS IN CHARGE
     Stop indulging in that weakness of being afraid, of worrying about, what is happening to the world. God is in charge of everything, including Satan.
     You are not part of this world. You are not responsible for this world. God put you here on earth to develop, to come close to him personally.
     The Sacred Spirit knows what to do about the darkness around you. “I am not going to spend the rest of my days at the mercy of someone else or of the headlines. I don’t have to be afraid of anything. I just have to  be interested in understanding what is going on. I’m going to see where this voice, these terrors are coming from — inside me.”
     Fear is a false power, a magnet that attracts unwanted events. Events have no power except what we give them. Understand that the exterior world has no influence on you at all. Remember, worry is darkness disguising itself as light. There is no one and nothing to fight.

RIGHT HABIT
    Make a concentrated effort at remembering a simple task. When I call for the break, you will rise from your chair knowing that you rose. You won’t do it without thinking about it — you will do it while thinking about it so that you know you got out of your chair. Between now and the time I call for the break, you will repeatedly remind yourself of this task. After you have done it, you will do a second and a third task and thereby gain momentum. You will find that, if you practice this, you will open up the door quite consciously because you have a right habit of reminding yourself what you have to do.
     (Even though these instructions were given in a classroom setting, you can find other similar settings, such as at a meeting or a family gathering where you can know you are getting up from your chair.)

IT WAS MY FAULT
    Happiness can only be ours when there is obedience to spiritual laws.
    The law of self-responsibilityis a law of life. You have to get suspicious that you are a very irresponsible human being. Then let that suspicion lead you to absolute final conviction that you never have been responsible; you’ve never been responsible for your soul’s salvation.
    You and every other human being were born into this world under a certain unbreakable law of personal responsibility. You alone are responsible for what you say and you will get the results of what you say and do.
    Here’s how to begin to get your own life back. Think of the following phrase as your password from now on: “It was my fault — it was my fault.” Now, don’t you ever say anything but that — never say “It’s your fault” or “They told me what to do.” No more of that childishness, that cowardice, that abandonment of God’s principles of self-reliance, of self-correction.
    When you say “It’s my fault” and mean it, that gives you a clue to further thinking. If it’s my fault then there’s something wrong with me and that’s where I have to put my attention instead of screaming out,  “Look what you did to me!”
    A man and woman live together for many, many years and they break up and each says it’s the other one’s fault. Each is lying.
    Can you take it that everything has been your fault in that marriage, in that friendship, in anything? Can you take it that it’s been nothing but your fault? From day one you didn’t say “It’s my fault,” you said, “It’s your fault” and you continued and got hurt by that bad relationship all because you disobeyed the law of personal responsibility which always means “I will see that it’s my fault and allow the correction to come in.” You’re going to have to do much better with that simple marvelous moralistic statement that self-responsibility is a law of life.
    The masses have decided to group together and go more insane day by day. Nobody wants to understand it but you will from now on. I instruct you, from now on, to love ordinary goodness, which is the same as loving God and it’s the same as loving individual personal responsibility which will grow into natural  strength.
    Remember: Password — It was my fault; I will see that it was my fault and allow the correction to come in.

SELF-HONESTY
    Say, “I don’t know how to straighten myself out. I don’t know how to be happy. I’m just lost altogether; I don’t know how to uplift my nature.” See that another part of you doesn’t mean it at all. It is essential not to try to be sincere, but to see that you have no sincerity at all in saying that. Use this exercise over the years so you can see there is a lying part underneath because in the next five minutes you go out and do something to make yourself happy. Then you will see you have been lying to yourself all your life about wanting to change. One day you will say it with the center inside and you’ll realize that there is no way you know how to rescue yourself. Then God will enter and teach you. Give up. When your will is no longer your will, then God’s will becomes yours.

CHANGE FAILURE INTO SUCCESS
     Here is a very important exercise. It will change everything. It will change failure into success if you do it constantly and remember that the object is to put yourself aside so that the new self can take over; so that the path is always lighted and you don’t fall down anymore. It is good and necessary to make your requests known to heaven, the request for you to be a new person, to have a new mind and a new spirit, but you can’t make the request known to heaven with a low nature, with a crabby mind. You can’t do that. It’s not going to reach heaven. Dark minds can’t reach the light of heaven. So I am going to give you a two-part  exercise. Oh, what a change it will make in your day and your whole life!
     1. Come awake. Do it now. Come awake. Set thought aside. Just know that you are here in this room. Don’t be thinking of anything in particular. Just be looking up here [where Vernon was]. Before you make your request known to heaven, come awake — not in a state of sleep, of anger, of worry, but wide awake! Your mind is as free as you can  make it. This is a good exercise. You come awake and then you make your  request to heaven. It has to be a right request.
     2. Your request to God is “Let your way be my way.” That includes everything. Remember now, it’s a two-part request. Oh, how many mechanical prayers go up all over the world; billions of them every day — useless, pointless, self-deceptive. Nothing happens. Aren’t you kind of glad you didn’t get some of the things you once prayed for?

LET GO!
    It is astonishingly possible for anyone to simply relax himself into becoming a new kind of human being. Let yourself dissolve, let go of the person you imagine you are. By letting go of the person he imagines he is, a man knows who he is at last. Let go of yourself when you do not feel like letting go. Be daring, courageous. Nothing harmful can happen by letting go of the artificial self, for as the daring know, only good can happen. When we walk away from ourselves even a little, by letting go and relaxing, new and pleasant feelings begin to take their place. Let go!

END TORMENTING THOUGHTS
     Work on this: As you go through your day and try to do your work, your mind is going to constantly bring up things to torment you with. Get to know how it operates. Be alert! Experiment: say NO! You must get firm and let those thoughts know they don’t belong here! Send them out to wherever they want to go. Stop being an unconscious human being. Stay wide awake. Come back again into the present moment. Tormenting thoughts know they will lose you if you just don’t think about what they want you to think about.

PONDER THESE POWERFUL TRUTHS

1. If you don’t know what to do about a problem, don’t do anything at all.
2. Stop criticizing and turn the arrow back on yourself. What you dislike so much in that other person is still unconscious in yourself.
3. You are deliberately going to be stunned by the idea that you are not alone.
4. To wake up is the same as putting yourself in the hands of God. Fight to stay awake.
5. You don’t have to do it by yourself! You don’t have to do it by yourself!
6. An external event does not cause a personal crisis. Rather, it reveals the crisis already within. Man is a slumbering crisis, like a ticking time bomb.
7. No matter how much you have failed in the past, direct your energies towards something higher.
8. Any time you are ready, just sit quietly at home and say “All is darkness.” You have to see that you can’t save yourself.

STAY IN THE PRESENT MOMENT
     MY AIM — From now on I will say to the mind, “I do not wish to be pulled away from the present moment anymore. From now on, I am in charge.” Whenever I am at my desk, or walking or driving, from now on you are not going to be lazy. You are going to stay in the present moment and remember something higher — not 10%, not 50%, but 100% attention in the present moment. You will know where you are and what you are doing. When you start to give me those old ways of thinking, I will remember where they lead and say, “No, that is not what I ordered! Sure, you will give me a fight, but the Truth is stronger than you are and from now on this is going to be a lot of fun. I will say to your sad stories, “This is not the Spirit of Truth.”

INTERRUPT THE MECHANICAL FLOW OF THE MIND
     My mind will do anything to keep itself going, which keeps me from finding my true self. Method to practice: Our part is to stay in the present moment. Truth will do the rest. The mind will do anything to keep itself going. Break thought. Interrupt the mechanical flow. When you do leave a void, a space, God, Truth, your True Self can come in. This gradually weakens the false self. The main thing is to work hard. Do not let a day go by without snapping the mind’s mechanicalness to become conscious and aware.

ANOTHER LIFE EXISTS FOR YOU
     Beyond the present you there is another life for you, and you, listening to the talk, are sensing the truth of what I just said but it’s very weak and timid, and you’re worried, so deeply concerned over what will happen to you if you go too far in the spiritual trip. What is happening to you now? You’re afraid something bad is going to happen to you — it’s happening to you now! Exercise: Sit quietly and say, “There is no need right now for me to be me.” That will confuse you because you don’t know what you’re talking about but you’re saying something right, something true, something good. That indicates that there is something beyond it which there is, and you will find it, live it, know it when you know absolutely that your good is bad. You are never going to ‘make it’ because you don’t exist as you think you do. Fall in love with something that is really magnificent. Right spiritual method to let the new appear: If you sit quietly amidst the ruins and wrecks of your own life, and you just sit there quietly with all the broken lumber and glass all around you; if you just sit there and do nothing you will attract God. You will attract the heavenly kingdom. After all the wreckages you are willing at last, after all these years, to let God be God.

WITHDRAW YOU FROM YOU
     Sit in that room every day for years and years and years, and obey the one small but all-powerful and all-compassionate instruction that this is what you are supposed to do. Just sit there in the chair, and as nervous and anxious and worried and scared as you get, endure it unto the very end.
     When [you do this] the evil forces — [which are] 95% of your inner state — all come together, knowing and laughing with sick glee at how easy it is to fool anyone, no matter how well educated, no matter how famous, no matter if he’s called an intellectual. How easy it is to fool the great and the wealthy and the famous as well as anyone else; and it’s a fact, billions of human beings at this moment have absolutely refused to do what Truth wants them to do, which is to sit in the chair and see what happens when you withdraw you from you.
     You have to act on the little bit of truth you first have and I have been giving you ways to act on it.

ESCAPE SELF-CONDEMNATION
     I want to talk to you a little bit about what happens all along the way in regard to hostile assaults on you. The devil doesn’t want to lose anyone to God. He spends his entire time to making sure that the masses don’t escape and the masses don’t escape. That should be abundantly clear to you that they’re not going to make it. And you will be a target for a long, long while, but first I want to reassure you, if you will simply put your choice on the side of learning from a mistake, from yielding to temptation, if you will simply say, “I'm hardly a perfect human being, I recognize that, but I'm going to do something different. I'm going to realize that no matter how awful a thought I thought — and I'm sure glad people couldn’t read my mind when I thought that sex thought, e.g. — no matter how bad it is, I realize that in my spiritual infancy, in my ignorance, I had no strength or wisdom to do anything but fall down before it. I'm weak, that’s all.” Oh, do you know, do you realize that God has been waiting for you to say that? “I'm weak.”
     All right, don’t you dare spend one second in berating yourself, hating yourself, calling yourself dumb or stupid, because you’ve fallen for the trick of the devil to give you an identity of being a bad person, and now you’ve been deceived again. No, you do something else the next time you make a mistake. First of all, you’re going to know you made it because you feel awful, uncomfortable, maybe a bit ashamed that you were so weak and yielded to the temptation. If you insist on calling yourself a wicked sinner, if you insist on calling yourself evil, God can’t save you. God demands that you get rid of your self-hatred because that is another identity and it is at enmity with God. From now on, you’re simply going to realize that you cannot ever, ever be good, strong, or wise of yourself. Listen to me, you do not have a separate individual self inside of you that can be wise or that needs to be wise. You, I, can’t be intelligent. Get rid of the idea that you are a container of wisdom, of strength, of power, etc. You are not. Make your determination that, no matter what you do, you’re never ever going to stop in the identity that ‘I'm too far gone’. If you say you’re too far gone, you’ll make that true and you will be too far gone; and that’s the excuse that wicked sinners have for continuing to worship their own egotism.

RELAX AND START OVER
     Oh, why don’t we relax right now? You’ve just struck a blow, to use a military term, against the general  called Satan. He didn’t want you to do that. He wanted you to stay tense and nervous and all wrapped up in your sick little self. Congratulations! You did something right even if you did it under orders of the Spiritual Captain which is Truth. Someday you will have direct contact with the Captain, with Truth, and while you’re down at the shop, or having dinner, or even while you’re conversing with someone, all of a sudden, because you’re listening and receptive to the Captain’s invitation to relax and start life over right now, you’ll be able to do it from yourself without being told.

YOU DON’T NEED HOSTILITY
     Get this down and think about it. Hostility serves no natural need. That means I don’t have to have it. I thought I did. Yes, you did! The next time the temptation to be hostile comes up, remember this: Self-will is tormenting. Hostility is self-will. It is not good to be gloomy, depressed. They injure you. You let in the enemy. No More! There is no necessity at all for you to be sick and miserable over anything. I said anything! It is never necessary, it serves no natural need for you to argue and fight about anything. You don’t have to do it and you must stop doing it.
     The rules on the heavenly ‘steamship-line’ are absolute. You must abandon your self-will because you see where it hasn’t got you. Two choices: continue getting mad when you don’t get your own way, continue with your sourness, demanding your ticket be honored. It is not going to be honored on the heavenly steamship. Saying “I’m right and you’re wrong,” it all must collapse. The internal collapse must come. You must not have another word of argument, of hostility, of aggression, of violence. You don’t need them. You think you do. From this moment on you will work; you will realize it is never necessary to be an enemy of yourself with all these horrible attitudes and words that go on inside … because Truth, God has won the  battle for you. You don’t have to fight. All you have to do is admit you can’t win of yourself and when you do that then God’s victory is yours.

ABANDON THOUGHT
    No more trying to figure it out on the level of the intellect. You must put more attention on the fact that you are thinking your life away. The very abandonment of thought is the whole thing.

LOVE THE CREATOR, NOT THE CREATION
     Something that hates you, hates all of humanity, is trying to get you off the path. For example, dark forces take over the way you talk. They want you to get excited over lifelessness. Exercise: Every time you talk to anyone you will know you are talking. Always make it hard on yourself. If you can jump six feet, put it up to eight feet.
     Story summary: Wealthy executive made money easily; felt satisfied with himself. Then a strange discomfort came over him. He felt a strange malicious presence in the room; became worried at what was happening to him. In front of him, fog formed a figure which spoke, “I’ve come to collect.”
     We’re here to break the contract we’ve made with Satan. At the same time you make the prayer to be someone outside the Kingdom, you suffer from it. Human beings know not what they are doing when they want the rewards of this world. Understand you are now praying for a very serious mistake in your life. What did you pray for so you could give yourself out as a solid and lasting human being? We demanded, craved, conspired for it. Set our conscience aside to get it. Feeling yourself to be a failure is Satan making you suffer. Where do you now feel like a failure? For example, you were cruel in the past — failed as kindly, failed the children, that other human being … a very definite pain in there. That is a false foundation but the devil doesn’t want you to see that. He wants to torment you. You don’t have to suffer as you think you do.
     Give up trying to be a successful human being because you see its folly and want to succeed spiritually.  Our ignorance causes us to go out to find answers to our feeling of ‘unfinishedness’ (for example, screamed persecution). Order: you are never again going to scream injustice, to say others owe you something. If you do, you’ll sign a contract with Satan. God is 100% powerful. The problem is you want to enforce the contract because you still believe in its rewards. Don’t believe heartache, hatred, etc., is good for you. You’ve simply been thinking wrong.
     Love the Creator, not the creation. The Creator is everything. The world is to use temporarily. Remember the Creator. When good yourself, everything will be right outside. God help me every day to keep the integrity of my spirit, to stay pure and innocent right in the middle of this world. The Spirit of Truth will appear to you and teach you all you need to know and he never, ever goes away.

LET GO OF YOURSELF
     You are afraid not to believe in yourself. You go over and over the point that you are unnecessarily and destructively believing in something that doesn’t exist in the first place. When you know that you have conjured up and manufactured yourself, then you will be willing to drop yourself, to let go of yourself. Study this over and over and allow it to work for you.

TRUE SECURITY
     Here’s an exercise. You are from now on to know absolutely that your life is nothing but one or more forms of anxiety and suffering. Start with the simple fact of admitting, ‘Yes, I am afraid,’ which you are. That would be an elementary lesson in listening to the voice that is trying to correct you.
     Your pain is always your responsibility. Now stop accusing someone else. Feeling bad, when persistently and honestly studied, is the only thing that can lead you to feeling good. Feeling good is so foreign to you that you fear it. Anxiety has deceived you into thinking it is necessary for your survival. NO! NO! NO! You don’t have real life now! Your True Voice, the spirit instructor inside, can never lead you into feeling bad. Obeying the instruction of goodness makes you feel good, which is peaceful, quiet. Do you know what an enemy you make of silence? Silence and the true spiritual life are the same thing. You can take this one talk and listen over and over and go all the way from the fiery dry desert to the nice pleasant mountain top where the air is pure, where nothing can ever knock you off. Once you are really there, God is also there. Spiritual security is true security. Find that.

LET THE CRISIS SAVE YOU
     Point the finger at yourself and you’ll be pointing it at the person who always does it. We are striving for a nature that is pure. No longer want to be touchy. Rightness needs no defense. See the law! You and you alone are the originator of everything that hurts you. Everything! If you’re concerned you don’t have a lot of money, you can cancel it out. If you’re easily offended, you lead a frozen existence. You are sparing yourself the crisis that could save you. Welcome all the pains the world can give you.

END ALL PROBLEMS
     For everything that happens to us, there is a cause. If, for example, someone says something to us in an angry tone, that is the cause. The effect is how we react. If we react mechanically and get angry back, we have created a new cause on the same destructive level. But if we stay awake, we have a choice. Instead of getting angry back, which is making our life go downhill, we can put into action right then a new cause. This is what leads to a New Life. If we don’t change it is our own fault.
     Whatever the problem, if I neither attack nor defend the problem, if I remain suspended and do not react, I am creating a new cause which in turn creates a new result or effect. This is hard, hard work.
     To make it clearer, as you stay awake and watch yourself — your thoughts and emotions — notice the instant you see negativity, then say “NO! I’m not living from you anymore!” — not from fear, anxiety, fear of finances, sadness and depression, any negativity, vibration, the devil. Make notes on that and put them around the house and in your pocket. Then after a few years, right feelings begin to take over. “No! I’m not going to be afraid of death anymore!” Of finances, bad health, etc. Don’t talk with the devil.
     This is all a necessary stage. You will rise above the idea that there’s someone there. Learn to scream it in a new way — at the top of your voice, NO!

PRACTICE NON-RECOGNITION OF PAIN
     Practice non-recognition of PAIN as a power. Starting right now, you will no longer give authority to sly stabs of pain and anguish and worry. You will no longer be so immersed in your own life that pain will be able to get away with its hit-and-run tactics. No longer let pain get away with its pretense of power over you. In Truth, it has none and never had power or ability to do what it wants to do with you.
     Make it clear to yourself how little you have to do with your own life, your actions or what happens to you. Make it clear that something has taken control of you and that it can’t have control of you anymore. You must want the facts to come first over anything else. The facts are strength if you want them to be. All facts about your life are your friends.

DROP PHONY SELF-IMAGES OF BEING NICE
     As a daily exercise I want you to see what a petty annoyance you are to other people. You can’t see the big ones yet; go for the little ones. You’re so compulsive, chatter-mouthing yourself, so eager to release your built-up tension over the years by being apart from Reality, that you interrupt them while they’re talking. That’s called being rude and you didn’t know you were rude. You’re to make a list, and it will be a long list of how you are a petty annoyance to other people. One little step at a time, you can’t take very much exposure at a time. How about having a sour face and manner? How about when talking, you’re talking about yourself? All these petty offenses mean that you have not even started to witness the daily unfolding of your own life and being dismayed at what you see, because you take a big sign and carry it around with you that says, “I am a nice person.” This list will give you the revelation of how utterly self-centered you are.
     Put this on your list, “When people meet me, I am doing something bad to them. I have no goodness inside to express and give to them.” Means you are spiritually asleep. You’ve never even started to allow God to replace you with him. You have a human nature, un-regenerated, and that all by itself adds to the weight on the back of everyone else. I thought you were going to be a different kind of man or woman so you’re not like the awful nature you see in other people.
     Now, reverse it and see that that’s what everyone does to you. Notice it in every single human being you meet. You absolutely must drop all your phony idealistic self-images of you being nice or them being nice.

STOP RUNNING AWAY
     Defy your old nature. The world spends all its time in running away from its own salvation. Stay home and resist all temptation to find a cure. It  gets worse as it gets better. Don’t call yourself sick or well. Don’t give yourself an identity.