Monthly Lessons Archive 2014

AUTHENTIC SELF-LIBERATION AND HAPPINESS
     I’m going to give you a very profound spiritual fact. Any spiritual student who has a crisis – something jumps up and attacks him, something hurts or disappoints him or her – if that individual will not become a ‘remark shark’ and tell everybody else about it – if that individual with the critical news will just stand there and suffer, but knowingly, the suffering will dissipate, fall into pieces and disappear.
     You’ve never done that. You’re so impulsive, so quick to say something trying to get the nervousness out of your system that you keep the pain rather than getting rid of it. You do the wrong thing with that bad news [your problem] which is to pass it on, put it on the shoulders of someone else and then run away to the next person to burden, and the next, and the next. The whole world lives this way. Tell me someone who doesn’t.
     You’re here to be unique. You’re here to be someone who in the moment of the crisis, decides to do something different with it. You decide to remember that where there is pure pain, you so well understand that there is [only] pure pain that you know it is useless to try to do anything about it because the pain and the perplexity is all there is. There’s only confusion, there’s only horror and who’s going to do something good about that?
     Application time: Do good hard work with this. You’re to inform yourself that, as a sincere soldier in the army of heaven, 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 them and into their minds.
     The motive for doing that is that you want everlasting life, something more than this very impermanent life. You want to find out what’s really permanent. That’s why you should do it, but you don’t understand that yet. You still want you to be permanent and it’s absolutely impossible. It can’t be done.
     Why are you trying to do the impossible when you can do the possible, when you can understand this lesson? Be an alert conversationalist when talking with anyone. Notice the moment you begin to go into contagious dreadful dread, trying to relieve your tension by pouring it off onto the back of someone else. You will know you are about to do it by coming wide awake, and then let your request be known to heaven. “God let your way be my way.” You will do that twenty thousand times if it is necessary. You will do it!
     After 20,001 times the dawn will begin to break in your mind and you will know stronger and stronger, as the spiritual sun comes up, you will be so grateful, so glad that you listened in spite of yourself. There’s no enemy in the whole universe that you have to conquer except your own unseen resistance to a God who wants you to be saved. You’re not saved. You’re lost. I assure you that truth is trying to get through to you and all you do is argue. You can’t run away anymore. You have to just stay and suffer until it bursts itself apart. You have to understand that is the only course of authentic self-liberation and authentic happiness.

BE CORRECTION MINDED
     If you will ask God himself to reveal your inner nature to yourself — the shocking facts — then after the shocking facts comes the marvelous healing. There is no other order. Liars shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. You don’t have to be afraid of what you see. Be correction minded. Ask God to be the power behind the correction.

NEVER FEAR EVIL
     “We wrestle not with flesh and blood but with spiritual wickedness in high places.”
                                                                                                                                               Ephesians 6:12
     You are indeed being operated on by a very evil force. Never fear evil. The next time you feel anxious remember it’s because you are not a truly spiritual human being.
     Request to high heaven to deliver you from that and little by little, you’ll understand that Truth itself is all powerful. People have no power to touch you at all. The Spirit of Truth being received by you is your protection. Reflect and ponder all this.
     You must be alert to see the lesson. Make a connection between what goes on inside yourself and the truth you’ve heard. Something — evil spirits in high places — are acting on you. They hate you and are going after you every minute. See what is going on. They can’t do anything against you. Prove for yourself Truth has all power and evil has none.

DEPEND ON GOD
     Understand that the exterior world has no influence on you at all. Meet everything with a pure healthy you. It is better to be healthy than to be sick. Constantly see your reactions. What did I just say? Feel?
     Wake up and go to work! Don’t look at an object and fear it when there is no reason to be fearful. Why do you trust fear instead of Reality? Why are you putting your confidence in being terrified instead of in your Heavenly Father? Why are you living in fear and trembling? You depend on a physical world. All you have are mechanical reactions. You react to what you see. These reactions you call you. It’s an illusion. Only God exists. If you had no reactions to what you see, you’d understand that.

ANSWER ‘YES’ OR ‘NO’
     You are to watch your thoughts all day long but don’t join them. Know you are worried; know you are afraid, angry, etc. See it, stand apart. Don’t go into the second thought.
     Mental ‘blabber mouthery’ prevents understanding. Go against yourself — just answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This will help you understand your own mind. Sacrifice everything to the invitation of Truth to understand your own mind, and God, who is higher than your mind will do the rest.

ADMIT YOU DON’T KNOW
     It is truly intelligent to simply admit that one does not know. The simple admission that you don’t know what you’re talking about whenever you talk would be a marvelous breakthrough for you.

USE CRITICISM TO WAKE UP
     You’re supposed to take so much criticism and take it in the right way that you fall apart and disappear. You say, “I can’t take the smallest criticism. The reason I can’t take the smallest criticism is because I’m such a sensitive soul.” You know what you’re really saying? “I’m a touchy little nut.” (Laughter)

DON’T BE A QUITTER
     The light of Truth is always separate from what it reveals and the most important part is that you are the light; you are not what it shows.
     The only important thing you have to do with your life is to find yourself. Unknown to you, you are avoiding the hell that you must go through in order to reach heaven. You’re avoiding mental health.
     How many of you would like a rough, tough work exercise for the next week? How many of you will do it? How many of you will request heaven to give you strength to do it?
     All right, for the next week, seven days, the only evil you’re ever going to think about is your own. Oh, you’ve got a lot to think about, huh? Of course. Now, you know why that is going to be healthy, because you know how you always have to point the finger at someone else. Someone else is always wrong and I am always right! That’s why you stay sick and obnoxious and you don’t know you are.
      It’s about time you started to wake up and face the facts! It’s why we don’t mince words here, because you either take it or you leave it. If you take it, oh sure, it’s going to be a rough voyage for a while and you’ll sometimes wish you never left port and wish you were back there. But let me ask you, you started on the spiritual voyage and you got ten miles out to sea and it gets rough. That is, you’re fighting Truth and so it hurts a lot inside. Once you succeed on the whole voyage, the hurt goes away, but the point is this. Suppose you get out on the spiritual voyage and you say, “I’m going to go back, I don’t want to go anymore. That man is insulting me; he’s hurting my feelings.” That man is telling you the Truth that can save your soul and you say he’s insulting you. If you do turn your boat around and go back to the surf-side town and go back to live there, what’s it going to be like? You know very well that town is populated by vicious pirates. Every time you refer to yourself you refer to a pirate — someone who betrays you.
     So you see there’s no point in any human being ever quitting and going back. In other words, don’t be a bitter-quitter. You stay on the voyage and oh, the experiences you’ll go through, the storms and the waves and the fear of destruction. But you listen to me now, instead of your warped mind and when I say ‘you’ I mean everyone in the whole world.
     If you will stay where the instructions are, if you will take the complete course in navigation, after a while the storms will decrease just a little bit. That means your fears will fade just a little bit and in their place will come a feeling that you are controlling the boat instead of outside forces controlling you.
     Now, anybody out there who wants to make you feel bad or mad can do it. But, if you stay on the boat, that is, if you come back to these instructions and you read the books, little by little you will understand that — listen, I’m speaking very sacredly now — that God himself was with you throughout that entire storm. You didn’t know it then because you wanted to do it yourself. You wanted to call yourself the captain of that boat. You wanted to use your life for self-glorification and don’t you deny it. You know how much vanity you have in you and if you don’t know it here’s a very easy test: every time you get your feelings hurt it’s because your vanity was knocked down. You wanted to use your life for vanity-serving purposes — for what you thought you needed.
     If you knew you didn’t like this talk, if you knew consciously you didn’t like it and then find out why, you’d be on the way upward. But if you prefer to stay asleep, stay unconscious and hate, then you will have the reward you demanded, which is lifelessness. God said that before I did, do you understand? Or, if you will listen to something that is not a part of your present nature, then instead of doom you can have authentic eternal life. You think you have it now but every time you think about it, it puts you into tormenting doubt. You will have eternal life and you won’t have to think about it at all. You will know it because God is behind the knowing.

REMEMBER
     I know you come to so many of these meetings and you go out of here and you’re given these very practical basic techniques and you forget all about them or you don’t practice them, which is why you need the jolt and reminding.

GO SILENT WITHIN
     All talking about yourself either as flattering or critical is a mistake which will continue to keep you a victim of your own false personality. Because you see — look how simple it can be stated ― falseness never knows what to do; your mixed up self, your confused nature, never knows how to behave in any circumstance: which means that you can’t behave spiritually and intelligently when you need to, when going into that business affair, when meeting a new person.
     Only the Spirit telling the mind and emotions how to behave is worthwhile. So when the Spirit wants to talk to you, allow it to talk to you, but it can’t do that if you’re talking to yourself. Now maybe you understand a little better the value of the words and what is behind the words going silent, going quiet within. Going quiet within, not allowing the chatterbox, whether it’s talking to other people or to yourself, not allowing the chatterbox to be in control of your life and of your reactions, but — you’d better write this down please — you’d better dare to remain quiet. Don’t say anything, don’t think anything, don’t feel anything, especially don’t try to protect yourself. Because what you’re protecting is something you should not protect, in which silence, or better yet, those several moments of silence at the moment of the crisis will allow that quietness to be there and Truth, Heaven, can only speak to you, instruct you, when there is silence there. God will not compete with you.

THE NECESSITY OF BEING HONEST
     God is trying to get through to you so you can see how angry you are and how you know better, but we fight this. All right, the one chance you have and the one chance any human being has is to know that you are angry. If you hide it from yourself, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
     The map for salvation has been given to you and to emphasize a point one more time – to know that you are completely lost is essential because then God can see your authentic honesty and humility and God can allow his salvation to come down to you where you can welcome it and you’ll feel different and be different.

BEING ALIVE
     Here is what you’re going to do from now on, starting now. You’re going to be aware of your existence at all time. Starting right now, you’re going to be aware of yourself right now, being an alive physical human being. You’re going to notice when you gesture like that; you’re going to notice the thoughts that go through the mind, you’re going to be in one of two states:
     1) Either knowing about your existence here, seeing what’s passing through you for example, or,
     2) You’re going to be engaged in some practical thought, e.g., you’d better fix the dinner or set the table, or you’re thinking about necessary things like consulting proper memory to repair your car.
     This is the most valuable knowledge I’ve ever given you. Effective right now your whole life is going to be dedicated to learning who you really are by never, never, never, never being in any other state except either useful thought or just being aware of your existence “conscious of myself seated in the chair; know I am here in this room, very alert all around me ... aware of my existence without interfering with what I see.” This is the beginning of sanity.

IT’S NOT TOO MUCH FOR YOU
     It is not too much for you; some of you feel that you’re too much for yourself. I assure you, you are not, because what is right in you, as small and as weak as it might be, can be recognized by you, can begin to be expanded by you through these techniques so that you’re in charge of yourself instead of your past being in charge of you, instead of your expectations being in charge of you, instead of your heartache being in charge of you, which it has been.

THIS IS A NEW DAY
     Make the bold declaration: THIS IS A NEW DAY, A NEW KIND OF LIFE FOR ME!
     Your search for your essential self keeps you young in body, mind and spirit — that is a worthwhile objective, so what you’re going to do from now on when arising in the morning is to make the bold declaration, “This is a new day for me.” Your inner comprehension of that makes it come true. The words themselves are an opening, a reminder to you of what true spiritual magic can happen inside of you if you do your part. Your part is to remind yourself in the morning that this is a different day for you because there is something that can make it different. Now when you say that the first several times, you’re not going to understand what you’re saying. Never mind. You have to study spiritual subjects just as you study history or geography.
     What you’re saying is that this is a new life for me, a new kind of existence on earth for me. When you say that you begin the spiritually magical process by which the understanding develops during your day because of your early morning declaration. You understand that what is new is something that has always existed — billions and trillions of years in the past and billions and trillions of years in the future. You’re really saying, though you won’t understand it at the start, you’re saying that, “This is a new eternity for me.”
     By starting with these thoughts, gradually through the power of higher forces which you have allowed to enter, you will comprehend that you are not talking about your personal self at all. You’ll understand, in a new way, the meaning of the word ‘me’. The realization comes to you the ‘me’ must not meet the day. The entity inside you is now meeting and conquering everything it meets because you have nothing to fight, to gain, to protect. You don’t have to argue, no one to defeat. The absence of the old nature makes it increasingly clear to you what is meant when you say, “This is a new day for me.” Oh, this is astonishing, beautiful. What it means is that the dissolution of the ‘me’, the old nature, the absence of that allows a new nature, a new awareness to get out and go out and meet the battling world out there but since when does true spirituality have anything to fight with? You know you have won.
     After a long, long time of you repeating over and over, “This is a new day for me” — you can say it anytime you want — you will begin to understand what it means to not live in time. Yes, you’re going to need the clock and calendar for earthly endeavors but your nature inwardly now has nothing to do with time.
     Want this to be your personal experience from saying, “This is a new day for me.” You actually have it all — all that is real! All that is pleasant! You have everything including eternity. Time has vanished. You don’t have an anxious self anymore.

KNOW WHERE YOU GET UPSET
   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.

SEE THE WORLD AS IT IS
     Your exercise for the next few days is to observe the world as it swirls around you over the coming days, listen to people talk, watch how they behave, look at them on television, and silently ask them that, it will become a great revelation to you; a stronger insight to you to see the simple fact that everyone you see is lost, all they can do is sneer at anything that is right, as was pointed out by one of you.

BE CLEAN
   Your vulgarity, the world’s crudeness, is killing it systematically. When you want to be clean, you will attract that to you, you’ll get the thoughts, the ideas, you’ll read and you’ll hear and you’ll exercise and you’ll practice and you’ll know something you never understood before. You’ll see it for yourself, that the world, the society that circulates out there and imposes itself on you, it cares nothing for what is good, for what is decent, it cares for only what is familiar and popular and which causes them no effort at all.

LEAVE IT TO HEAVEN
     In reality, you cannot be forced to do anything against your true life but not knowing the supremacy, the power of your true life, you feel the enemy come in and you say, “The enemy is doing it to me. It is forcing me.” People say, “I couldn’t help it.” Yes you can help it and you’ll start right now. No more evasions about your responsibility for saving your soul. No more excuses. No more being weak. Better write this down: GOD HAS PROMISED TO BE STRONG FOR YOU. Look that over a few times.
     You don’t have to say, “What am I going to do about this?” You will never know. You understand what we’re getting at? We’re getting at the very basis of self-transformation which is for you to know you can do nothing and stop right there. This is the beginning of the dissolution, of the ending, of the talker, the boaster, the false nature which has always given you instructions. And every time you follow the false voices that tell you what to do, they get a stronger hold on you.
     Leave it to Heaven! No, you don’t want to leave it to Heaven; you want to leave it to you. You think you have to figure it out and fight it out. That’s all a part of the “I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to stop being angry.” Anger is saying that.
     If you know what to do about your problems you don’t know what to do. There is a stage you have to go through in which you are discarding the whole vicious, sick, psychopathic, cunning world inside and outside. Even the trembling about doing that is false, is a part of the pseudo-self, of what you think you are. Little by little you put the pieces of the picture together.
     Stop loving pain. You have to see you do love it. Make an effort to believe what God says about your responsibilities here on earth. You believed everything but God. Be willing to admit that you’re nothing but a bundle of egotistical stupidity. That’s marvelous to know. Now you can let it go.
     We’re giving you a set of tools that will never fail you. You’re afraid to be without your plans for self-salvation. There’s a certain stage of terror. Bear the new terror of having nothing to do. Go through the dark valley. If you go back you’re a goner. Say, “I want to go upward.” Suffer knowingly, but don’t do anything about your suffering and the tools will appear and you will build your own eternal house.

BE A PSYCHIC DETECTIVE
     I want you to be a psychic detective from now on. Oh, you’ve got a lot of work to do. You are going to be a detective in which you immediately, instantly and fully catch the small threat in a person’s voice or manner and there are various synonyms with that, intimidation, pressure, but I want you to think of the word threat and see what a threatening world you’re in. You’re surrounded by it.

I DON’T HAVE TO BE AFRAID
     Tell yourself forcefully and at the same time very calmly, “I have much better things to do with my life than to spend it in pain.” Now you say that several times a day. You will not know what you are talking about but the words are beginning guidelines so that you can go from words to feeling, to comprehension, and the light will burst upon you one day in which you won’t have to say it with your mind anymore because you will know it internally. It will be with you twenty-four hours a day so that pain of any kind — emotional, physical, psychological suffering — so when it tries to intrude into your life, you will have more power than it has because you will have received the inspiration and the explanation from the higher place that you don’t have to submit anymore!
     Good morning submitters! You know that’s accurate. You know that what I just said is true. You submit. Now, you’ve already had an enormous clue. The clue is you have been telling yourself what your life is all about. I have to tell you something very special about pain, about anguish. Of all the evil forces on this earth, anguish, hostility, any kind of pain is one of the most cunning in disguising itself as a needful friend. I want you to understand for yourself what I just said. The next time you feel any kind of apprehension or doubt about something and you start to shake, I want you to look at it so closely that you can see through the bluff that it has had on you. You can see that it is nothing but a faker that you thought was your friend.
     It is never necessary for any of you to fall into a state of anxiety, tension, any kind of pain at all. I just told you the fact of the matter. Now which are you going to believe? Well, you’re going to have some hard work in tossing out your beliefs in the necessity for you to be thrown off the track. And New Life teachings will show you how to do it, how to encounter the enemy with a new kind of strength and fresh vigor and higher intelligence so that pain, worry, feeling inferior, the whole business, so that you meet it with the light of heaven itself and that is what makes you strong; that godly presence living through you is stronger than the trillions of types of fear, tension, feeling awkward, feeling unworthy.
     Identify to yourself the wide variety of pain and sufferings there are. See how they can grab you anytime they want. You’re not going to spend your days feeling at the mercy of other people, of the news headlines, of anything at all. The fact is freedom from agony exists. Shake those chains off. Don’t be afraid of anything! Instead of being afraid of your life, you’re going to be interested in it. You can do this! You can say, “Oh, I’m going to understand you. Instead of shaking before anything, I’m going to look at it as a scientist would look at a problem.” You’re walking around and you catch some small or large anxiety, whatever, and then remember what you’ve just read. Don’t forget it! Write it down. Look at it fifty times today. Put a little note in a prominent place at home that says, “I don’t have to be afraid or in anxiety over anything. I just have to be interested in understanding what is going on.” Already you’ve struck a blow against the enemy; you’ve taken some of the chains off and heard them clank down at your feet. You will understand the deeper meaning of this as you practice it.

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.
* (This was a specific exercise given during a lecture. You can substitute taking a break at work or some other daily activity that you do on a regular basis to help break the mechanicalness of everyday living.)

CHOOSE THE SIDE OF TRUENESS
     When you make a decision to place yourself on the side of God, there is nothing that more infuriates the forces of hell than to think that you might escape their sick kingdom; that you might become a child of God. Things are in the balance and I want you to tip the balance to fifty-one percent of the weight being on the side of your decision to simply say, mean it, and stick with it, “I choose the side of trueness.” Having made that declaration, you can expect to find fresh assaults by the enemy who doesn’t want to lose you because then he can’t use you as he has been doing. So when you are attacked left and right after making your new decision, I want you also to write down in your own words, in a dozen different ways if you want, “God, who really exists, is stronger than any kind of attack.”

WHEN YOU MAKE A MISTAKE
     The next time you make a mistake, you are not to glorify it. Don’t give it your attention. Satan puts these words in your mouth: “How dumb can I get!” You can’t feel you; there’s no one there to feel. You’ve only felt the ridiculous imposter. Don’t go into self-hate when you make a mistake, error.
     “I said something ridiculous.” Don’t keep your self-glorification of your mistake going. “I made an embarrassing remark to fifty people in the room.” Don’t fall for the trick. Have the attitude, “Who are you trying to kid?” You weren’t good or bad; you were possessed and didn’t know it. You should have been attentive, intelligent. You wanted to be clever, but you were stupid instead. Goodness is there when you know you had nothing to do with its creation. You no longer fall for evil. You will then walk in the presence of God. That is the final solution.

STOP TALKING TO YOURSELF
     You are actually born with dim instructions about what you’re supposed to do with your life here on earth and along with those instructions, you were given self-responsibility to obey what you should obey. You can have a permanent destination. You’ve had it with the intellect trying to solve the problem.
     This is you talking: “Oh, I know how to push away the scares I have.” That’s talking to yourself instead of talking to God. You must catch yourself in the nefarious act of talking to yourself and stop it now. Don’t be afraid to stop talking to yourself. You’re doing it all the time. If you were to learn the secret of stopping yourself in the middle of giving yourself advice, something different could happen to you.

LET GOD HANDLE IT
     “Lo, I am with you always.” You can allow the fact instead of wanting to handle it yourself. Your life belongs to God. How can you want anything but that? Never allow the false nature to steal from you. Because you fall asleep you go into what horrible drama again? First stage: Simply know you’re trying to do something with the vibrations — you are the nervousness. Second stage: Know that at every single second of your day, the presence of the Spirit of Truth is within you and you let Reality handle the dragons. Whatever comes up, never again try to handle it. Our ways are not God’s ways. Place your life in the hands of something other than your own mind and feelings. When you know there’s nothing you can do, God will make himself known.