Monthly Lessons Archive 2017

GIVE UP YOUR UNHAPPINESS
     If you will simply know that you spend most of your day complaining, then you will know that that’s one of your false loves. Therefore God can't open the windows of heaven for you. I'm going to ask all of you right now to strike a mighty blow for your liberty.
     I instruct all of you to be willing to, and then do it — to right now give up all your unhappiness. Every bit of it! That is what it means to turn away from yourself, turn away from dry land and look up to the higher place. You are asked to identify, to recognize, to reveal to yourself all those both small and large miseries and pains that mean so much to you. And you will be willing to take the long leap upward by just sacrificing, giving up, abandoning every single one of them.
     How are you unhappy today? That has to go. Your unhappiness is your happiness, but you don't know that, and you don't practice looking up for the showers of blessings. You have to choose to want a new kind of experience.
     If you want it, it will begin to awaken the hidden moral principles, sense of righteousness. It will begin to awaken your wish to leave this drought-stricken world and make contact with heaven, which will send down its showers. You will want, right now, to allow Truth to work on you, work through you — to give you a revival of these spiritual impressions, the codes of goodness that you've carried around with you. You just have to know what you don't want. You, really in your heart, don't want to be unhappy.
     Here's what I want you to do. You're to bring yourself back and you will recognize what I'm talking about when I say you wander around in the drought and the wreckage of your life. You're going to do so many things, and all there is is pain and suffering and chaos in there. You're to know that you're wandering around there, not even knowing that you're wandering around. And one of your requests to heaven is, “Please make me conscious, right now, that I'm stumbling around inside myself in complaint and in sorrow, and please, please help me to un-love that life and love what you have to give me.” That will give a sensing and a strength to break away. From what? From you! That's the only thing you need to break away from — from your unconscious life.
     Final word: Heaven is waiting to give you whatever it has for you to grow a New Life with new harvests — one so rich that now you can't conceive it, and you don’t have to. And you should not because that would be your mind doing something that belongs to God to do. God’s revelations, God’s richness and bountiful harvests is all you need. Let heaven do everything for you, and it will give everything to you.

SOMETHING SUPERIOR TO EVERYTHING
     You can build a new nature, which is strength and wisdom and right action. You will be taken over by something you should be taken over by, which has nothing to do with your old nature or anyone else's. And it operates through you and here's what it says internally, silently, and with a 100% pure success.
     Something happens to make you feel angry, despondent, and you want to strike back and get revenge. You now have 100% power to say to that and all other weaknesses and evils, "There is something in me that does not submit to that. It is superior to everything."
     You must never acknowledge that anything is stronger than Truth, God.

THE NECESSITY OF PERSISTENCE
     The healthy information that you must acquire first seems to you to be unhealthy for you. At first you take the friend of right information as the enemy. And because you don't understand the trickiness of your own mind, you do not see through this initial mistake you make when you hear marvelous, healthy, beautiful statements of truth such as you hear [in these talks]. After awhile, with your right spiritual persistence in hearing truth, it changes magically in front of you because a new hearer comes into existence.
     The bad self always takes good things as bad for it, of course. And as the bad nature is replaced by what is true inside you, then it hears healthy facts as healthy. And that begins the process of continuous growth, and your own pleasure of living your own life at last.
     Falsehood comes along, lies come along, and because most human beings live from lying natures, they like it.... Everything you hear at New Life is for correction, not condemnation. Good healthy ideas can never condemn you like you condemn yourself.... They are healthy for who you really are but very unhealthy for who you are not, which you take yourself as being.... I told you, you must never fall into dismay or discouragement, no matter how bad or how black it looks for you. Don't fall into that because you don't have to.

TURN YOURSELF OFF
     You must turn yourself off. This means to simply stop the mechanical movement by which you constantly try to find answers. It means you’re not going to keep going to the usual sources. Now, don’t underestimate this exercise. In the middle of any day, just sit down and watch your mind and see that you can’t do anything at all about it. Don’t go into reaction over that or leap to a distraction. Know one thing only: “My mind is madly churning, but I am watching it.” If you see the impossibility of saving yourself, you will have learned something; for when you do something for yourself, you become hardened. This exercise will begin to do something for all the questions that hound you. It will show you that there is no point in you continuing to let anyone on the human level answer your questions, including you.

FALL OUT OF LOVE WITH CONFLICT
     Once upon a time there was a man who worked at a big tall office building in a big town. And philosophically, he was a man who was interested in the sort of things we’re getting onto here. They fascinated him. He wanted to know more about self-enlightenment. So at his coffee breaks he'd go way upstairs to the roof of the building, and he would sit down on a bench there, and he'd look around and what would he see?
     He would see himself surrounded by hundreds of other grayish looking buildings just like his. And he said to himself, “There must be something more than this! There has to be something more than this building I'm in, filled with thousands of heart aching people. There must be something more than millions of people in all their little cramped offices. There has to be something more than this!”
     All right, now here is what you’re to practice saying to yourself. This is a definite start. This is a new gate to go through. "There has to be something more than this."
     Don't you tell yourself what it is — what that something else is. That would just be falling back in the same mechanical habit that you've been having, and you'll go nowhere. Instead of that, love that statement, "There must be something more than this antagonistic and agonized world."
     Everybody is unhappy. You know that! You know that it's all a false front, so you’re quietly telling yourself there has to be something higher. Then it is necessary for you to firmly add, “I don't know what that something else is.”
     You must do that! Don't fail to do that, or you'll be tricked by your own sneaky little mind that wants to keep you suffering. And so it says, “Here is what it is. Quit working down in that office. Move to ten states away. Go work at some other place.”
     I told you that there is something more than this, but you don't know it! If you knew it, you wouldn’t suffer. You'd be free of it.
     So our man practiced what he preached to himself, and one thing that became clearer to him was that nobody out there, none of the pained people even want to investigate their pain. They don't even want to know! They're in love with conflict. You will fall out of love with conflict, starting now and continuing.
     When he got the clue that other people loved being miserable, he looked at himself and said, “Wait a minute; it's sure easy to see them clutching and shouting at each other and hurting each other, but what about me?”
     Now the lesson is getting personal, huh? This is what you have to do now. You can't look out and criticize everyone out there anymore. You have to look in and not even criticize yourself, but know what is there. The shock will wake you up. The shock of seeing how careless, how wandering you were, anxiously seeking but never really finding any true answers.
     So this went on for a long time, him saying, “There has to be something better than this.” And then letting the next thought come to him, “I haven't the slightest notion of what it is.” This is spiritual self-sincerity, self-honesty.
     He allowed that to work on him. He began to see something very strange and experienced what you’ll have to go through. He saw that he wanted to preserve his hostility, his pain. He wanted to preserve it so that he could be the center of what he called of his own life. “I'm somebody! I'm hostile! I hate that world out there! I hate it!”
     He saw that other people were the same way he was, and then he went on from that state to knowing how to be free of the whole world, the whole deceitful, hostile, vicious, vicious, vicious lying world. He knew how to be free of it. Be free of myself! That’s the only answer. That’s the glorious answer. That’s the God-given answer.
     He went on and on and on, as I want you to go on and on and on. One day he was able to walk up to the rooftop and look around and he was able to say, “I know there's something stronger than you, evil. I know it.”
     Do you know how he knew that? I always come back to this now. He knew he couldn’t be touched by anything out there because he couldn’t be touched, hurt by anything inside himself. It was gone! He was living in a new world. He was living a million miles above that vicious cruel city that he was in.
     Do you understand the point? Why are you wasting your life in fighting the social system, which is, without question, utterly insane? You know that! Why are you fighting what is happening? Why are you being afraid of what you see? You have no business being afraid of anything, anywhere, any time!
     God has promised you freedom within yourself of all attacks, of all hurts. God has promised you freedom. That means that you are the one who has to get your right corrective action, not the world. Let it go where it wants to go! Don't try to help it! Don't smile at it! Don't you dare smile once more at what's going on. They will know why you smile. They will know that that’s your weakness masquerading as friendliness. They will know it, and they will get you again and again.
     I'm talking to you about being consciously serious, which is not glum and gloomy at all. It is freedom; therefore it is happiness.
     Final point. You conquer the world by not trying to conquer it with what you are presently. See what you are presently. Don't want that anymore. Accept the higher gift. Then nothing is easier to be free and happy no matter what happens to you, because it's no longer happening to you because you're not you anymore. You're living with the spirit of freedom and happiness that you have allowed to come into your life.
     Take one step at a time and one day whatever you're doing at home, you'll be a perfectly happy person no matter how little or how much money you have, no matter if you're alone or have a thousand people, because God is not lonely and neither will you be.

SOMETHING REAL CAN HAPPEN
     Absolutely nothing real is happening, only the mechanical running around. Billions of activities and nothing is happening. At the end of an individual's life, nothing is happening but movement. How pathetic. They missed it.
     Something real can happen to you. There's a psychological crime going on inside of your psychological system. All you have is your pretense and fakeries. All you do is try to convince yourself that you are right when you are wrong.
     You can't be lazy and get out.

CHANGE YOUR JUNK TO JEWELS
     Facts about human nature, about you, are always positive. Avoidance of the facts about human nature and how dreadful it is with phony idealistic descriptions of how nice people are, that is negative. Whenever we can see something wrong about ourselves, you can be quite sure that we are on the right path toward correction if we continue with it all the way.
     This is because so many people continue to think that if you paint the junk yard a pretty color, It becomes something valuable. And no matter how many times you explain this to people — because they don't want to face the junk inside themselves — they say the paint is all that matters.
     If you want to change from junk to jewels, you must face the facts as they are, and it won't happen overnight because you're so used to avoiding them and deceiving yourself. And that's the trouble with this world. The trouble with this world is that you can't find anyone with the strength and the honesty and decency to say that he doesn't know what he's doing in it. Everyone knows what he's doing and where he's going; and to prove it, he'll clout you if you disagree with him.
     That's saying, "I'm so right and you're so wrong." Out of this horrible attitude of always knowing the answers, of always being right and the other person wrong, out of that comes your suffering, your pain. Because you are doing it, not because the other person is doing it, but because you are, not knowing it's a part of your problem. The whole human miserable condition of which you are presently a part is caused by dishonesty.

SUPREME TRUTH
     You must reflect all day long about your need for allowing Supreme Truth to be the only governor of your life. You have to be constantly at work wherever you are, whatever you are doing. You must realize that your life isn't supposed to be spent hoeing the corn in the field or tapping the typewriter. That's incidental, that's casual.
     You're supposed to be thinking all the time about your life, not about your occupation, not about your physical action, not about your dinner, not about how you were slighted when you wanted to be praised. I said you have to think about letting Truth be the governing factor in your life.

PERFORM A REAL MIRACLE
     Listen to this. If you believe that you have enemies, opposition, people or circumstances who can harm you in your life — if you believe that you can be harmed — listen to what you are believing. You believe that God can be harmed!
     Do you understand that? You have enthroned yourself as God. You don’t know really who the true God is, but you’re worshipping yourself. And obviously because it’s all false, you must believe that harm can come to you, because harm is always involved in the egotistical imaginary nature. When the false nature disappears through your insight into its non-existence, then all that is left is truly God.
     When you're living in this bright light of God’s spirituality ... you’re living in what God Himself lives in. And God indeed has no opposition. The devil is not opposite to God. People think there is opposition because they think in opposites. God is not opposite the devil. As far as God is concerned, the devil is nothing. God does not recognize the opposition of the devil, human minds do. But when you get up in the morning and are afraid of life, it is only because you don’t have a free spiritual life. God doesn’t know any problems with the boss. Reality isn’t fighting for recognition and someone to love. It is what it is and if you become what it is — that is, Reality — then you will have the freedom that Reality, God, True Spirituality has.
     So remember the next time you hate someone because they didn’t give you what you expected. Remember the next time you get so anxious for someone to phone you, write you, look at you, anything. Just remember you are living in the wrong place internally. Remember you’re living in the wrong inner geography. Do that and that will remind you that you don’t have to live there and you’ll start to move out of yourself.
     You want to perform a real miracle? I’ve just given you an example of it. The miracle of a man or woman who has started right in the depths of the darkness inside of himself and has picked up a little thought here and a little thought there, and that becomes like the markings on the side of a cave that someone has left. You know, someone who has been in the cave and found his way out left little markings. You grope around, you feel a little arrow there. You can’t see it, but you can feel the line of the arrow, then the two little marks that come out from it. And then you lose yourself a little more, and you go to the opposite wall and you feel another one.
     When you’re outside of the cave, there are no terrors of the cave out in the sunlight. Ah, look, here’s a summary. Be willing to give yourself up. Try to understand what that means, then be willing to give yourself up. Then you’ll have a new self. There’s no way you can believe what it will be like and you don’t have to. What you can do is experience what we’re talking about.

STAY UNTOUCHED
     There is no individual and separate ego which controls exterior affairs. This is illusion, and the cause of social chaos. When you and I see this, we are one with everything that happens to us; that is, we are above the swinging opposites of yes and no as it operates in daily life. See where this leaves us? We can engage in business or anything else, just as much as we wish, but must never believe we are “doing.” As long as we do not demand a certain result, as long as we do not identify with happenings, we remain free and happy, untouched by anything in the outer world. Try to find ways to apply a disappointing experience with the above. Work hard at “letting go” — and watch what happens!

STOP THE MISTAKE
     If there are a million pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, that's not too many for truth to come in and straighten out. Think instead that all that is up to you is to want to know why the pounding puzzles are there and why you haven’t escaped them.
     It isn’t up to you to chase out the goblins. The knowledge that they are in there is your part; that is, honesty of your actual condition.
     You're not to fall into your usual sad self anymore. You don't need to feel embarrassed or awkward. Whatever happens to you, you're going to become a ruthless refuser. NO! I'm going to stop the mistake right here and now.
     Mistake: Because you've lost your spiritual birth certificate, you feel obligated to go along with, to yield to it “as if it is my duty to allow those emotions to make me feel bad. I don’t have to obey those emotions. NO! What is wrong with me that I want to feel bad?”

BADNESS IS POINTLESS
     I have a startling and delightful announcement for you. An announcement that will change, uplift and inspire everything from moment to moment in your day. That announcement is: Sin is unnecessary, badness is pointless. To be tricky and devious has no needful place in your life. Badness is as useless and pointless as wheels on a boat.
     Anxiety, which is badness; hostility, which is badness; worry, which is badness — simply do not form a requirement in your personal life. You can live without being bad, without inflicting hostility on yourself.
     Evil has no permanence. Sickness has nothing to back it up. It’s a vapor that projects itself into your mind, and because you are immature and confused, that vapor seems to form a bad evil face — countenance. And so you think that the vapor has eyes, nose, mouth and the rest of the face. And you call it evil because you don’t understand it.
     You yourself, out of your ignorance and your false belief in your false existence, have created a force, a misused energy. You have taken natural, right elements within yourself and distorted them for one reason. Simply because you don’t know any better. Now you can know better.

NO MORE WORRY
     I want to emphasize a point that no matter what you get that the world gives you is never enough. It drives you crazy; you’re always hungry. Now isn’t that enough for you to stop to realize that you’re just going to have to go on to other things?
     I tell you, during the course of one half hour talk of maybe about fifty powerful points, if you can remember and take one and say, “I’m going to carry that one around with me for a month until I see through it.” That would be your opening into the beautiful Garden of Truth.
     You know, the Garden of Truth, it does have hundreds of paths around it. And the one I just gave you now is one. Take it — the fact that there is no way you can ever satisfy your craving for recognition, for appreciation. See why? Because there is no one there to receive the recognition. There is only a temporary, sick, neurotic emotional thrill. That’s all there is.
     I want you to see so clearly what I say, that of yourself you’ll take a rest from yourself. And just sit back in the chair of life, and give up without any thought about the consequences of you giving you up. That’s what you must do. Now you see, if you could begin to do that, it would occur to you how folly has ruled and ruined your day from the first day up until now. Folly operating as ignorance and misunderstanding in that you believe that you have to do something about the awful ache. You would vow that you have to do something about the awful ache. What you have to do is to not do anything about the awful ache. That’s salvation, that’s deliverance from evil, that is finding the Kingdom of Heaven.
     Ah, that’s release from getting up in the morning and hating what you face. See, when you want recognition, when you want to believe in yourself, that very act is what creates the opposition. And I tell you, you can get up every morning from now on, get out of your bed, and you go to work. Or you get the children off to school and clean the house or cook the breakfast, or whatever you do. You can get out of your bed every morning from now on — and listen to the loveliness of this — knowing that there is not a single enemy or opposition to you anywhere in the whole world of people and events.
     Look, this class isn’t for people who just want to grab more money. Who just want the recognition of saying, “I have a right to more money and if you don’t give it to me, I'm going to cause you trouble.” Oh, some day please exclaim in horror how sick everyone is!
     I am telling you as a fact that there is in existence a spiritual nature. There is a shining light that will be you when you get up in the morning and it will be with you all day long, in which there is no recognition of opposition, of enemy, of hardship, of foe. There is no recognition of that because there is first no recognition of your personal self.
     When you know that you are not the imaginary you, when you know there is no self there — you understand automatically there is nothing to do. When you know that you are not who you imagine you are, that is it. It’s the whole business.
     There is no way you would ever get up again and worry about your finances. You’ll have common sense, you’ll understand you and money. You’ll understand that it’s an artificial invention of man, for one thing. Money won’t be a problem. Sex won’t be a problem to you. Sex is a problem because that’s one way in which you connect that with recognition. You ladies, if you can appear to be attractive to a man you can use his need for sex to get him. Then you will feel secure. Forget it.
     I tell you, right now, as you are seated here, there is nothing for you to do except see. See what I talked about. Understand that. When you see, when you understand, a hundred thousand strains and problems and decisions that drive you crazy all fall away. You go into a house and you’ve got junky furniture, you throw all the junky furniture out, then there’s room for everything new. That’s what we’re talking about.
     Your part of what I have been talking about is to ask yourself — this is an exercise. I want all of you right now to say to yourself, “Could he be talking about me?” Now answer the question, which is yes. He was talking about you and you sense it. You must do more than sense it. You must remember what was said in order to bring it up so you can see what a vain little egotist you are, and how that connects with the fact that you’re scared.
     You don’t have to be who you think you should be. You can drop all thoughts about building yourself and finding recognition. And what comes after that is all you need.

SPIRITUAL WORK IS SECRET WORK
     Spiritual work is secret work. Withdraw yourself secretly, spiritually from any individual whom you secretly depend on for anything at all. It can even be a memory. Just thinking about them seems to give you comfort, but it keeps you tied to the past. Work in secret to cut yourself off from that person who is dominating you. Don’t say a word to them. Inside yourself make your spiritual life the one love of your life.

THE SEEKER HAS TO GO
     Say goodbye to the seeker of security. The fundamental mistake is far deeper than you realize.
     Summary: There is an insecure entity with no real or permanent existence trying to attach itself to as many things in and outside as it can. No seeker, no real existence, no permanence. There is no one there who has to do anything at all. Now you want to understand, not seek. You only want to understand now.
     You always divide yourself into ‘me’ and an object of my search — what is going to satisfy me. The search is always satisfied, guaranteed. The seeker finds his rage, for example, and that becomes his reward. When you get the object of your search, you’re satisfied for a bit, but old haunting comes back.
     The seeker wants agitation! Seekers, cease to seek! You have no need of anything the mind imagines it needs. You don’t have to believe in yourself anymore.
     This is as far as I’m going in seeking. The seeker has to go out of existence. The searcher in you is your worst enemy, causing you trouble. There is something that exists in you that is apart from the seeker and that is the one thing that gives you real encouragement.
     You don’t want to save yourself. You want to save the seeker, the emotional self. With the disappearance of the effort person, the ‘trier’, then all the trails will disappear because you have disappeared. The answer is not at all what the seeker has given you. That consciousness, that seeing is the New You — eternal. There is nothing more to do.
     You can never do anything. Resolve to understand there is no center in your nature. That is letting go of the delusion. Give up. Lose yourself right in the middle of your fear. Let go of those enemies of God.
     When you see you can’t do it, it is done for you. Heaven is the absence of all your efforts to find heaven.

STOP LEANING ON OTHERS
     Think of someone who you think might be able to help you find yourself. And you think association with that person could retain a certain sense of security you have, or maybe you could learn something from them.
     I’m telling you, you are making a mistake that unless you correct that mistake of depending on any other human being, you'll never find yourself in this life. And that would be the greatest tragedy that ever could happen to you or anyone else. Well of course, I'm trying to destroy your confidence in human beings! That is what real religion is all about.
     You want to lean on someone. Now you're going to sacrifice your soul and be weak toward him, and neither is going to get out. Your life is going to have to be shattered and just see that all there really is is emptiness.

CHOOSE HEAVEN, NOT HELL
     God, Truth is always watching you with compassion and you need not be nervous about it. It's the only thing that has real love for you and it's watching you all the time. And I'm going to make it clear to you what it's watching for. What Truth is doing, for example, during your rage over being talked into doing something by a false friend that deceived you and got you into trouble — right in the middle of it, you're doing the only thing you can do — suffering.
     Here's the only way to get rid of all enemies, and you can go out of here not having an enemy to battle if you absorb what you're hearing.
     Your need to have something to win has to be seen through as a vagrant, worthless, useless thought. You don't need anything because there's no you there to acquire, hold, or pocket anything. All it is is a mad movie filming itself over and over — the horror movie repeating itself, right? Yes, right! That's what you have chosen to be you. Aren't you horrified at the horror movie? That's a part of waking up — to be horrified over the horror movie. That's different. Then by putting an end to the artificial nature, you put an end to all enemies. You don't need either friends or enemies and I'm not talking about social friendship. You'll know how to deal with everyone. Since when does Truth ever make a mistake? And that's what you'll be living from.
     I'm going to give you a method to take home with you today and I want you to practice it the moment you hear it and for weeks after:
     Know that the storm is raging and then you're to realize the following fact: The anger, the storm, is now raging throughout your system. The eviler within is lying to you. It is tricking you into feeling yourself. It's saying to you, "Doesn't that feel good? That's the way to live forever." See, it's destroying your opportunity to live forever. You will now hear that voice lying to you and telling you, "This is good. Hang onto it. Don't give it up."
     This is what the devil is! He's operating in the darkness. This is long hard work but OK., what fun to know God himself is right with you while this is going on and wants to help you. But you're the chooser and you can choose to no longer believe what that dark voice is telling you. For example, "Go out to where your wife is and explode at her again. When you get to work tomorrow morning, give that boss a piece of your mind again. Do it again."
     This is evil talking to you and appealing to your own weakness. Now the darkness has been exposed. You're to write down SHORTEN THE INTERVAL BETWEEN THE STORM AND THE CLEAR SKY.
     You will see that actually happening and you'll have a new blessed amazement. You will find that by an act of true choice, a higher choice, that when the storm shortens, you won't be alone and afraid as the lying voice told you. You will find that you do exist but in a new way. The old, lying gullible nature has been extinguished and now you live but it's a new you that lives.
     Summary: Go out and do a lot of hard work until we meet again and beyond that. By an act of choosing heaven instead of hell you will shorten the interval between the time in the raging storm and the time that the blue sky appears.

CHOOSE NOT TO REACT
     You’re not going to invite any feeling at all the next time you get knocked around by life. Don't care what happens to you. As long as you remain silent, only good things can happen.
     You have to take a million times more than you can now take. You have a delusion of yourself and it's killing you. You're to notice how egotistical you are when that feeling went through you. Every thought starts with 'I', 'me', or 'mine' — that's egotism. Awareness of that will preferably horrify you. All you can do is think about yourself.
    "I must not be afraid of not having an answer when I choose not to react. I must not fear to not have any help. I will not try to help myself again."
     You don't have to be you anymore.

BE MISUNDERSTOOD
     Refuse to relieve the anxiety. Don't know how to handle it! It is my knowing how to handle it that fouls my life up, that keeps me in self-worship.
     “I’ll defy all those dark ideas inside me that command me to make the phone call, write the letter, get the ambition that will make me feel better. I'll defy the dark ideas even if I have no strength at all. Who said I had to have strength? I just have to do it!”
     “I’ll catch myself in very small ways. For example, I'm about to say something to someone and because I'm watchful — the SENTRY is alert — I understand my motive in saying that. It is because I want to relieve a little bit of anxiety lest that person misunderstand me. Let that person misunderstand me! Let the unsaid explanation of myself or my actions remain unsaid. Let it lie there! Don't pick it up! Go through it! Watch what happens to me!”
     This is a new experience. Well, isn't it? You relieved the anxiety before and had the old, repetitious experience. Just let it lie there and in a very fascinated frame of mind say, "You know, this is really interesting. This is really novel. This is really unique! Here I am in this uncomfortable situation and I have about a dozen different emotions going through me. There's a bit of guilt. I can see a little tension. I can see a little wondering what the other person thinks of me. I hid it from myself. Now do I understand what it means to open the window a little bit? I'll open the window in fear and trembling if necessary and begin to see where I am. I'll see what's happening to me.
     “Take a look. This is what it is all about. And I can do this exercise any time I want — fifty times a day, one hundred times a day. There is no need for me to be in a dull daze anymore. I can follow these instructions, finding my own ways to refuse to relieve my tension.”
     Don’t do it. Don’t say it. See what happens. Bear it. Feel it. Notice it. After awhile “I’ll begin to see that my very pain is a teacher. I wouldn't allow it to teach me before because I relieved it. I hid it. I got it out of sight. So, I’ll remember the phrase from now on: DON’T RELIEVE THE ANXIETY AND LET PAIN BE MY TEACHER.”
     Oh, how fast and how marvelously the lessons will come! And with the coming of these lessons, in equal proportions, will be the disappearance of pain, of nervousness and of everything that is tormenting me.
     Isn’t that nice?

LET GO OF YOURSELF
     Poor sir, poor madam, how difficult it is for you to let go of yourself! Ah, the difficulty is authentic difficulty but we can do it. We're going to do it. There is no such thing as failure in this room. If you want to succeed — listen to this, this is an absolute promise — if you want to succeed it's as good as done.
     If you want to stay you, then go ahead home and live with you. I have nothing in common with you. I'm not going to go back to the old life.

PASSIVELY WATCH
     Any effort to solve a problem keeps it going. The next time you have a crisis, here’s what to do. Find a nice quiet place all alone. Relax. Passively watch what’s going through your mind. When you are watching passively, seeing these thoughts, have no concern as to what they are. You need not be concerned. You are standing aside watching them. Now you know who the devil is, what temptation is.
     The devil is running thoughts through your mind, telling you to get up, go somewhere, to another room, for example. If we do, he’s got us. The temptation is to slouch, get depressed, get agitated, and forget what you are supposed to do. What we’re supposed to do is to watch. The passive watcher has no problems at all, but we want to fight, dramatize everything.

THE CAUSE OF INNER SUFFERING
     The cause of inner suffering is the sufferer. If you wrote that down and worked on it for a year, it would lead you out. You’d wake up inside the canoe that's heading for the falls.
     The habit of every human being is to try to feel persecuted — a certain pleasure in that. You do it to yourself. If the pleasure of pain becomes the dominating pain, you’re gone.
     You’re a scared human being who’s afraid to drop your fear for you fear what lies beyond. What lies beyond the ending of the fearful self is permanent salvation for you.

THE ONLY REAL STATE
     “I am here.” When you put yourself in the position of knowing you are here, then nothing has the smallest chance to enter into your right world and disturb it. When you spiritually know “I am here,” that’s the only world; there's no other world at all. God is exclusive. Truth is all. Reality is the only real state. You realize the Kingdom of Heaven is pure and also the uselessness of protecting the neurotic world.
     It is essential for you to remind and practice the slowing down of your fiery assertions that you must do something about your problems — to defend or attack. Let your whole life go.
     Your reaction to that was a blur, fear, and an unseen reaction of ‘no.’ The real enemy is always within and so maliciously sly that you haven’t been able to recognize it yet and the proof is that nothing changes in your nature. You believe in your present but false existence, in this neurotic inner counsel, that what you have is essential for you to protect it.

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE
     From now on, wherever you are, you will know where you are. When you are in the kitchen be aware of your physical self and that you are in the kitchen. See what’s outside of you, and at the same time be aware of yourself. Feel your feet on the floor in the kitchen. This cuts off the flow of mechanical repetitions of mechanical states. Double awareness of the exterior and the interior chases out the spy, and your fondness for darkness.