Monthly Lessons Archive 2021

DO YOU LOVE TRUTH OR NEUROSIS MORE
     If you continue to live with suppressed angers, with concealed jealousies, if you continue to live with chaos inside your mind and in your feelings and in your life, if you continue to live with these hidden harms, then you will have to be an unhappy human being.
     There, now I’ve told you. If you continue to be the way you are, if you continue to make the past the future in your life — with chaos inside your mind and your feelings and in your life — if you continue to live with these hidden harms, then you’ll have to be an unhappy human being. Then you also have to repeat the strain and the stress and the anxiety and the nervousness and the uncertainty and the pain. Now I’ve told you, right? Now I will ask you, what are you going to do with what I’ve told you?
     Now we come to the question: Which do you love more? Do you love the truth, the beautiful truth that you have just heard, the truth of deliverance that if you do face yourself you can change everything and be free of your old nature? Do you love the truth that you just heard, or do you love more the way you have always been and fear to leave it?
     There it is. And I leave that question with you for you to think about later on. You have been told there is another way you can free yourself. What do you love?
     You have to do something that is utterly new for you, and thinking about the way out and trusting your memorized experiences, you have to utterly abandon it. Think of something else. You call for rescue from your own self, your own unworkable ways. When will you give up? I will tell you if you will give up, something else that is not you, that is not a part of the 30-40-50 years old inscriptions in your mind will come to you. Don’t consider that hopeless. What you call hopeful is hopeless and always has been, and you are afraid to face it. And that’s why you don’t get out. You will continue feeling, being trapped unless you try to understand what you are doing against yourself by consulting your own self-centered, your own self-love endlessly and thinking it is going to change something. If it could have it would have. And it has changed nothing.

WHY PEOPLE DON’T CHANGE
     Above all else, all human beings love being what they presently are. This is staggering so don’t let it get by. Connect this with your life, with your stress and your anxiety, and you will begin to see, little by little, the solution.
     A human being loves his present nature, whatever it is. As miserable as it is, he loves it and he clings to it. And you try to change him and watch how he fights. Evidence is right in front of your eyes that we love, to our own destruction, having the kind of thoughts we presently think, and having the kind of feelings that presently surge through us, wrong as they may be. Also, having the actions and the catastrophes — this is what is loved most of all, simply because most people will not make the smallest effort to see that this kind of stress and strained life is unnecessary. They take the present ways, the present pains, the present conflicts and the present sufferings as being fixed, as being right for them, as being necessary, because they say, “This is what I have, and this is what I must continue to have.”
     Talk about seeking, we had better talk about non-seeking; about people who do not want to make any effort out of their condition, to walk out of the desert. They love their pain so much that when someone comes along, when truth itself comes along and says, “Sir, Miss, things can be different for you if you do certain things. For example, if you will listen to something other than your own past mind, your own past thoughts, if you will begin to listen to something different from what you usually listen to, things can change. You want to do it?”
     Listen to these strange facts. Now you will understand why most human beings remain as they are. Take a criminal. Say to him, “Sir, if you commit a crime, if you hurt somebody, there are certain punishments that society will give you. You will go to jail, you will be fined, and have all the other problems that go with being caught in committing a crime.” You tell him this and do you know what he does? He goes right out and commits the next crime. And you tell him that again after he has been caught the second or third time. You tell him that if you continue to do this, you will suffer the consequences. You will lose your physical freedom. And he goes out and he does it again and again. Isn’t that a strange situation that you cannot talk to a person and say, “Look, if you do something that is wrong, you go out and hurt somebody, you will have to be punished for it.” And he will do it again. Isn’t that strange?
     No, it is not strange at all if you understand thoroughly what we are talking about which is that the strongest love of all is self-love, the love of repetitious behavior, the love of being what you presently are.
     To sum up: Above all loves is self-love.

TRUTH IS HERE TO HELP YOU
     Back in the days of Columbus, a ship’s captain wanted to go out and find new worlds like Columbus did, so he went to the king and asked the king for ships and supplies to discover new worlds. The king agreed, so the captain went down to the dock to see what he could take with him. He found one little ship, undermanned, with poor supplies. That’s all they had, so he set out to find new worlds. And a couple of hundred miles out he had to turn back in disappointment. He went back to the palace and told the king what had happened. Supplies were short, not enough men, and the ship was unseaworthy. The king was in an irritable mood that day and he began to feel as a lot of human beings do. He began to feel accused, to feel that the Captain was not grateful for what he had done for him.
     And sensing this, the captain made a statement that caused the king to really listen. “Sir,” the captain said, “Sir, I am not here to accuse but to correct.” The king paid attention. He was so intrigued by the polite boldness of the navigator, he eventually gave him the ships and the captain went on to find new worlds.
     Listen to the phrase: “I am not here to accuse but to correct.” First of all, this is what truth says to human beings. It says, “I am not here to hurt you but to help you.” The captain was just simply trying to make the king understand the situation and he was not accusing him – just discussing it to explain and correct the situation, which was finally corrected.
     You are going to have to be very open inside your hearts and inside your minds when truth comes to you and says, “I am not here to hurt you.” You think so. Of course, you think so. That is why you resist. That is why you fight. You still have the self-love. You won’t listen to anything outside of that.
     Here is an interesting fact. If you will let truth say that to you and you understand it and take it in with a right spirit when truth says, “I am not here to accuse but correct,” eventually that truth, that statement, that feeling will become so much a part of your life that you will begin to say it to your own nature; you will now pass it on to your own nature. Talking to yourself consciously and in the right way, you will be saying it to your old nature that wants to fight, that is afraid.
     There is a wide-awake part that says that phrase, so simple and beautiful, that you’ll be saying it to the parts that resist. “I did not come here to hurt you but to correct.” You are not working on yourself to harm anything inside yourself but to get rid of the harm.
     You know, people are so shy and timid and they hold back and you can see by their faces and by their manner that they are absolutely certain that Reality, Truth, God, call it what you want, that Reality is going to do something against them and so they run away.
     Remember that phrase. Truth, wherever you may encounter it, has only one purpose. Truth isn’t like human beings. It’s unlike human beings. Now just because you have been hurt since you’ve been a small child, which you have been by this world; just because you’ve been hurt by a former husband or wife or a friend, because you’ve been betrayed, why do you continue to think that truth is like that? It isn’t like that. But we understand that. All you’ve ever known is accusation, condemnation.
     But if you understand that the worst thing we can do is to continue on with our self-love, if you can begin to see that, you can begin to sense, “Wait, just a minute, maybe indeed I am my worst enemy after all! Maybe I am trying to get a solution where it can’t be found. I am trying to make it work up here [Vernon points to the brain] and it doesn’t work up there.” No, because the hurt is still there and it’s pretty bad, we don’t deny that. We know what a vicious world this can be. You suspect how bad the world is as it is. And you will also see along with that an astonishing thing that truth is the one and only rescue and oh how you will want to welcome it. 

STOP DEMANDING THINGS
     All the mental can do is get out of the way so the spiritual can be revealed. Silence! Pause! Wonder what it’s all about.
     How to substitute the spiritual for the mental: You are not to want anything from what you encounter out in the world. No desires, wants. The anxiety persists. The pain is still there — a basket with no bottom. You’re a want machine, the wrong thing to do. There is no fulfillment.
     Say, “I don’t want anything from anyone in this world.” Stick with that. You’re not going to crave, demand anything. Then you will worry over what’s going to become of you. Detect the insidious forces acting through you, using you. “I am not going to want anything from anyone. I don’t need it. My false nature needs it. No more wanting approval or pleasing people.”
     To get outside of your own life, use that exercise. No compromise. You’re in charge of the whole world by having nothing to do with it. That’s a condition of absolute authority; all power by no personal power.
     If you don’t want anything from anyone, God, Truth, Reality will give you everything you need.

BE AWARE OF YOUR EXISTENCE
     Here is what you’re going to do from now on, starting now. You're going to be aware of your existence at all times. 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 know your existence at all times with one exception. That one exception is when you're going to be using thought naturally, which, when properly used, is fine and necessary.
     So, you're going to be in either one of two states: Either knowing about your existence here — seeing what's passing through you, for example. Or, you’re going to be engaged in some practical thought. For example, 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, or whatever.
     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 my existence, conscious of myself seated in the chair, for example. 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.

NO DECISION IS NECESSARY
     When you know that the world can't do anything good or bad for your real nature, you will see the mistake you've been making by believing in the invented self.
     Your unhealthy present nature does not know how to avoid ‘unhealthy’ out there. When the imposter nature, the acquired stupid self, comes to a decision, “Should I date that man, or shouldn’t I date that man? Should I go there or should I stay away from there?” — you know how it goes. It’s living in an awful illusion that something bad or good will happen as a result of either decision. And it’s all folly. It’s all delusion. It’s all wrong. It has no meaning at all. You’re trying to protect something that has no existence, which is your false nature, which you think is a true nature.
     When you’re strong and vibrant with spiritual wisdom, is any decision necessary as to whether you should avoid that thing or not, that person or not? No, because you know very well if you see a wolf out in the woods, you don’t go toward that wolf. You don’t have to decide. Just the sighting of the wolf, knowing that he’s maybe mad and wild and hungry, you know to avoid the wolf. No decision, just the sight of it tells you what to do. You avoid the wolf when something new, thank God, is possessing you because you’re making room for it. Then when you go to lunch, you go to work, in all your contacts with life in this daily world, as sick as the world is, your spiritual health knows how to handle the world’s sickness every second!
     Spiritual health knows every answer that you presently don’t know. Have you ever heard a more encouraging statement than that? The reality that can take over and live its life through you knows what to do on every level in every situation of life. Now you can have this new life. You can have this new identity, but one thing is essential. It is necessary that you don’t try to think of what it is, and you know why, don’t you? Because you’ll turn it into something resembling you awful quick, because that’s your mechanical unconscious habit working to preserve yourself at all costs — the self that is not a self at all.
     Having given you that little caution, don’t try to believe, imagine, think, reason who God is. Instead, use your mind correctly to take in the information you need, so that information itself, when you take it in and want it to become your guide, then that information, even though it’s only mental and intellectual as yet, that the intellectual facts and revelations that you’ve been given in these talks, they will lead you to the next higher step and the next higher step, the next higher step.
     The steps are there! You don’t have to create them. You don’t have to wonder whether they’re there or not. All you have to do is start on the very bottom step, right where you are now. All of you can allow God to save you, if you want him to, wherever you are, no matter what bad things you’ve ever done in the past, no matter how much conflict or evil you have in you.
     Right now, whoever you are, if your heart is right, your intention is right, you can start on the bottom step and God will lead you up to heaven.

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