Monthly Lessons Archive 2022

ALL IS WELL
     The voice that is assuring us that all is well, because Truth is well, is always speaking to us twenty-four hours of the day, every day of the year, under all conditions! There’s no condition in which the Voice of Truth, the Voice of God, is silent. It is always speaking, assuring, saying that all is well. Why don’t we hear it? Well, that's obvious.
     The mind is in the way — these exciting things, the depressing things. For example, fearfully looking forward to something that's going to happen, some kind of a crisis, some kind of a situation you have to meet that you can't avoid. And so this fills your mind up, and you can't hear the voice fully. But just one small part of your spiritual ear is hearing that all is well.
     That is what you have to listen to. Not to the voice of the demands, the voice of the future. Do you understand what I am saying now? Let's see now if you do.
     There is nothing wrong with the Kingdom of Heaven at any moment. The Kingdom of Heaven is always in charge of everything. All is well up there! But up there is also down here, if that's the way you are. See?
     What happens when we go wrong is this. The mind takes over and demands that we worry. And it will explain in sinister detail its own twisted logic why you should worry. "You should be concerned because.…" And then it goes on with a thousand different lies as to why you should worry. If you can catch yourself beginning — we called it beginning to be kidnapped last night — beginning to fall for the lie and stop right there. And remember what I just said. And it's OK to start with a phrase at the start, the idea which I will now repeat. All is always well in the Kingdom of Heaven.
     If we don't feel well — if we’re agitated, if we’re jealous, if we're aggressively evil in any way, it’s because we have forgotten that fact, and have been kidnapped out into the outer world where the pleasures of worry are so astoundingly varied. The pleasures of worry because as long as you are worrying you can still say, “I can solve this problem.”
     You can always be the center of your own attention.
     The Voice of Heaven will become increasingly clear to you as you just dare not to worry or be concerned with anything! There are no exceptions!
     If you want to see how horrible the human condition is, you make a long list of your worries. Don't be afraid of it, just write it down. “I worry abou t.…” And then put it down. And after you’ve made your list of fifty or so, don't you dare stop. Because the dark forces want you to stop there, and not see the other fifty that are even deeper than that — having to do with embarrassing things, shameful things, things that you don't want to think about, about yourself. Right? See! And don’t you see that the very resistance to that is part of the trap?
     You dare then to make conscious any thought, feeling, response, that goes through your system. Make it conscious to yourself. Don't be afraid of the shock. Or, if you have to be afraid of it, be afraid of it, but simply know that the shock is there. And at that moment, at the most horrible feeling that you're a terrible human being, to put it mildly — that you’re sinful, that you’re evil — right at the moment that you hear self-accusation going on, at that moment you remember that all is well in the Kingdom of Heaven.
     And the remembrance of that, which has far more psychic force than you can understand yet — spiritual force, the remembrance of that will push out right now the concern, the anxiety, the worry, the self-centered concern with yourself. The remembering that all is well in the Kingdom of Heaven returns you to it.

START SEEING
     All right! It’s a long, long journey that starts with seeing that you are indeed in the dark valley. Seeing that all the doctors you’ve consulted, all your pleasures for example, seeing that they have done nothing but keep you sick.
     It’s a long journey from that initial recognition of your condition to where you become one who says, “I love God more than I love my darkness.” And so, you stay up there on the mountain top and let the sunshine do the work for you. That’s what will do it! Nothing else will do it!
     Thinking, ordinary thinking, can’t cure anyone; it has to be something higher than ordinary thought. Well, that something higher than ordinary thought is Spiritual Sunshine. And all you have to do is remain in it and it will cure you. You can feel it inside you. You can see all your fears start to fade away, in actuality, not in imagination! And when they start to fade away, you will see that you imagined your whole life before. Imagined that you were loving, for example. You imagined that you were kindly. You imagined that you were intelligent. And in great horror you saw that you were asleep all your life, dreaming that you were awake!
     The decision is yours, ladies and gentlemen! The path is there to start walking up the mountain. It’s up to you individually. If you want it, I have good news for you. Truth itself will guide you up, and keep you up there, if you put yourself on the side of that instead of putting yourself on the side of loving darkness. And loving darkness in your friends, and in your activities and inside yourself.
     And even a small start is recognized by Truth as being genuine. That much is all you need. Just that much. Even if you said tonight, as best you can in a small way, “I’m going to try to understand everything here. I’m going to try.”
     God heard that prayer, “I’m going to try.” And you’ll grow, and you’ll change. And you’ll understand — you’ll understand for the first time in your life, you’ll understand from yourself that God exists. And all is well because of that!

VICTORY IS ALREADY WON
     I am speaking to you with words. Try to see the depth of the meaning behind them. A person who, in his self-centered egotism, takes himself as a god apart from all else doesn’t know it! This is why you can’t get through our thick heads and their thick heads, that you have an image of yourself that you take as being real and which you also bow down and worship above all else. Which means you’re separated from God with a capital G. Which means your life is a mess, and you are indeed a cruel hypocrite.
     This means that we’re unconscious, right now. Therefore, the way out is to become conscious — to see, to understand, to apprehend, to have insight into ourselves as we actually operate. Then after that we can cease to call it ourselves, take it as being me. But you have to go in the right order; otherwise, you’ll get hardened in the wrong order, and there’ll be no hope for you.
     First you have to see the condition as it actually is, and then you cease to say ‛I’ to it. But that’s very dangerous — the whole thing is very dangerous all along, because the devil is watching for anyone to try to make progress. And he’ll trip you up if he can, and he has a million tricks.
     Do you remember, listen? Never forget this morning’s talk. The victory is already won. You don’t have to win anything. There’s no one there to win. There can never be a winner. You can use the word winner only when you’re conscious that you’re using the word ‛winner’ without self-reference. Isn’t that beautiful?
     If you fight, you’re going to lose. You will always lose. Sickness always loses when it asserts itself. The one and only way to win with a capital W is to resist not evil. Right?
     Look, if you have no one on earth to hate, to dislike, if — listen to this now, it’s pretty deep — if you have no one on earth to hate, can you exist as a hater? No. There’s no way you can exist as a hater. But we want to exist as a hater because this is the only existence we’ve known up until now. And we’d rather be hateful than to be non-alive. But to be hateful is death! Did you ever think of that? That this is a state of death — to live in hatred, to live in violence, to live in egotism. And death is always trying to, with all its madness, always trying to convince itself that it is life. And it is doomed to destroy itself daily!
     False love invites hatred from the world — false love, which is hatred itself. Calling the brick love doesn’t make it love. It makes it a label only. And then we believe in the label and say, “I am loving.” And all people who are loving on the surface have great violence in them, and great hatred against the people that they are forced to love. Can you imagine love being compulsive? This is what it is in the dark world! Real love has nothing of that. It’s very loose and free and spontaneous. And it doesn’t look around and say, “I love you. And I hate you.” See, it doesn’t use the words at all. Love doesn’t use the word love at all, which makes it unique Love with a capital L.
     All self-reference dulls you because it’s an illusion that there’s someone there to get excited over. There is no one inside you to get excited over! But you have a thought about yourself, and you mechanically repeat that thought over and over and over again in order to repeat the thrill. And the thrill blocks out your awareness of the fact that you are not that thrill at all, or the supposed person in back of the thrill.
     The real nature, your real self, has no time in it. Therefore, it does not have to resort to time thinking, which exists in the intellect. It’s just there. God already exists. God already is good. All we have to do is — like the prodigal son, the prodigal daughter — is go back home, and all problems are solved.

HOW TO REALLY WIN
     When you are afraid — which you are — that doesn’t mean that your fear, your tension and anxiety has to go beyond itself and explode into other self-injuring emotions. For example, if you are afraid of someone, of a condition, it is not necessary for you to then go on to be hostile toward it. You need not go on to attack it. Because if you do that, then the attack and the hostility will find a third element to attach itself to — accusation, or whatever. And it starts the whole string of freight cars rolling down the track, all unnecessarily. And down a track, by the way, that leads downhill and always — and you know it — to a crash, to a self-crash.
     Now, what’s the alternative? Can’t you just sit down somewhere when you’re afraid of something, and just sit back and know that you’re afraid, and not go beyond it? You are in fear for just one cause — because you don’t really know who you are!
     The Truth, the beautiful, pure, powerful, marvelous Truth itself can’t be lost. It’s always one with itself. It is always found itself. It can’t lose itself. There’s no division. There’s no parts to wander off. There is an Intelligence with a capital ‛I’ that has nothing in common with the way you now think.
     I want you to think how you now think. Look at the madness of it! Look at the scheming, look at the defense, and look at the hardness. And look at the bitterness and look at the changed facial expressions as you try to promote and protect yourself. This is what your mind is like. This is what your life is like. And this, horribly, is what you take as the whole world of existence for you! And of course, what else can you do? Your mind can’t go beyond itself. How can it? It’s limited. You have limited it with your limiting self-descriptions.
     So, now you know what your present life is like — how it rotates. And you come right back to where you started every day. And all you ever have is a new fresh set of despairs of how you are going to win. Will you listen to me when I tell you, the way you are going you are never going to win. You’re always going to lose. There is no way on earth that you can win the way you are now doing it.
     Tonight, and the rest of these meetings, we’ll show you how to really win, which is simply to stop trying to. And when you do that, your nature will change, your mind will change, your spirit will change. And then you’ll see — you’ll see to your great relief – that there actually was an intelligence that was one hundred percent different from yours.
     What we’re trying to do here, and what you can do personally, is to break the barriers of ordinary limited, thinking. And there’s one way to do that.
     You don’t know that this extremely limited world of your intellect is the cause of all your difficulties in life; the cause of every tension you have, of every hardness, of every defense. And if you have defense, you’ll also have offense. And you’ll hurt other people, as you’ve already hurt yourself.
     You don’t understand that you must — if you’re really going to be free, if you’re really going to be happy, if you’re really going to be in another world while you’re right here in this social world — then you have to come to an end of yourself. Which is the same thing as coming to an end of ordinary thinking!
     The way you can understand what we’re trying to get at is to sit back, take in all these impressions, see how true everything is that we’re talking about. See that you are being described exactly as you are.
     Collect knowledge. What an encouraging bit of information you have just been given. You have been told that it is possible for you to know that you’re in prison. You’ve been told that it is possible for you to understand exactly where you are. Admit it! Don’t lie about it! But know exactly where you are, that you’re a prisoner. And when you do that, there is someone on the outside of that prison who has the key. Who senses that when you want to get out, you will get out, and He will open the door. That entity outside the prison that is waiting for you to admit that you’re in it can be called God.

TRUE CONFESSION
     The act of confession plays a very important part in religious, philosophical teachings. Ninety-nine and nine- tenths of confessions in religious and philosophical teachings are false. The confession, the confessor, simply is trying to relieve the pressure of his own estrangement from God.
     Being apart from himself, apart from Truth, he feels the pain of that. And that pain does indeed cause him to commit acts that are against himself — crimes against himself, and crimes against everyone else with whom he's associated, including strangers on the other side of the world.
     So ordinary confession is nothing more than another ego-serving device. For one thing, when you confess to another person that you’ve harmed them, or you confess to God, you are talking about yourself. You are talking about yourself as a transgressor. And there's the familiar love of labels that we talk about. And you can then go into imagination and say, God has forgiven me. Or my wife or husband has forgiven me for behaving so badly. But your nature has not changed. Whatever caused you to be so cruel to that other person, the cause is still in you and it will happen again, and again, and again. Perhaps not in the same way, because we try to hide the repetition of internal crimes which then are externalized. We try to hide them from ourselves. And so, we invent new labels — glorious sounding labels — labels which excuse us from our crimes.
     So, most confessions simply make it necessary for the confessor to confess more and again. And of course, there's always an external authority that will say you are now forgiven. And then you can accept that and say, “All right, I am now OK.” You’re not OK. You're the same person as you were before you confessed.
     Now there is True Confession. And True Confession means that you have looked inwardly, and you have seen the present state you are in. That is True Confession! You look inside and you do indeed see the malice you have for other people. You do indeed see how divided you are inside yourself. And you get torn back and forth all day long, all life long, between one aim and the next.
     You want to be with a person you claimed you loved one day, and the next day you can’t bear the sight of him. This means that we do indeed have internal problems. The first step, a major first step, to getting rid of the problem is to confess that it is there.
     Now you won't be able to confess that you're angry, that you’re lost, that you're petty. You won't be able to confess that until you begin to catch the glimpse of something else, which is why work has to go along together in several ways. You won’t be able to confess it until you see that it wasn't you after all. You have to have a glimpse of what you're doing when you confess. This will weaken the hold of all these mechanical tyrants inside. And when you've gone through the process, not just a hundred times, or a thousand times, but daily, so that over the years ten thousand times you've confessed that you are indeed wrong about something. You can find all day long, ways in which you are wrong. An attitude, a hostile attitude. And you simply see that you are wrong about something. When this purification of True Confession has gone to the very end, you will then see that you confessed merely to the existence of the darkness inside you. You confessed to the existence of it, and you will see fully when you do this that it wasn’t you at all, but you wanted it to be you. Because this is the only thing you knew what to do. And at the end of your last confession, you can look back on your life with that ex-wife or ex-husband or friends or crimes that you committed. You can look back at it, and nothing is easier on earth for you to see that you were indeed a criminal. A criminal who hated other people. I'm not talking just about external crimes of robbing a store. I’m talking about being a psychological criminal.
     But it will be the easiest thing in the world to confess, that is to know, to see, to understand that you were utterly lost. That you were — the slightest word from someone could set off a sick reaction in you — and you either hit him or wanted to hit him. And in this state of seeing, of a whole confession you might call it, in this state of whole confession, that confession, there is no guilt at the moment, and no carrying out guilt afterwards. Because you’ve cleaned the whole thing out.
     And what a relief for you, or for me, to go into every one of these practically psychopathic behaviors and acts and thoughts that we had. Simply to know that they were there. And we were one with them. Therefore, we couldn't see them. We couldn't confess. Confess? We LIKE what we’re doing. You don’t confess when you like being psychopathic. You’re just living it out with a hard, dangerous look on your face.
     I’m talking about the very end of things now, where if anyone was to accuse you of being a vicious animal — five years ago, twenty years ago — you just nod your head. Your confession is complete. You knew, you know, you understand that you were taken over. Of course, at that time the only nature you had was that of a psychopathic monster. And you know now it was far worse than you ever thought you were at the beginning of your search. And those two words I use, psychopathic monster, are mild! We were that and far more. And you will internally nod to what I am saying, won’t you, because you know, especially if you’re beginning to confess that this is your state.
     And after it’s all over where you no longer take ego glory in saying “I’m a monster“ — when you’ve confessed that, you’re not even a monster. You've gone beyond that. The cure is complete. And you won’t have to confess ever again. Instead, you'll be very watchful so that there’s nothing to confess about. This is real innocence.
     That’s a long, long ways down the road. But we can start today.

DARE TO TRUST GOD
     See that you don’t know what to do about anything. Bare the discomfort, a new kind of pain, of not knowing. Refuse to ask anyone else or even to talk to them about it. Just go about your day and be interested in what you are doing while you are doing it.
     Keep coming back home. Watch. This is the answer. Stick with it.
     Dare to trust God to work it out for you. Remember: Someone is handling it for me.

TRUTH NEVER HURTS
     Truth hurts! That’s my lecture. I could spend forty-five minutes saying that same thing, and give you little stories about it, and elaborate on it. You will remember or write down TRUTH HURTS! It’ll explain everything! From wars, to broken marriages, to broken hearts, it’ll explain everything. TRUTH HURTS! Nobody will ever investigate why they feel bad. And of course, you know, you should know, that Truth never hurts. It’s the resistance to it that causes the pain.
     You refuse to stand alone! And right now, you’re far from being capable of standing alone. Most horribly of all you associate with yourself! Did you ever think of that thought, that you associate with yourself? And you’re going to ask yourself to be your strength?
     Standing alone means to not stand with yourself! But I know the problem, and maybe you suspect that you haven’t separated enough inside yourself where you can see that you're depending on that familiar retort. You’re depending on that huddling up inside of yourself. You're depending on hoping that someone will speak to you first and be nice to you.
     You stand around, even in this room and in other places, and just hope that someone else is going to take the initiative to relieve your insecurity, your loneliness. And they come over to relieve theirs, not for your sake.
     If the Truth hurts — which it does — then why don’t you let it hurt you so completely, so altogether, that you can understand it. And you won’t throw up all these defenses, all this heavy artillery of resistance, or of giving yourself comforting thoughts, “Well, tomorrow will be different.” It won’t!
     I run out of the ability to tell you certain things — certain marvelous facts which I know — and which I want you to know too. Because God, Truth, Reality is overseeing all of us, you and me, in order for us to escape from ourselves. I run out of words. And yet, I can use words, which are very limited. And I'll tell you what I'm talking about right now.
     There is a great secret, with a capital S, that the world knows nothing about, doesn’t care about, has no interest in it, has no interest in pursuing it.
     I just said that there is a great secret. Now it has no meaning to people who want to remain rude. This has no meaning to people who want to continue to pretend that they are superior to everyone, including a speaker. Someone who comes and tells them about things — they know more than that man. In their own minds they believe that they know everything. Right? Now, I'm going to explain to you the unexplainable while using words.
     In order to get over pain you inflict more pain on yourself so it’ll be stronger than the previous one, so that all you can do is close your eyes and cry. Completely self-enclosed, thinking that’s going to block it out. This is known as living in hell!
     When you’re out — when you're really out — you think different, you live different, you act different. And you never, never, again want to hurt anyone.
     Will you see your mistake then, in trying to climb over the wall, which is self-defeating? Which will only give you an egotistical and neurotic thrill, and the pleasure of punishment — the pleasure of punishment, because now you can think about yourself.
     You want the secret? I’ll tell you. The guide, the member of the escape committee, is ready to talk to you any time you are ready to listen. And he'll tell you the right way to go. I’m talking about Truth of course, which will enter a receptive heart. And no matter how hardened we are, how stubborn we are, how hopeless it seems, if you'll come back again, and again, and again, and put yourself in back of that guide. If you'll put yourself in back of that guide you will know that he is in front of you all the way out.
     Listen to what I said. If you're outside, you know that all those evils, and all the viciousness, and all those whips, and all the cruelty of human beings can't get over the wall. They don’t want out. They can’t get out because they don't want out. They want to be who, and what, they are. We have got tired of that lie! We have said we want out. And we can make it.

JUST WATCH
     There is a part of your mind which is perfectly capable of standing aside to calmly observe another part which is disturbed. It is like a referee at a football game who sees everything but is not involved in the battle.
     Realizing this is one of the greatest discoveries we can make. You can see why. It proves the existence of another way of thinking, of a force which is never drawn into the whirlpool of agitated thought. You will recall that we have called this the technique of self-observation. But, of course, we must practice until we experience this power for ourselves. Any daily challenge will serve.
     Just watch. Never mind if nothing happens at first, you’re still experimenting. Quietly observe every upset feeling the moment it arises. What results from this? What results is a human being who is no longer the victim of exterior influences, a person who determines his own thought and who lives his own life.

EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU
     I remember one time, many years ago, I was in a certain social situation, and there was a young man, probably in his twenties, who was with us. And a certain amount of money was required from each one of us — maybe two dollars, a small amount. And we were all putting our money into this little thing we were going to do that it was necessary to pay the two dollars for.
     And this young man looked at the rest of us, and really very pathetically and sadly, he said, “I don’t have any money.” He said it with great shame. He said it with sadness. He said it with a lack of understanding of what life was all about. He said — listen to this, I’m trying to get a certain very powerful point over to you — very sadly, and scared, and ashamed of himself, he said, “I don’t have any money.”
     My dear ladies and gentlemen, everyone on Earth is saying that! Everyone is going around sad and ashamed of themselves, not knowing what else to say, not knowing how to push back the embarrassment, and the sadness of not having any money.
     I’m not talking about money tonight. You can be sure of that. I’m talking about human beings who feel as if life has become too much for them. The other two or three boys in the group had the money, had the two dollars. And he said, if you're getting the point by now, and I hope you are, “I don’t have any money.”
     If you will listen closely tonight and be willing to get your vanities and your conceits — all of which are unconscious in you — willing to get them out of the way you can apprehend and absorb and begin to live these Truths.
     The idea is to live them in your daily life. For heaven’s sake, don't you see how you’re now living? You are that boy! And in your own way, you are saying that. And you’re ashamed of yourself. And you don’t understand that’s not what life is all about.
     It’s not about being caught out in a situation where everybody has advantages but you, everyone has position but you, everyone has a girlfriend but you, everyone has a boyfriend or a husband but you. And you feel that you’ve been left out in some way which you can’t understand; you’ve been cheated out of things. And you go home, and you cry.
        And if you're tired of being that young man who was so sad, and his eyes were wet because he didn’t understand why he didn't have any money; if you want to stop being that young man — and you all are that young man, if you want to stop that, then listen.... For whose sake? For your sake!
     Please, there’s nothing wrong with you admitting that you don’t have it made. There is something wrong with you lying about it, because then the cure can't begin.
     This may be, for some of you, the most positive, beautiful, cheerful, marvelous evening of your life, because it’s the first time perhaps you've heard these things. You have been lied to before, left and right by other people, and by yourself until you no longer know the difference between the truth and a lie. Well, tonight you’ll be given one hundred percent truth — not one fraction of a lie.
     This means everything depends on you. You must work out your own salvation. All the help you need, all the guidance — not from me, I’m simply a spokesman here tonight — all the help and guidance and power and wisdom that you need for changing yourself from this young man who didn’t have any money — all that is available for you the instant you become receptive. The instant you want to learn more than you want to protect yourself.
   If you see tonight, in even a small way, that you're kidding yourself, if you see it, a thousand angels will rejoice, because that’s their purpose, using a figure of speech, of course. That’s their purpose, to look down and see what progress you’re making. And they give you help — an angel being Light, Truth, a spirit of Rightness.

GO AGAINST YOURSELF
     To increase your speed toward self-health, towards spiritual success, always do exactly what you don’t want to do. You don’t want to carry that exercise over to the next day that you were given the day before. You don’t want to shake your head in a certain setting where you’re getting ego-gratification out of staying asleep. You don’t want to go against yourself. You don’t want to paddle upstream You want to stay asleep in the canoe. NO! Do what you don’t want to do. Go against the powers of darkness that want to keep you lazy, that want to keep you dreaming, thinking you are awake.
     Always give yourself a shock by deliberately doing that exercise one hour longer. Give yourself a shock by going into the supermarket and your aim is going to be aware of yourself turning the corner and going down the aisle and watching other people. Don’t be sleepwalking through that supermarket.
     Summary:  Do exactly what you don’t want to do and that will lead you to a new self.

TRUTH ALONE LOVES YOU
     Truth alone loves you. Truth alone loves you enough to not let you get away with it. There is a certain attitude which I’ve just introduced you to which you can deliberately develop, which is to know, to realize fully, that Truth alone loves you. And loves you so much, cares for your life so much that it doesn’t want you to get away with anything that is going to get you away from the level of love, which is very high.
     You can obey the invitation to understand fully what I just said so that your nature is dominated by a reverence for rightness.
     Since Truth alone loves you, don’t you want to return that higher spiritual affection? Of course you do. The little right part of you struggling to grow and to become in command of your life, that part can sense the rightness of having reverence for rightness. Now, since you’re loved only by what is right, can’t you see the enormous importance of knowing wrongness when you see it? When you feel it?
     Can’t you see the vitalness of you recognizing anything that is unloving, and won’t you want to disassociate yourself from everything that is your enemy, that really hates you? Yes, I know that you don’t know clearly at all and you’re afraid to face it just now. You’re afraid to face the existence of powers that actually hate. They do. They hate your existence. They don’t want you to do anything except what they maliciously and slyly tell you. And everything they tell you is a falsehood. And your suffering and chaotic life is the price you pay for not detecting the entrance and the possession of you by darkness.
     Truth is the only power that loves you. Therefore, the only power that is capable of showing you how to deal with what is unloving.
     You’ve got it mixed up. You now, in your great misunderstanding, love what doesn’t love you. You don’t recognize the enemy when you see it. So, what gratitude you can have for the plain and overwhelming fact that something wants to get through to you to show you that it is indeed the only element in the universe, in life, that wants to help you. All other sources say they want to help you while subtly destroying you. And you have lots of acquaintances with them, but you have not recognized they are evil to the point where you want nothing to do with them.
     Your increased association with reality, your real reverence for what is right, will be your proper course of action from now on. Take that proper course of action.

LIVE IN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH
      We’re going to talk about a subject that is extremely sacred, very pure. What I’m going to say next, you have heard about many times since you were a little child. I want you to watch your reaction to it. It’s extremely important that you do so. I’m going to tell you about the authentic spirit-led life. Haven’t you head many times that God will take care of you, that you can be led by the spirit of Truth, of Reality? Haven’t you heard that all your life? I’m going to explain to you how it works so that if you choose to make it work in your life, you can start. And here it is.
     A person who lives in the spirit receives the Spirit of Truth, of God, into his whole system. And he does just one thing with it. He obeys! Because he knows, he’s found out, that when Truth speaks, that is the only thing that is good for his or her life. There’s no question of choice! The very fact that a person is a full receiver of the spirit of Truth means that he understands that anything that comes from Reality is good, helpful, guiding, right, right for him.
     He understands that. So again, he doesn’t choose. Because choosing would come from the mind, wouldn’t it? So, the Light in him and the Light up there are the same thing. He’s in contact.
     This man who is a listener takes the message from on high. And now, having come into his whole system, his mind, his intellect, his mental part, is also a part of his whole, isn’t it? He has a mind. He knows how to conduct his business down on the corner.
     The spirit of Light comes down also into his intellect, which is devoid of self-centeredness. Therefore, the only thing that can happen is practical thought. This means that living in this world, he has to make choices too. But the choices are always as practical as this world will make them. But he’s not even concerned if they are impractical as far as he’s concerned because he doesn’t have an ego that says, “I must have it go this way instead of that way.” So he is not hurt by the madness of this world. So here we have the individual who’s living right on both levels, where you can begin to do something you’ve never done before which is to LISTEN.
     Now here’s the great secret. Will you fight first to understand the facts? I said fight because there’s a large part of your mind that doesn’t want these facts to lodge permanently in your mind. Let the Truth begin to come in, even if you don’t understand what that means.
     So what are you going to do with your choice? If you’ll make the choice not to make a choice from your intellect, the right choice will come to you. And it won’t be yours. Understand? Now if you do that, then there’s no question of whether you’re going to choose this or that. There’s no chooser. Then God chooses, to use that word deliberately.

RISE ABOVE THE THRILL METER
     All right. On the thrill meter talk, the man was looking at the thrill meter on the negative thrills, and on the upper half on the positive thrills. The positive thrills being what you now call, and what society always calls, good news. More income, flattery from someone, what you call good news of some kind. That’s the positive thrill. The negative thrill is where you lose something, where you’re depressed over the news, wondering what’s going to happen to this chaotic world. That’s a negative thrill.
     The point is this. You identify with, that is, you slip into sleep wherever the thrill meter registers — either above the center line into what you call a positive thrill, or call happiness, or the lower side, a negative thrill. It makes no difference where it falls, you call yourself that person. And if you don’t think so, the next time, for example, you get ‘good news’, something nice happens to you, and someone asks you “How do you feel?” you say, “Oh, I feel great!” See, ‘I’ and your feeling are one thing. “I feel great.”
     You get depressing news — a loss. Something happens, someone criticized you, someone said you’re not adequate in your work down at the office, or whatever, and you get depressed. Someone says, “From the look on your face, your world has collapsed.” And you say, “Yes, I feel pretty bad over how the boss bawled me out today.” Automatically, because you don’t put a pause between you and the reaction, you fall right into it and say, “I am elated” or “I am low.”
     Learn to be indifferent as to where the thrill meter registers — from the very low on the negative part, to the very high on the positive part. So-called positive, so-called negative part, it makes no difference where it is. If you are utterly depressed and gloomy and moody and sad, what has that to do with you?
     I’ll tell you what it has to do with you. First of all, you’re getting a thrill out of that, right where it is! You can now say, “What kind of a world is this? I’ve always been treated this way. No matter what I do, I get knocked down by someone.”
     You get bitter and hard. Now you want to keep that self, so-called self. But you say to yourself, “Well, life has its ups and downs. Maybe tomorrow I’ll be happy.” And sure enough, tomorrow the good news comes, the compliment, gentlemen. The lady smiles at you and you get hopeful, get real excited over it. And you say, “Ha, I am happy now. I have hope.”
     Use the word ‘indifference’. Maybe that will get through to you. It makes no difference to you – who you really are – where the thrill meter goes, registers, up, down. Where it stops makes no difference to you, because it’s all false. Anything that can be registered on the thrill meter is not you at all.
     There’s no way Truth can be depressed. You can be, your present identification, present name calling. Can you imagine God, the Creator, swinging in opposites, being elated one day and depressed the next? It’s impossible, isn’t it?
     It’s quite possible to picture yourself doing this. Can’t you see you’re making a mistake because you’re out of the kingdom? You’re not in the kingdom as long as you are registering on the thrill meter. The purpose of the story is to get you to see that you are living by that. You’re reading it, believing it, and say, “Ah, the thrill meter says, I’m now elated.”
     The thrill meter says, “Now, you better let the elation go and go down to the lower part of it and be bitter about something.” And of course, it always says, “Above all, deceive yourself as to the state you’re in. Never, never notice it, simply feel it.”
     When you feel the state of what you call happiness, and you feel a state of depression, you are feeling something, which means you can’t understand it. Feeling does not understand. If you could begin to understand your feelings, you could then cease to say, “I am whatever that mark is on the thrill meter.”
     A free mind, a free man, a free woman, does not have a thrill meter attached to him at all. He’s not living from it. He doesn’t need it. Lost people must have thrill meters, otherwise they feel lost, if you can figure that one out. Without the thrill meter they have no identification at all.
     Do you have the courage to just take it out of your pocket and set it aside, throw it in the trash? This is the way a free mind operates. Then you’re not concerned, as you now are, with inflation, with the price of gold, the price of oil. You’re not concerned.
     You know that person you’ve got in your life, either close or moderately close? Notice how concerned you are with how he or she feels toward you — relative, friend, acquaintance, someone you work with, whatever. You are not living your own life. You’re possessed! You’re controlled!

STUDY FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
     If there’s one word that characterizes daily life of men and women on earth, it’s the word restless. We’re always moving around somewhere, hoping that the solution to the pain, the cure for the heartache, is over there. And when we get over there, it’s not there. And we start all over again. Restless, moving around, ever searching, never finding. But worst of all, never noticing that this is what we’re doing.
     We’re on an endless kind of search, not knowing, not seeing, how we’re hounded along, whipped along by all these strange, and unknown feelings inside us. Not seeing how we’re driven by something we don’t understand.
     Not only that, but we’re afraid to look inside and see what’s there for fear that we may not be able to understand it, because we’ve understood so little about life. And when we don’t understand it, we get punished. We didn’t pass the grade, or the teacher reprimands us.
     All this conditioning is built inside us. And so we say, “I’ll play it safe by not even investigating, not looking.” Solves nothing! The restlessness is still there, and we just don’t know what to do with it. And so, we just resign, we just resign to life, which is defeat.
     All most people know what to do is to fight. And have an occasional little sugar lump, where it’s sweet for a little bit. Then they know they have to go right back to the start again. There is a place to start! A place to start always exists!
     Isn’t it a shock to you somewhat to realize that the evidence of the wrongness of so-called right people has been right in front of us? It’s in their faces when they’re walking down the hall and don’t know you’re watching them. But even when they know you’re watching them, they can’t hide it, can they?
     Now I wonder if you understand the following statement. All those idols, successful people (who millions around the Earth admire and think are leaders) all these people have one thing in common. And what they have in common is an attempt to drown out the roar of their own pain.
     If your face is wrong, that is, if it’s divided, your life is wrong. Now you make a study of human faces, effective as of right now. Out there in the world, you take a look at someone that you admire, that you’re jealous of, that you would like to be like. And you watch and see what you can see in their faces and ask yourself if that’s what you really want.
     Think of unnatural facial expressions. Think of vacant facial expressions. Go out into the world and just look at people and see if you see anything that you want to emulate, that you want to duplicate. Right in front of your own invisible eyes as you change inwardly, you will see, and you will know your face changing. You catch yourself in a vacant, agitated, nervous facial expression. Catch it in yourself and I will guarantee you, it will make it a thousand times easier for you to catch it in someone else.
     And it’ll make it much easier for you to detect one thing, which is what we’re after. Seeing the emptiness inside as it is expressed outside! The more afraid you get, the more you look. The more you’re ashamed of what you see, the more you should look. Because acquaintance with it will eventually prove to you that this is a part of that false personality that’s been hiding out and wrecking everything internal and external all these years!
     All right, that leaves one thing left. And it’s called work!

DON’T PUT UP WITH FEAR
     What a person fears is the loss of everything that he calls the truth. The loss of everything that appears right to him and for him. He fears the loss of his respectability, his reputation. He fears the loss of things that he’s counting on to tell him who he is. He fears the loss of all his acquisitions.
     Now, we’re trying to be much smarter here in this class. We’re trying to see precisely this. We’re trying to see that we fear the loss of everything that is causing us to be fearful losers. When we look at it, we understand that the fear of loss itself is the first wrong move, because fear is always a part of our old destructive nature.
     The next time you are afraid of anything, of being found out what you’re really like, you look at that fear and you see that it itself is an impostor! The fear speaks to you and says, “Watch out. Be careful. People are going to see through you and see what a fake you are. Watch out.”
     Now you watch that fear itself, and listen to what I’m telling you, which is that that anxiety itself is a lie. The tension and anxiety itself is the first lie. And you’re very wise by exposing that fact itself.
     You have a habit in your life that you can’t break; you have a certain way of living, a deceptive way of living, of speaking, of thinking, and feeling. And you see yourself wanting to get rid of it, at the same time you fear losing it. Look at your fear of being unable to get rid of the habit. And I will tell you that your fear of your inability to break the habit — I don’t care what it is. See the specific one you want. I can’t break that habit! The fear of not being able to break that habit is the only problem you have in life, because that basic fear extends to everything else.
     God does not compel you to be fearful! Then why are you? Because you’re not listening to the voice of Truth. You’re listening to something else. You had better find out that you are listening to the lies of yesterday that you’ve clutched so close together — that you’ve taken them as the only possibility, the only reality, and the only thing you have.
     Now, if you see that, you’ve stopped it right there, instead of going on to say, “But what if I lose my friend? What if I lose my money? What if I lose this or that?”
     You see you have a fear, and then it projects itself outwardly. And you think that that is the problem. That habit is not the problem. The fact that you have fear in you is the problem. The fact that you lose something is never the problem!
     You’re concerned with losing yourself. We are not going to fall for it! We’re not going to be in love with ourselves, which is the same thing as being in love with tension, being in love with fear. We’re not going to be in love with something that is using us anymore. We’re going to study our mind. We’re going to see where we’re making a mistake; where the imposition of ten, twenty, thirty years ago is still operating inside us.
     I told you, you don’t have to put up with it! I tell you, you don’t have to put up with the fear of losing anything. Anything that you fear losing, you should lose. If you fear losing an identification, an attachment, you should lose it, so you can go through the shock of seeing that it has no value to you at all. Because the only thing in this universe that has value at all is Truth itself with a capital T.
     Don’t you know how beautiful this is? It is marvelous hard work. And every time you expose something inside of yourself that you’ve been hiding, you get healthier, and you get happier, and you get freer!

ONLY YOUR UNSELF CAN BE GOOD
     Regarding acceptance and rejection, the day will come when neither word has any meaning to you. Such opposite states have meaning, false meaning, only to a divided mind, a mind looking to itself for a wholeness it will never be able to locate. Wholeness does not reside in thinking about wholeness, but in the lack of a need to think about wholeness. The king who has returned to his castle thinks neither about the castle nor the woods.
     To go a bit deeper into this, the spiritual castle has no geographical location on this earth. It does not exist in the woods or outside the woods. It exists above both, in a new and lofty world. This becomes clear when you see that a word is a word and nothing more. You need have no concern about being in a good light in the eyes of others. Only the thought-created self has such ambitions and the resulting anxieties. You cannot have either good light or bad light, for there is no individual self to receive it. Try handing either a bouquet of roses or of weeds to an imaginary person. It cannot be done. Only your unself can be truly Good, and that Goodness comes from God, Truth, Reality.

UNDERSTAND YOUR MIND
     All your life you have been trying to do things that you can’t do. You’ve been fighting, trying to achieve certain objectives, and you’ve found yourselves defeated. Trying to do things that you find it impossible to do. You’re constantly sending your desires and wishes out into the world, all day long, all night long, hoping to win and losing.
     And you have built up a certain hardened frustration and negative expectation by saying, “What kind of a terrible world is this where I can’t get what I want? Where whatever I try is met by a strength, a power, that is greater than I am. And I get thrown back, sometimes very hurtfully. In other words, I can’t win. So many impossible things that I wish to be possible remain impossible.”
     You should be very pleased to hear that what we’re going to go into tonight will be something that is possible for you to do. There’s something you can start with and something that will change everything in your life. It’ll change the way you see yourself, change the way you see the world, change the way you think toward God. It will change the way you act toward everything on earth including your own inner states. And that one thing that you can do, which will not meet with rebuff, with defeat – if you’re sincere, if you really mean it — that one thing you can do is to understand your mind. Really understand your mind.
     You don’t understand it now. Can you be very honest about that at the start? Can you admit really now that you have no comprehension at all of why your mind works so wildly, so madly — why it has so many dark movements in it, why you are indeed frustrated in your desires?
     Can you understand then that you don’t understand presently how your mind operates? If that is your starting place, it’s a marvelous starting place, because it’s an honest one. And no self-transformation can ever proceed unless you start on the basis of self-honesty, which is to see yourself as you actually are, not as you imagine you are.
     Do you really think that God, that Truth, that Reality has condemned you to unconscious self-laceration for the rest of your life, self-whipping? Do you really think that that is a necessary state for you to endure and suffer from all day long?
     You’re not happy, you’re not free. I’m saying that as a fact, you don’t understand what’s going on inside you, inside your mind. Can you picture yourself as being an enemy of your own life here on earth?
     Question: You watch very carefully, your mind, as you answer this. Can any dark mood such as depression, such as vicious criticism, such as sneering, can that be right for you, or is it wrong for you? I’m telling you, you had better start standing aside and seeing how you are identifying with those passing thoughts instead of standing aside and pushing them away in the sense you’re not accepting them as being yours. You are embracing a cage full of wild animals. Doesn’t that explain to you why you’re so nervous living with yourself?
     You will begin to understand your mind which will then instruct you on both ordinary life and higher life. You can begin to understand it, and that very understanding is a force, a force that works for you.
     Now, if you’re a blabbermouth by nature, and that’s the way you want to live, you’re not going to understand your own mind. Therefore you will have to pay the penalty in your preference for mental ‘blabber-mouthery’, or with your mouth, physical mouth.
     Final question. You want something better? Sacrifice everything to the invitation of Truth to understand your own mind. And God, who is higher than your mind, will do the rest.

KEEP ASKING FOR HELP
     If you want help, it is yours. All you have to do is want it. You don’t have to know exactly how it is going to come to you. You don’t have to keep the help going in any way. You don’t have to worry that is won’t come. All you have to do is follow the spiritual instruction which is simply to ask for help.
     Keep asking for help, and then (don’t miss this) and then when that help does not come to you immediately, you are not to allow satanic arrows to make you discouraged, worried, doubtful, that there is such a thing as help. You are never, never, ever, under any conditions, to get discouraged, you must not wander away, or think that it is hopeless. Because when you do that, you’re obeying instructions from hell. They told you to get discouraged and the devil will actually put the actual words and phrases and sentences in your mind in order to deceive and destroy you.
     Pray all over again. Work all over again. If it took you 90 years of your life to find the Kingdom of Heaven, wouldn’t it be marvelous to know that you found God? Once you’ve found it you’ve found it forever.

PURE INNOCENCE
     Listen to this following thought, it’s very profound. If a person can keep his own mind confused, keep confusion going out in that world, then he won’t have to be clear, will he? Now follow. If there is confusion, then there can’t be clearness. Because if there is clearness, what will be revealed in that clearness? You know what will be revealed? The fact that human beings are criminals inwardly, to one degree or another.
     Do you know right in the human heart is a desperate need to cause confusion, because as long as that is there, they don’t have to face their own guilt. The guilt of saying that they know more than the Light!
     Are you following that thought? How profound, how immense it is! Therefore, we have found that we deliberately cause chaos. This means the whole situation, the world situation, is obscure and we, if we’re still sick, we can blame someone else and hope that in the confusion we can get away with it.
     A confused mind is already suffering from its own confusion. Only a mind that says, “I’m going to start to be clear. I’m going to see my guilt in being egotistical, my guilt in pretending I know” — that’s the beginning of clearness, isn’t it? We’re trying to be clear and see what the situation is actually like. Face it so that the Light will banish the darkness in it.
     From now on, you have a new exercise for yourself, don’t you? You have an exercise in which you can see how petty lies for example, petty evasions for example, are a part of your attempt to create fog out into the world so you can hide yourself in it. And hope that your defects and your dishonesties are also hidden in the fog.
     The reason it can’t work is because if you create the fog, you have to walk in it. And you’re going to get bumped in it. And you’re going to bump into other people, which explains wars, which explains heartaches in the home, which explains internal struggles, internal conflict.
     What a brave mind it is that starts to say, “I understand my own tendency to want to confuse things so I don’t have to face myself.” Start tonight. No matter how painful it is. This is a new element, the shock of seeing your pain. You are already in pain by being lost, separated from your real nature. Add to that the shock of seeing the pain and it will begin to disappear!
     It’s a terrible thing for any of us to wander through this world feeling guilty. Wouldn’t it be nice to be innocent because we’re not claiming anything for ourselves, not taking any kind of a credit, not taking even any kind of a blame. That’s why you’re innocent, because you don’t even have a label of calling yourself a troublemaker.
     That comes later. The first step is to see that you’re in trouble with yourself, therefore a troublemaker wherever you go. And you’ll finally take the next step of going beyond the label. Because you’re willing to give up completely, as we talked about earlier. And all your old identity vanishes. And you stand there innocent.
     Not innocent in your old nature. That can never be innocent. It is always guilty because it’s separate from God. But it’s an innocence that is not intellectual. An innocence that doesn’t have to prove itself. An innocence that doesn’t even think about its innocence. That’s how innocent it is. And it is nothing more but the pure innocence of Truth itself that you are now living in.

YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN WHO YOU REALLY ARE
     You need not idolize or yearn for anyone. But you must see very deeply into this in order to discover your basic error. You really do not admire that man or love that woman. Unknowingly you admire and love your own thoughts and feelings about them. Having imitation strength and beauty inside yourself you project them outwardly and then deceive yourself into thinking that they reside inside that man or woman. You will get an endless series of pains and disappointment as long as you unconsciously approve of this kind of self-trickery. You feel the need for something which in itself is right, but then wreck the solution by trying to get an answer from the same unintelligent mind that asked the original question.
     You cannot and must not answer your own questions. You fail to see that you are doing this when you look outside yourself for wisdom or strength or guidance. You are like the king of a castle who falls off his horse while riding in the woods. In his dazed state he wanders into a cave, thinking it is his home, even while suffering from the cave's discomfort. As his head gradually clears, he remembers where he truly belongs. Then his action-in-understanding guides him back to the castle with its true security and comfort.
     You have forgotten who you really are. Truth itself will help you to remember.

HOW TO ENTER HAPPY LAND
     Remember the part in the story where the people who covered the obstacle course dishonestly got so delighted when they were told those who qualify now may enter the happy land? And of course, all of them in their self-deception said, “Of course I qualify.” Therefore, a false statement brought a false thrill.
     Happily, and joyfully, they marched over for their reward. That is, to enter the Kingdom and be happy for evermore. They came up to the invisible wall and they tried to get in, and they smashed their hands and their feet against it, put their palms up. That is a very necessary, horrible, grinding, atrocious, beautiful experience you must go through.
     You do go through it! You went through it today. Your whole life consists of you saying, “Ah, I have done my part. Now it’s time for the payoff. And now, my rewards of being happy will surely arrive.” They never arrive!
     Now here’s the point. Fury must not only arrive, it is there. Fury must be made conscious. The minute you pound on that invisible wall and demand and say, “I have a right to get in,” in all your fearful rage (and remember, you’re scared, you’re terrified) you say, “You’ve got to let me in!” But they won’t let you in! This goes on a hundred times a day. “You must be nice to me.” “You must not raise the price of corn on me in the supermarket.” And you pound, and you pound, and you pound!
     You have one hope on God’s earth, and no other! You must collapse. You must collapse until you disappear! As long as you have strength — ego strength, conceit strength, self-strength, to get up and pound on that invisible wall with even your little finger, trying to force it open on your terms, it will never open.
     Now, there’s an alternative! You haven’t arrived there yet. You’re still pounding on that wall demanding to get in, and you’re not going to get in that way.
     I’ll save you a lot of work if you’ll listen to me. The next time you collapse because you’re so bitter, so hateful, you don’t have an ounce of your self-strength left, remember what you were told here. That will be the beginning of understanding.
     You must sooner or later see that that invisible wall was the unconscious self. The only wall that keeps you out of Heaven, out of that Happy Land, is the wall of your unconscious conceit — yourself. “I deserve to get in.” There’s no one deserving to get in.
     Boy, this is tough stuff! Don’t you dare miss this if you want to reach that other land! But I even tell you how nice Truth is. It says, “Look, when we see through your deceit, we see through it, and we try to tell you through your pain, that there is no way you can kid us. And when you pound on that wall, and collapse in utter hatred and bitterness, I know what murderers you are in your hearts.”
     Aren’t you grateful that I can see what you can’t see which is keeping you out of the Kingdom? You can’t see it. Be grateful that someone will tell you that! After your next defeat, remember what you’ve heard here. And remember that if you give up trying to enter that Kingdom, if you really do it — you’ll get up, and you’ll walk right through it.
     The nature of the unhappy land — that nature cannot enter the Happy Land. Would it be happy if you brought yourself into it? If the way you are right now were transported up to Heaven, would it be Heaven for you? You have to live with yourself! It would be hell! And all your nice relatives up there too, would that be Heaven?

THIS WORLD IS ILLUSORY
     The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist. Because it does not exist as a reality. Because it is illusory, it has only illusory and worthless rewards for you. While employment and geography and people exist for your physical self and your social self, and are good for them, they cannot give benefits to your real spiritual nature, which is complete in itself.
     It always has been complete and always will be, for it lives not in time but in eternity. In reality there is no individual who can win a thrill or a sense of worthiness from the everyday world. In a lost person, rewards or punishments from the world fall on the self-glorified self and cause it to vibrate. This vibration serves as a shaky idol, which we eagerly worship for as long as the thrill lasts. But since the worshipper and his idol are the same thing — the same set of vibrations — the ending of the thrill of worshipping the idol causes self-panic. We feel as if we are fading away, that we will not be ourselves anymore.
     The fear of the extinction of the invented self prevents us from seeing that the false self must fade away in order to experience true spiritual birth. Your work in all this is to notice the deceptive nature of your fear of not existing. And one way to do this is to notice how friends, news stories, rumors of doom, how they all try to plant fearful thoughts and feelings into your system. Here is what these people are doing: In order to give themselves a false sense of aliveness by making gloomy remarks, they have no conscience in making others feel the same false sense of doom. They are like mad musicians who demand that you dance to their insane music. Everything in this paragraph connects with the opening sentence, which is: The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist.

SEE PAIN AS PAIN
     You make a pain feel like a pleasure. You break down and cry inwardly or outwardly and that pain you take as something good. You take those tears, you take that sadness you have as a marvelous opportunity to feel yourself. And you’re not feeling yourself alive at all. You’re feeling a state that will come to an end. And when it comes to an end, when you’ve cried yourself out, you’ll immediately pull out the next thing to get excited about so you can call that false pain a pleasure. This is the life of practically every human being on Earth.
     Distraction is always a pain that masquerades as a pleasure; anything that takes you away from awareness of what you’re doing at the moment.
     Do you know that you’re seated there listening to me? Turn your invisible eyes back on yourself. And know that you’re seated here. You can know that you’re seated here. And you can be dimly aware of the person on your left, or on your right. Now that’s the beginning, that you know that the physical self is there. Go much deeper than that. Can you see yourself think right now while you’re talking or listening?
     That’s a good start, isn’t it, to know that you’re here and the other person is there. That’s both opposites together. I am here and you are there. That’s bringing the two together. You’re aware of the whole thing, aren’t you? Not just you, you’re not lost in your own thoughts like that. You’re seeing the whole room.
     The point is this. You can watch your own mind operate. You can see your thoughts come up. Just as was illustrated in the talk of a while back. Remember the man was sitting at his window watching the trucks go by. And all he had to do was just sit there and note which ones went by. You can watch what thoughts go through your mind. And if you don’t – now listen – if you don’t do the choosing, if you don’t do the accepting or rejecting, the right thoughts will always come up. But if you choose — you see what is happening? If you choose the thought, that’s the self-protective thought, the accusing thought toward another person, then you have kept yourself alive as the error maker, because you’ve kept yourself alive. And the self is always the error-maker.
     From now on when your thoughts come up, just let them come up and watch them as they come up. DO NOT choose. If you choose you have re-created yourself on the basis of delusion, on the basis of greed for money, or the desire or yearning for another person. Let me tell you that Truth has made you complete in yourself. You don’t need to yearn for anyone. You don’t need any kind of excitement. You can have right entertainment. You can have people in your life. You can have sex. You can have a nice relationship with another person. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about whether you have put Truth first in your life or not.
     You see the problem, don’t you? You don’t want something to come down and do it for you. You’re afraid that if you drop control of your life that you’ll lose control of your life. That chaos is what is in control.
     This would be a marvelous starting point for anyone. If you saw the pain as a pain, you would soon drop it. You can’t drop a pain until you see it as a pain. But you put a label on it. And you think that this excitement and this thrill — this thrill of hating another human being, you think that is keeping you alive. It is keeping you down in that very dark place.
     We’re here to tell you all these facts and to tell you please wake up! See what you’re doing. See what you’re doing against yourself by hanging on to yourself. And what is beyond yourself is a marvel — a marvel that is unbelievable, unimaginable!
     You’ll only know that this God exists who can give you this life, when you as your own petty self-worshipping self begins to fade out. Let yourself fade out. And what replaces it will be real. And you’ll come, with a different manner, with a different facial expression. And everyone else will know it. First of all you will know it because you’re living it.

NOTHING CAN STOP ME
     There is nothing out there or in here that can keep you from finding the Truth if you will walk on in spite of your own evil. Nothing can stop me. Nothing, as long as I don’t quit!