USE YOUR OWN INITIATIVE
Vernon tells of a lady who visited Switzerland who used her own initiative to find out more about the country. She thought, “I’d better find out what's going on in this place that I'm in.”
You’re in this world. You have things you have to understand. You have to know how to talk, you have to know how to read the news and watch television. You have to know how to have a right relationship with friend or relative or stranger. You cannot possibly live in this world happily and with self-control unless you understand first yourself and then your relationship with others.
Your life contains the book of universal language, by which you can read it and find out how to behave toward yourself and toward the world in general.
See, if you’re in trouble, if you have scary thoughts, that simply means that you’re not in the right place inside. Which in turn means you had better find out how to move out of your present nature so that the days and the nights will be under your command.
You won’t have to ask anyone for anything. In the first place you will know them, that they don’t know. Because when you found out that you didn’t know, you were astonished and shocked at first to find out that they didn’t know either. But they have rehearsed their act so well, and you were so weak, that you wanted to play follow the leader.
Well, where have other people led you because you did not read the universal book about the kind of a life you’re living? Wherever they led you is your own fault, it is not theirs. They might have been tricky people and all that, but it was your self-responsibility to understand why you don’t understand....
It is your self-responsibility to know that they don’t know and there’s only one way to reach that brave productive conclusion, which is to know that you don’t know.
And then don’t ask yourself what to do. Never get information about yourself on how to behave from your memory, from your habits, from what you always say.
BREAK FALSE DEPENDENCY
You, for today’s exercise, you’re to shatter, you’re to break at least one little false dependency that you have on someone else. You are never again, from this day and onward to look at another person and hope that he is strong, wish that she is the answer to your prayer. She might be the answer to your sex urgings, he might be the answer to your wish to make more money. I'm talking about you seeing they have no answers that will give you an intelligent life that will lead you toward eternal life.
That one thing alone, that exercise alone would be a terrific eye-opener for you, so that you have the opportunity to dismiss all of sick society, dismiss it altogether and see through it to where you’re thrown back on yourself.
That’s the second shock, to see that you look at yourself and say well if they don’t know, I better find out for myself, and then you make the mistake of doing what you’ve always done only you’ve covered it up a little bit, you consult your own experiences, your own desires, you say, ah, that’s the help I need.
Please think of the word self-transformation, it is only the transformed self, the enlightened nature, that you can fall back on with safety and with authentic progress.
