Monthly Lessons Archive 2025

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.

START LIFE ALL OVER
     Now we have the greatest story ever told to humanity because it’s a story about you as an individual, as a man or woman here on earth. If you don’t like the chapters in your personal novel, you can toss it all out, leave it back where it belongs in ancient history, and get a fresh pen, and start your life story all over. You must not allow the subtle and cunning power of past history in your personal life to interfere with your thinking, with your receptivity that is going on right now.
     Ah, you’ll say, “I thought that I was trapped by my past thinking, past experiences. I thought it was needful for me to suffer today about something that happened twenty years ago. I so believed in the need of recurring pressure and pain that I invited them, thinking it was a good thing to feel today again the humiliation and the disgrace and the disappointments that I felt yesterday and twenty years ago. And as a matter of fact, I must hasten the moment to have the courage to go to that closet that I’ve been visiting every day and taking out the old scripts, and throw them out.”
     I tell you, you will get a new, true, exalted feeling of authentic spirituality, of liberty, of happiness, each time you rip out the old page, and there’s the fresh one right in front of you. And listen to this. Say this to yourself. “I am not trapped by all those years in the past. If I make a mistake now even, I can rip the whole page out and there’s another fresh page.”
     When you make a mistake, any kind of a mistake that you know is wrong, don’t continue to think that you’re compelled to read the first mistaken line and are compelled to continue with the next wrong move. Dare to toss it in the wastebasket and start again.
     Now, you can add a second true fact — encouragement. Remember, you’re writing the book all day long in your own mind. You can add a second one, a third one, and a fourth one, all the time building up what can be called heavenly momentum so that you’re shifting your central self from acting mechanically to flowing consciously.
     You say and think that it is needful for you to live with the manuscript-self of that terrible, shocking, experience when you were ten years old, and you even want to blot it out of your mind. You must never, never, never blot it out of your mind; that’s called repression. Repression causes pressure. That’s called avoiding reality. It happened when you were a ten-year old boy or girl, didn’t it?

UNPLEASANT BEHAVIOR IS SICK BEHAVIOR
     Unpleasant behavior is sick behavior. Few people want to think about this fact, but you will do so. From now on you will see that unpleasant people are sick people. You know the thousand varieties of unpleasantness, including sarcastic accusations, delirious demands, repulsive self-worship, a cold and hostile face. If your behavior is unpleasant, you must see that you have chosen midnight over noon and see that you will stumble and fall in your own darkness. If another person is unpleasant, realize that your wish for sunlight must have nothing to do with his darkness.

NEVER FEEL BAD
     I don’t care what’s going on, wars, crimes, starvation, whatever, you must never look out at the crazy world and go into self-reference. If you do, you have drawn the zombie-like world inside yourself and you will get a false love for that, and you will want to continue as a zombie. You'll want to continue to be what you are because you feel a certain false satisfaction in having someone to refer to.
     Don’t you ever again refer to yourself in any way at all. It’s not going to do a thing for you. You don’t have to feel bad about anything. You don’t have to feel persecuted by anyone. You don’t have to be left out.
     As a quick exercise try to think of hundreds of occasions where you did feel as if everyone was against you. Everyone knocks you down and drags you around. All the time you didn’t understand that you were doing something very seriously damaging to yourself, which was to build up the misconception that you have a you, and then you think that you have to keep the you going by remembering all the insults you've ever had.
     I’m going to give you a spiritual exercise and I want you all to do it. I want you to consider yourself living in this world doing exactly what you're doing now, working where you're working, your family life, and consider yourself as being something that is apart from the sickness wherever you see it, inside or out. Consider yourself to be apart from your own inner surges of jealousy toward someone else. Consider yourself to be apart from all secret sorrows, you name it. Consider yourself to be apart from it. Now in spiritual reality that is true, but you're not able to escape the anguish of what you see happening in the world or inside of you. You’re not able to escape it because you want to be your own anguish. You want to feel yourself.

CHANGE THE INTERIOR
     If I change the interior, if I make the interior right, then it will project itself to the exterior and the exterior is right, and I never believed this would happen, but the exterior becomes right by me having nothing to do with it. Ah, look at the thousands of beautiful things that are happening inside of you now. You’re beginning to work where you should work.

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