Tremendous Tidbits by Vernon Howard

A TRUE SPIRITUAL STORY by Vernon Howard (From  a talk given in 1984)
     Once upon a time a man lived in England where there are many castles. Over the years when these castles and mansions were built hundreds of years ago, it was a habit to put a secret room in it. A secret room where they could hide their valuables and they did it very cleverly. You could imagine how they could put a secret room in a big castle … put a  false roof in a room and put the room under it. Things like that. Now, a lot of these old buildings, hundreds of them all throughout the land had secret rooms in them. But the present owners didn’t know about them and here’s why, and this is a true historical fact. They’d fixed them so cleverly that people never even suspected … the later owners, for example, never even suspected that these secret rooms were there, but they were. And they were filled with old scrolls and jewels and armament and valuables, because that is what they were for. For valuables that they didn’t want thieves to come in and get.
     So, this man was an expert in finding secret rooms and he hired himself out for a price. He would go to a mansion and say there may be a secret room in this big castle that no one has ever discovered. For 500 years, there may be a room filled with gold coins of Charles the XXX, Henry the “I” “V”. (Laughter) And so he’d hire himself out and he was an expert. He had studied the old castles. He had studied what they were built like. So he would take a walk around and he’d look carefully and where they were he would find them. So all the treasures of the past were uncovered and the new owner got them.
     Point: You, too, can become an expert in finding the secret room inside yourself. Oh, I tell you, it’s pretty well disguised so far, isn’t it? You’ve been looking for it for a long time, huh? No results. No riches. You hear talks about how you can free yourself of worry. How you don’t have to fawn before anyone else. You hear all these good things, but they don’t happen, do they? Come on, I know they don’t happen. I know you haven’t found the secret room!
     What’s the problem? The problem is that you have not put that first and foremost. YOU DO NOT HAVE A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION ABOUT IT. So you own the mansion and you’d rather play out in the front lawn, and have a picnic, or you’d rather sit inside and paint pictures. I’m talking, of course, about internal wastage of your energies.
      Let’s do one good thing right now to locate the secret room, which exists in everyone of you. Right now, you will drop all thought. You won’t be thinking about the castle and you’ll simply, you can look around a little if you want. You just know where you are, and you might want to change your position a little bit as I’m doing. And now, we’re going slower, and we are more conscious than we were before (Vernon slows his speech down here). Thought has slowed down and you know you’re in this room and you can see the person next to you out of the corner of your eye. You have deliberately done something to detect the secret room.
     The exercise I just gave you must be done all day long. Do it at unexpected times. DON’T WORK WHEN IT’S EASY! That expert became an expert by traveling all around the country, by doing hard work, by noticing how the craftsmen of 500 years ago concealed the rooms. He studied trickery. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Internal trickery. How even when you’re confused, you won’t even see your confusion. To see confusion is the end of it.
     All right, back to our man. He traveled all over Scotland, England, Wales. He studied every building until he began to understand how clever the craftsmen really were to hide the rooms. But he had his own mission. In  this case, it was to earn a living and to bring to civilization all these artifacts and ancient spears and golden crusted cups that King Arthur used. He liked that too. He helped archaeologists.
     What’s robbing you? I know what is robbing you. You are afraid to wake up! YOU FEAR WAKING UP! Why would you fear that? See, when you wake up, you have no daydreams. You don’t waste your time. Gentlemen, I will ask you, how many sex thoughts about that pretty girl have you had in the last month? Come on, to yourself. Sex thoughts, you know you see those girls. Now, next question, gentlemen. When are you going to sacrifice it so you can find the secret room? One or the other. You can’t have both! You can’t go into those daydreams of that beautiful girl coming into your bedroom and into your life. You’re going to have to give them up. If you don’t give them up, you won’t find the spiritual life.
     Ah, ha! what’s been your choice so far? The beautiful daydreams. Ladies: you’ve got your own. You’re going to meet a man. He’s going to marry you so you won’t have to work anymore. And you won’t have so many financial problems, you think!  He’s going to be one of the knights around the castle rescuing you. Don’t count on it. He can’t even afford a horse. (Laughter) Come on! Which have you chosen so far? Ladies and gentlemen, something has to go. It will be very painful for you to give up your wrong thoughts. I know it’s painful, but look. I’m going to help you. Just do it. Just do it and go through the emptiness. That beautiful girl you saw and she even smiled at you and you immediately write your own script of how she’s going to come knocking at your door. Break it the minute it tries to form itself in your mind. Break it right now. Oh, it’s going to hurt. DO IT! AND DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN, AND DO IT FIFTY TIMES A DAY.
     This is called breaking the power of dark forces over your life. Exactly what you do when you go against that and say, “I WANT IT BUT I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT.” Not fifty times a day … 100 if you can manage it. Little by little, because of the law that God is stronger than Satan. In fact, there’s no contest. Little by little, the power of images to form in your mind will weaken and fade away. Little by little, but oh, how definite. And what will take its place is the NEW YOU, THE REAL YOU, THE NEW LIFE.
     More and more, you’ll get to be spiritually excited! Look, you’ll be working when you fall into bed at night. You’ll be working to make sure the devil doesn’t creep in. All you want to do is find more secret rooms inside of you and there are hundreds of them, not just one. And every room, you understand the analogy of it, every room is a new insight, a new right excitement of seeing that you’ve cut yourself off from that evil human being that you used to be around all the time, and you even thought you liked him or her. Now you want nothing to do with him or her and you understand perfectly that this means that you’ve found one of the new rooms.
     FINAL COUNSEL: Use what you’ve heard tonight to grow a little bit every day. You can’t take leaps and bounds just now. Later on you can. A little bit every day, but that doesn’t mean you work a little. That means you work all day long real hard. Sleeves rolled up. You work real hard all day long. The dark forces are not going to yield to you easily. They are not going to let you go easy. They are going to exert every force they have against you. You put every force you have by being connected with God against the dark forces, and you’ll see the law work which is that the devil must yield to God. Darkness must yield to light.