January 2008

VISIT YOURSELF
  Remember the phrase “Visit Yourself.” Now, please, you don’t have to take an exciting tour, you don’t have to go to Europe, the Orient, you don’t have to go all over the world. Try visiting yourself sometime. You will find the most fascinating adventure any human being could ever have because it will lead to what you really want. You're not going to find it in that other country, buying all those pathetic souvenirs and putting them up on your mantle, wondering why you bought them in the first place. Try visiting yourself, that is, take a look at the way you handled yourself today or mishandled yourself. Take a look and see how you got tongue-tied all of a sudden and didn’t know whether you should say this or say that.
   Wouldn’t it be a marvelous, beautiful, peaceful, human experience to be self-contained? That means everything you need is within you.

YIELD TO YOUR YEARNING
  Man’s situation would be hopeless except for one thing, you can have a yielding to your yearning. First of all, do you not have a yearning for something higher, something better, something freer, something healthier, something less lacerating to your spirit, less pounding? If deep in your heart you yearn for the new, for the transformed, for the truly wholesome and healthy, if you will let the yearning be there without trying to direct it, the very yearning will then turn in the correct direction, which will be up there, something coming down from up there to answer that yearning and you will change.

February 2008

THE UNEXPECTED EXPLAINED
   I want to give you an exercise that will help you to turn around and go the other way. Most people do not take the unexpected into account in ordinary daily life, in their inner life, and I’ll explain why. This is very deep, so follow please. People do not take the unexpected into account because in their own conceit, they have made a demand upon the future that it bend to their demands, to their egotistical desires. Therefore when reality comes up, they’re so shocked. They say, “Why should this happen, I wanted that to happen.” This is a sign of childish, immature thinking that hasn’t risen much above the basement of mentality. I want you to remember that the unexpected is really, in a very definite sense, a fault within the human mind which says, “I must have that, therefore why does this come up?”
   When you're awake, when your mind is alert all the time, there’s no unexpected. There may be the unexpected in physical events, but you expect them, so it’s not a shock. There’s no unexpected inwardly because everything is flowing smoothly without you putting demands that you be the king of the world. As far as you're concerned, there’s no unexpected events because you're flowing wholly in Truth. 

LET THIS NEW ATTITUDE CHANGE YOU
   This is not only an assignment, it’s a new attitude, a prayer, and a way of changing everything. Take an attitude that says, “I don’t want to change myself, but make me change anyway.” Start with the word “I” and end with the word “anyway,” and fill it in with hundreds of different versions. For example, “I don’t want to drop my vanity, but teach me to drop it anyway.”

March 2008

DO RIGHT
   Rightness is strength, wisdom and resourcefulness. When you do one little right thing, that builds your strength for doing the next right thing. Your exercise is to find one little right thing and just do it. For instance, it could be remembering what you heard here in class, reading a book or listening to a tape. You understand you don’t have to be concerned with results. Rightness always has the same result, which is a right reward.

CATCH IT
   Catch the first lure, the first foreign inner voice that says, “Okay, time to get depressed,” because if you don’t catch it when it’s a whisper, it’ll become a shout and you'll get depressed.

INTERRUPT THOUGHT
   Here’s your exercise: Right now at this very moment you will come awake, you will interrupt your thought, you will be aware of your physical self, you'll be aware of where you are, you will not be thinking anything at all, you will just know where you are. Now, you will hold this state you're in right now, and you will continue to hold it as long as you can.

April 2008

SIX TO NINE
   One clue as to whether you're changing or not is what you do with what you have learned from the time you get up till the time you go to bed. Think of an average day, let’s say from six to nine. Think how much of your time during those hours were occupied in doing something that will let the light come in to live your life for you.
   For instance, let’s say while you were shopping you noticed a negative reaction inside of you. While you were talking on the telephone you noticed your impatience or you noticed how they dominated the conversation and you had something you thought was so much more important you wanted to talk about.
   Start sitting in judgment of what you are doing with your time and your energy during the day.
   When you get up tomorrow morning remember what you've heard tonight and remind yourself and say, “I'm going to fight for myself to stay awake.”

WHEN YOU BLOW UP
  When you blow up, when you're the exploding volcano, at the moment that happens, the only thing that exists in this whole universe for you is your explosive anger, fury. Go real slow now because this is pretty high. At the moment of shaking your fist, mentally or physically at someone or a condition, at that very moment of your explosion, sadly the only thing that exists of you is the explosive fury itself. There’s nothing else. I want you to watch the next time you get mad and prove to yourself what I just told you.

May 2008

WRITE DOWN YOUR AIM IN LIFE
  Part one of your exercise is to write down, “My aim in life is to” — and then you can list what it is. Some examples could be:
   My aim in life is to wake up.
   My aim in life is to be authentically happy.
   My aim in life is to find God.
   My aim in life is to no longer be a nervous wreck.
   My aim in life is to live in the Light.
   My aim in life is to give my life real purpose.

Part two of your exercise is to write down:
   Regardless of what happens, I will remember and return to my aim.
   Regardless of what happens, I will always remember and return to
   what I really want.
   Now, no matter what happens, if my house collapses over my head,
   I'm going to immediately remember and return to my aim to wake up.
   “No matter what happens” is an extremely important part of the
   second stage of the exercise, because it induces and introduces
   right feeling.

SHATTER YOUR IMAGINARY LIFE
  This will absolutely guarantee you shattering imaginary life and having true religion and true life:
   Every time you feel tempted to drop one pound of the pain, you intentionally add another pound. This means enduring more than you endured before. Instead of escape, instead of imaginary pleasures, imagining yourself as the beautiful heroine or whatever, you snap the mental movie, you become no one, and then stay there as long as you can until you see the next fantasy that presents itself to you under the guise of being a friend.

June 2008

SEE SOMETHING HIGHER
  If you want to break out, all you have to do is think about one thing only, which is to see something higher than yourself. Oh, what power, what beauty, I don’t have to think about whether my friend is going to like me next week, whether my spouse is going to love me and whether they are going to stay faithful.
   Write down and number each item, all the things that you do to escape the heaviness and complications of your life — looking around for a man, ladies? Looking for more money, more appreciation or whatever, gentlemen? Then at the bottom of your list write NOTHING WORKS! Be honest about your list so that the Truth can start to change you.

OBSERVE PEOPLE
  Here’s an exercise regarding human relations. Don’t think you've already done it or that you can do it in five minutes and understand it. Please do this for the rest of your life so that you can begin to get a starting place where this one percent of Heavenly rightness will begin to grow and glow even brighter. Observe people and ask yourself silently, “What attitude is he expressing right now?” Then answer yourself, “He appeared nervous, she laughed nervously,” and so on. Now for the part that’s a little more difficult, do the same thing with yourself.