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Vernon Howard gave us this special exercise, which will help us tremendously in our daily lives:
There is something higher than your present existence on this earth and it is your responsibility to find it, and I'm going to show you how. You do it by your own efforts, your own arousing of yourself and that’s how you can begin to develop. Development is an invitation to what is not thought, not in the opposites, which you will sense and you will live by. What I’m going to tell you, you must do, you can do, and if you will do it with a right heart the results will be right.
Here’s a little background on what we’re talking about. You fail to use life properly. You’re so crowded with yourself that nothing can come in to penetrate and displace what has been wasting your day, your mind and your spirit.
Nothing new happens, does it? The old pains, the old worries, the same old routine ways, always hoping for magic of some kind, always hoping that something will turn up, that something will come your way.
How many of you are in love with yourself? Being in love with yourself means having no inclination or wish to change the fixed pattern of your reactions that hit you in the outer world or inside yourself. It means that you lie about, justify, protect, promote and maintain everything as it was before because when the river starts raging, all you have to do is fall into it. Have you ever noticed how simple it is to fall into the crabby little nature and make the sharp remark on the telephone or in your mind to someone else?
You can start tonight to put yourself into a position called SELF-SURPRISING. How many of you are kind of unpleasant sometimes? Pretty dreadful, isn’t it? We’re going to pull a trick on the devil tonight, and you’re going to take it with you and work on it. The next time you feel tempted to react with a sharp word, a hostile feeling, which you’ll justify of course, a wrong reaction of any kind, you’re going to SURPRISE YOURSELF by being pleasant instead.
I have given you a guaranteed method for building a life that is stronger than anything else, anywhere on earth. When you know you’re in an unpleasant state within yourself, or a worried one, in that state of knowing, the strength to do what you’ll have to do thousands of times, and which you can do for the higher success, is available to you.
The rule is when you make an effort to work internally on yourself, when it’s terribly difficult for one reason or another, such as other people are around or you got a shock of some kind, when you work on yourself when it’s most difficult, you get a greater reward.
A repeated, faithful application of Self-Surprise, catching yourself playing a role, catching yourself anticipating the pleasure of hurting someone else with a sharp remark, that Self-Surprise produces the necessary different location inside of you, and since everything is different inside of you when you understand that you don’t know, then your false knowing is weakened.
Do take your notes home mentally or physically and Surprise Yourself all day long. Never have any fear of the consequences of deliberate, conscious Self- Surprise because they will be good. You will then know what it means to be on top of the mountain and look at the marvelous view.
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