The Secret Weapon That Guarantees Victory
  Vernon Howard gave the following story, which illustrates an excellent exercise we can do:
  There was a serious inner-life student whose favorite spiritual action was to read books that told him all about himself, the world and higher principles.
  One afternoon because he was out of reading material, he went down to a very special kind of bookstore, which specialized in books about the higher life. He went into the store and asked the owner, “What do you have that’s new that I haven’t seen before?” The owner responded, “As a matter of fact, a new and rare book just came in the other day. It’s solid, very inspiring and the title is ‘The Secret Weapon that Guarantees Victory.’” The student was very interested and asked, “How much does it cost?” The owner said, “The payment, as you know, is not money, but by giving something up.” The student thought for a moment, then said, “In exchange for the book, I will give up any secret, reserved beliefs that I may have that I know more than the author, because I have noticed that,” the student confessed, “many times reading a book I found myself arguing with a certain statement, and after a long time I found out that I was all wrong and the author was right. So I will give up arguing, believing that I know more than the man who wrote the book.”
  The owner then gave the book to the student, who could hardly wait to get home to obtain spiritual food. As he read the book the idea formed in his mind that the main theme in it was simply this, “You're not the point of my life.”
  Now that means this: he’s a spiritual student trying to learn things and yet he’s in a mad world that’s insanely busy, and all these insanities try to steal his attention, divert his energy, and waste his life. He understood from this new book, the secret weapon was to tell the world, “You’re not the point of my life.” The student realized there are millions of things that weren’t the point of his life swirling around in the world trying to take him and everyone else over. He was determined with his every contact with life, the people, the telephone calls, the letters and so on, to remember and say to himself, “You are not the point of my life, because the point of my life is to wake up. Even if I don’t fully understand what that means, my point is to not be what I’ve always been — scared and sullen, moody, changeable, with fifty different people inside me instead of one unified person.”
  While he was thinking about the higher principle he had read, a phone call came from a friend that he’d known twenty years or more. His friend invited him out to the country where he lived to have lunch with him and his neighbors. He intimated that they had decided they wanted to build windmills for generating electricity because of the wind power, and thought it a good idea for the student, who was an engineer, to come out and give them a hand, or at least give them preliminary knowledge of how they could build windmills so they wouldn’t have to buy electricity from the power company. The student remembered that this was not the point of his life, but he knew, as you should realize, how the tug of his old ways wanted to take him there, especially his old friend of twenty years or more, who invited him to lunch and particularly the appeal to his vanity, being the authority, the great engineer who knew about all these things. He saw the tug, and he realized that his very seeing of the tug, back and forth, wanting to go and yet not wanting to go, he saw that that very tug was evidence that he was doing the lesson. Before the tug would have been unconscious, he would have gone back and forth below the surface, but now he saw it. So going against his usual nature, he told his friend, “No,” but he felt guilty.
  His friend asked him why he wasn’t going, and began to put a little subtle pressure on him when he said, “Who are we going to get?” See, as if it was the student’s problem, but the student knew it wasn’t his problem. He knew his friend and his neighbors out in the country were trying to get free advice from him and buying him off with a lunch, and compliments on how wise he was as an engineer. He defied his guilt because he remembered his aim, “You are not the point of my life.” That was one application of it.
  Two days later he came across the second application. He had some paperwork to do, had to get some figures and facts on paper, but after sitting at his desk for an hour or so, he felt a natural feeling that that was where he should stop. He felt he needed to rest from it because his mind had been working concentrating on that and he needed to have a change, which is a natural change of pace. Additionally, to complete the job he needed more information.
  When he left his desk and went about doing other things, the paperwork kept nagging him, kept telling him, “Come back and give us more attention, you have abandoned us, come back.” He understood this process so clearly, the nagging went on and on and on, and he repeated consciously, “You are not the point of my life, and you might as well give up trying to make me think that you are more important than what I must do right now.” And when he felt that statement as well as said it, when he knew it internally, the haunting stopped.
  He went back to the book, The Secret Weapon that Guarantees Victory, and looked at all the jewels in it, all the things that he could now do that he couldn’t do before. He understood that it was very high knowledge that he had never fully realized up until now. How easy life became for him now. All the little tasks that seem to demand attention, you can look at them with a higher kind of intelligence and see whether you should give them attention now or later or never.
  Thinking is just one part of yourself, and there’s the body and there’s emotions and reactions, when that point becomes the whole point of your life, you just walk through life without thinking because there’s something higher that’s doing your work for you and it’s called understanding with a capital “U”.

Getting Your Life Back
  We all want to have more energy, so here’s an exercise from Vernon that will help us not to waste it and thus have more:
  Just think, all that energy we’ve been wasting can go into two legitimate areas, one in our further inner development, more light, and the other into practical affairs of the world.
  Take paper and pencil and write down, don’t try to be too exact because you’re still thinking and comparing and working things out, write down a number of tasks, duties that you are now doing that you suspect you may be doing them compulsively because you think you have to, or it’s simply a habit. See which one of these activities you can delete.
  Don’t leave anything out, write it down because maybe you have a certain bad habit of wasting your time, for example talking with neighbors, and such like. If you put that down, the false part of you which gets pleasure in escape may object, so write everything down. Then go over your list periodically. Make as long a list as you possibly can, fifty, a hundred of them, and you can do it, with the simplest ones being your daily physical habits, “Maybe I can even walk from the parking lot to my office a shorter way.”
  Try ways to be efficient, to be direct. Now this is going to go against your habit of wanting to do things the hard way because there’s a certain value in being confused. “If I’m confused I won’t have to face what I don’t want to face.” This means, as I said before, that you’re going to have to get a long list, go over it very carefully, and then dare to cut things out. At first it will fight you, and then after you finally see the uselessness of the activity, you’ll say, “Thank Heaven I began using right ideas to build a right life.” You can do that endlessly.
  You may have a little habit or a big one that you have been practicing for thirty, forty, sixty years, and be prepared for this shock, “Have I been wasting my time all those years in making that telephone call, which I thought made me a nice person and I thought was my duty?” Oh, what relief you’re going to have when you eliminate all these foolish unnecessary things.
  You are under invisible tyranny that you know not of. Now you just received an exercise for exposing it. Take this list over months, years, and gradually reduce it. Also be prepared for the displeasure on the part of many people who are using you, and you are using them. You are no longer going to be able to do that.
  This is called learning to live your own life.
  This is called getting your own world back.
  This is called doing in the right way what you really want to do, not what your neurosis demands that you do.
  This list will free you of yourself.

Stop Self-Reference
  Vernon gave the class this beautiful, practical exercise which, in effect, is about us not injecting ourselves into practically everything we talk about.
  Let’s say several people go outside on a dark night and they all look up at the starry skies — millions, billions of twinkling stars up there — one man personalizes it and says, “That’s interesting! I think I’ll get a telescope and study the stars.” A woman in the group says, “Oh, I remember as a little girl back in the East where I come from, we used to go out and count as many shooting stars as we could in one evening.” All go on, they personalize themselves with the universe up there.
  Now, you’re not going to be like that. You’re going to be that one person in the group who also looks up at the stars and instead of going into memory or ambition over it by saying, “I’m going to be a great astronomer” — instead of falsely using the observation of the skies, you say to yourself something like this: “You know that is a wonder out there and I wonder how in what manner this physical body, this what I call my life, I wonder if there might be a different kind of a connection between the universe, the world, the timeless state up there, I wonder if there might be something I’ve missed so far.
  Now, already that is good because you, unlike the other people who personalized it, you pulled yourself, you pulled your past experiences out of it, and your higher inner nature was responding to the physical nature of the nighttime skies. There was a certain connection there and the feeling and the right thinking about it developed.
  Now the important thing in this sort of an experience which I want you to practice is pulling yourself out of the candy bar, the flower and the skies. The important point is for you to practice instant withdrawal of yourself from the whole world, so that when you go to the office or you look up at the skies — no matter what you do with the physical creation — you want to find a new and different relationship to it. That wish for something higher must develop.
  This is a spiritual guarantee, if you will go in the proper spiritual steps of l, 2, 3, 4, 5 of first withdrawing yourself from the temptation of the candy bar or the flower or the temptation to get rageful over the insult, and instead withdraw yourself from your limited personal and truly nonexistent inner life that you have vowed is real. It is not real. It’s unreal masquerading as real and you haven’t seen through it yet.
  This illustration of simply suspending usual hot feelings and wild thoughts, allowing them, daring them, daring to suspend them, this will increase the right kind of wonderment, which is a kind of questioning. And then your beginning right thinking will give you a beginning right feeling which will have nothing at all to do with the flower or candy bar or the insult or the praise of the outer world. It will be altogether inside you. It will be a feeling of affirmation that there really, truly is another kind of relationship that you can have with everything, which means you mustn’t try to draw the world into you in order to give you a feeling of life because it can’t give you a feeling of life. You get a feeling of true life by refusing the false.
  Just make it an overall powerful vow and determination to refuse to be pulled back into the wrong delusory world inside yourself. That refusal in itself will make room for the next step which is to have an increased very quiet, silent, powerful insight that you have changed the kind of world you live in. Your body is still in the physical world, but your spirit is now in the higher world with all its qualities and all its purity and all its power.

Are You Willing to Be Wrong?
  This practical exercise which Vernon gave us could be called the “Are You Willing to be Wrong?” exercise.
  Let’s say you work in the storeroom of a large company. One day your boss reprimands you. He says, “You were careless when you returned boxes to the storeroom. You did it with no regard for instructions or for putting the boxes in right order so they could easily be pulled out when someone needed them.”
  At the moment of the criticism were you able to see the fact without self-defensive emotion, or did egotistical self-protection, which is wrong, come in and speak in your name? It manufactured all the wrong things, including the pain you must experience because you asked for it.
  Or, did you say, “Yes, I was careless. I see what you mean. I put boxes “A” back in the corner and they should be toward the front and boxes “B” are also hidden, and should also be in the front. I understand.”
  When you admit you are wrong, the next time you have to put the boxes back you do not go into hostility toward the boss. You don’t let the present time arouse your pernicious memory of the previous time.
  You know you were careless the first time because you wanted to go to lunch and meet that pretty girl. You didn’t care about a certain neatness and order we must have in human affairs. All you wanted was get it done and you hoped no one would notice. Also, because everyone else hates the boss, you do too.
  You realize you’ve been exposed as a lazy and careless man who cannot do what he’s supposed to be doing at the moment he’s doing it. You see you have a rambling, selfish and wild mind. You resolve in the future to give your attention to what you’re doing at the moment. Why? For your sake and everyone else’s because your nature affects them. You say to yourself, “I’m going to be very careful with these boxes. I’m going to look at the instructions, I’m going to learn to think right, to behave right. I’m going to see how clearly, how accurately, how nicely I can set these boxes in the storeroom.”
  Notice that when you stack the boxes right, there will be something very alive in you as a result of this right experience. When you do right, you feel right. Watch what happens. What will happen is this: Light radiates, doesn’t it? The same with this experience. When you have that right feeling that you should be with yourself at every moment and pay full attention to what you’re doing, there will be accuracy and you won’t go into wrong emotion over stacking the boxes. All you need is a clear mind. And you understand you constantly have the wrong emotions while doing other tasks. This lesson just happened to be in the storeroom. So the lesson spreads. It goes out from you. And what is happening is that the rightness of the truth of God is beginning to displace the wrongness which you have recognized and no longer desire. The light is getting brighter.
  You have to understand it is right for you to see the wrong.

Just a Minute
  Vernon Howard gave us this refreshing illustration and exercise, so we can begin to reclaim our lives.
  The purpose of our work is to arouse right rebellion in you which comes as a result of right insight. Here’s an example: There was a movie on TV that had a lot of great psychology in it. Here is one of the incidents to illustrate what we’re talking about.
  This is the story of a typical New York striving young couple. He wanted to become somebody in the business world, and she played the role of the helpful wife.
  One time as part of their phony scheme to get in with the crowd, they decided to have a party. They had a little money and hired a caterer who was going to come to the New York apartment and set up all the food. So the caterers came in before the guests arrived and the couple, pathetic you know, strivers are always pathetic, aren’t they?
  The couple’s seven-year old daughter wandered into the kitchen and asked the caterers for a piece of cake. The mother was right there when the child asked for the cake. And the caterer, the man in charge, the big boss, said, “No, you can’t have a piece of cake. We’re in charge here. We’re fixing things up for the guests, so no cake.” The child then went away feeling disappointed. The mother walked out of the room half thinking about it because she had so many other things to think about. All of a sudden it hit her. Pray for the day when it hits you. She said:
  “Wait a minute, this is my house. I paid for that food. I hired you. Go get a piece of cake. Give her a piece of cake.”
  You don’t know that, you don’t do that, which is why you are the way you are.
  Pray for the day when you say, “Just a minute, whose life is this?” Don’t say it, scream it, shout it, like I am now. Oh! You’ll see through your cowardice.
  See, if she’d been awake, she would have said it when it came up.
  “Just a minute, this is my house. I’m paying you. You don’t tell her what to do, I tell you what to do. Little Mary, take a piece of cake, take two if you want.”
  You have given your life over to sickness. When are you going to reclaim it? Start now, saying, “Just a minute.” Do you see why people are arrogant? Because you let them. You’ve sold your soul. See! Years ago it happened that way, and you’re afraid to tell that man you hired who’s in your house, “This is my house. I’m paying you. If you don’t like it, get out. I’m in charge of my house.” You’re afraid you’re going to get knocked down if you rebel. I tell you, dare it!
  When are you going to start? God himself will back you up when you say, “Just a minute, whose life is this? It’s my life.”
  You don’t know where that one right rebellion and declaration of independence is going to take you. It’s going to take you to an enlightenment in which you are free.