Self-Surprise
  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.

Do Right
  Vernon gave us the following information on spiritual justice which we can all work on and get the many healthful benefits.
  There is a popular word in the English language, which is much used and little understood, and that word is justice. We’re going to understand it in a profitable way inwardly tonight.
  Now society has its own definition of the term justice and, unfortunately, all of them are distortions of reality, all shallow, all misleading and all self-serving.
  To the average human being, justice is done if he gets his way, if he gets what he wants. If he doesn’t get it, that’s injustice and he goes around complaining what an unjust world this is.
  The true definition of justice, the spiritual definition, is simply when goodness is rewarded and badness is punished. If you are good, you will be rewarded, if you are bad, you will be punished. There’s really no way to escape divine justice, it’s a fixed law. You always get justice from the spiritual viewpoint and it can be positive or negative. It is justice when a good man does good and feels good, and it is injustice when a bad man commits a crime or hurts someone. Justice is done, vengeance is mine says Heaven. You know that you can’t be a bad human being and be happy; only a good man can be happy.
  Justice always follows either happily or unhappily every small move you make, every action you take. Every word you speak will bring upon you one of the two kinds of justice, but it’s up to your inner condition whether the justice is happy or unhappy. A negative cause will produce a negative effect.
  Sure you're going to associate with people, spouse, friends, you're part of the physical world, but there’s no more anxious yearning when you see that crowd or go to the party, there’s no more anxious wish to change them in any way. How would your life be different if wherever you went, you didn’t want anything from anyone? That is the true spiritual life.
  We have to come awake and stay awake. Then everything that used to conquer you, you now conquer.
  In this true world of justice, there is no such thing as defeat, all there is, is a knowing of the true world, the divine world.
  Listen to the following:
Do right even when tempted to do wrong.
Do right even if it means losing a friend.
Do right even if it means you don’t
understand why you should.
Do right even if you fear the consequences.
Do right even if you don’t want to.
Do right even if it feels strange.
Do right even if it arouses criticism.
Do right even if it’s you against the world.
  Oh how clear the whole world of badness will become to you because you're seeing it from the height of goodness and that height is also from which you have absolute power, spiritual power over the past.
  You will know for yourself that the only world you have is the good world, and in that good, true, virtuous world no badness can enter.

Spiritual Seriousness
  Vernon Howard gave us this Spiritual Seriousness exercise to use in our daily lives so that we can distinguish between right and wrong humor. And also to meet gloomy, sour-spirited people with a conscious mind so that we can grow.
  When someone tells you his troubles, let them fall on your understanding not on your shoulders. To do that, you have to be a serious and very energetic student of human nature.
  Bad people, gloomy people, sour-spirited people are everywhere. The purpose of this talk — one purpose of it — is to make you aware of this kind of a wrong person so that you won’t meet him lightly and asleep, but will meet him with a conscious mind, so that you’ll be able to spot what he is doing.
  Now, to help you work at this from here on, you will now use memory properly to think of two or three sour, bitter hard-faced men and women that you know. That didn’t take long, did it? Wherever you wander, they’re all over the world, but you get two or three of them that are close to you, and I want you to know that they are life destroyers.
  See, sin, sickness, mental unhealth must never under any conditions be taken lightly. I told you once awhile back, an alcoholic is not an object of jokes or of humor. To be alcoholic is to be self-destructive, therefore destructive of everyone else. But the point is this. Do not take it as a joke among yourselves when there’s a sour-faced bitter person working in your office. Don’t take it as a joke and laugh over the fact that she is hard and troublesome to work with, to deal with.
  Always take wrongness very, very seriously. Don’t allow levity or lightness to enter into it. And the reason you have done this in the past is, believe it or not, because you sense the dreadfulness of that person’s condition and it frightens you a little lest you be like that. It frightens you and so you do make jokes about it in order to give yourself certain relief. You will never do that again.
  I want you, starting now, to have spiritual seriousness. This means no more joking at the wrong time. No more laughing at things that are not laughable. Anything that is apart from the Kingdom of Heaven must be seen seriously. And, as I mentioned before, from now on you will not make jokes about staggering drunks going down the street.
  You will not speak lightly of that woman who can’t stop criticizing … “Ah, she’s a nut.” She is a nut, but you’re to understand that below that, what appears to be an amusing character trait, below that is a perniciousness that you must see without trying to relieve yourself by laughing at it.
  Spiritual seriousness is an enormous power. This you will understand as you practice it. Do not, do not be frivolous toward this world. Do not try to find humor where there is no humor. There is right humor and you’ve gotten them all mixed up. I want you to be very watchful of jumpy, grumpy people as they come along and enter your life. And everyone is jumpy, grumpy unless they have the Spirit of Righteousness within them.

The Kitchen Exercise
  Vernon gave the class this very practical and valuable exercise:
  Here’s an exercise on how to choose what is right for your true self. Let’s say you’re working around in the kitchen. You are to suddenly go out of thought when you can. You’ve chopped the carrots. You’ve put a little salt on them. You’re cooking the dish, and that’s doing well. All of a sudden, when you can do it, be aware of your physical self in the kitchen. At the same time that you’re aware of your physical self, you’re also to be aware that you’re in the kitchen.
  Now please, don’t interrupt and say that you always know that you’re in the kitchen when you’re in the kitchen. You don’t, and you can prove it. Sometime, all of a sudden practice this exercise, and you’ll suddenly realize that you’re in the kitchen, you’re in the bedroom, you’re in the living room, or wherever, and you didn’t know you were there.
  All of a sudden, at the same time now, you’re going to do two things. You’re going to be physically aware by looking around the kitchen and seeing the stove and seeing the refrigerator. You’re going to see that outside of you. At the same time that you see the physical objects around you, you’re also going to be aware of yourself being in the kitchen and seeing the outer things.
  Now, this is the cancellation of divisive thought and produces the state of one light, which illuminates both the physical kitchen out there and illuminates your inner state, your inner thoughts and your feelings.
  This exercise, which you must do all day long wherever you are, cuts off the flow of the mechanical repetitions of your heartaches and your thoughts, so that they don’t rebuild you every few minutes with your lonely state. This will do it. You will see it for yourself. You’ll feel different!
  When you’re working around the kitchen, you may have to go back to chopping up the cabbage next. That’s fine. Then you have to go into thought on how you’re going to do that. That’s fine. Then you have to go into memory-thought of how long you’re going to cook the carrots or the cabbage. That’s fine.
  But, when you can be free of that and give your attention to something else, then practice this, so that you’re now free of mechanical memory-thought, including the memory-thought that you’re lonely. You cancel that by walking around the kitchen and you feel your feet on the floor. For the first time in your life you’ll know that you have weight that pushes against the floor in the kitchen. That’s part of your physical awareness. You’ll look around, and at the same time that you see the kitchen, you will know that you are in the kitchen.
  That double awareness of the exterior and the interior is what chases out the spy, which is what pushes out your false terrible fondness for what is dark and for what is punishing you.
  You try that for yourself, and when you take that out into the world, let me give you one small reward out of so many. One of them is, nothing in this world, other people or headlines or anything out there can ever again tell you what’s important to your life.