“What Was I About to Say?”
     Vernon gave us this beautiful exercise because it’s for our true health and happiness.
     This is an exercise to increase our awareness of something that is not a part of the old mechanical life. Ask yourself, “What was I about to say?”
     Be determined to give yourself little jolts, and one you can give yourself is to be without your usual reaction to a situation. For instance, always saying the same things. Catch yourself saying, “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles,” and when you realize it’s just a mechanical habit, that’s the impetus to be more aware when saying it. Now, you can dare what all your life you called darkness, which is the unknown, and now you can go right into it and not have anything to say. You will then know for yourself when you don’t say “That’s the way the cookie crumbles” that there’s the empty space, which means there will be the non-re-creation of you.
     If you endure it, you hear the darkness lie to you and say, “You’re coming to an end, fill up the space with a remark, anything, say anything.” Stay awake and try to see what you are just about to say, and remember do not try to stop it. If you try to stop it, you are trying to stop it. Now you have inserted a you who is going to stop an old you, and they’re both you and they’re both wrong.
     Thought has no place in this operation. Notice the arising thoughts for you to say, “That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” and then eliminate the phrase forever.
     When you go home, take a piece of paper and at the top write Shock List, then write your favorite phrases you use when speaking to other people. Now, you may have two hundred of them, but just get the most frequent ones.
     The catching of the mechanical is the changing.

Bear Your Own Burdens
     Here is an exercise on how to be saved.  Write down, “Bear your own burdens.”
     Here’s what it means to bear your own burdens. When you have a suffering emotion or thought, when you hear some news that you call bad, when you feel threatened by someone or something,  you make no mental movement whatever to push it away. When you feel afraid, you are to bear your own burdens by being one hundred percent afraid. You are to permit the fear to course through you with all its so-called ferocity, with the full flood of it.
     If you will do that so that only you are involved and no one else in the world is; if you will permit the flood of terror, of self-doubt, of anxiety, any hellish feeling, if you will permit this hellish feeling to enter you, you’d become conscious of it. It’s the consciousness of it that allows it to come to its full force so that you don’t dilute the suffering. Then at a certain point where the flood is one hundred percent pressure inside of you, it breaks apart. This means it passes through your mind and goes out of your mind and emotions and goes away from you, leaving you with a conscious recollection of what happened to you. That by the way is what makes you eager for the next experience.
     You bear the inner burden fully, which you have to do because your burden is your burden. No one else can carry it for you. Then you will get your reward for yourself from God. This means you won’t want any reward from society, which means you’re free of its sick false rewards, and you’re never going to be wrongly involved with anyone. You’ll be rightly involved with everyone else on earth because you’re rightly involved with yourself, and sickness can’t touch you because you’re healthy.

Make Up Your Own Ads
     Vernon Howard gave us the following practical exercise:
     Ads are everywhere. They’re in magazines, newspapers, on radio and television. This project is for you to see how all advertising appeals to ego interest. If you see even that, it would begin to cut off its power to control and influence you to spend your money wrongly.
     On the highway when you see an ad, at the same time you look at it, see how you reacted to it. If you hate the ad or love it, you are reacting to it instead of seeing it clearly. Intelligence can see the ad without any agitation, either pleasurable or adverse, because there is no message coming from you to the ad back and forth. You know it has nothing to do with your true values in life.
     Now you can look at ads and see how you used to fall for them. Because a part of you was so desperate you said to the world, “Give me something to fulfill me, give me something to excite me, give me something to take away my loneliness.” But you saw that it didn’t work.
     Make a practical experiment by making up your own ads about the Higher Life and place them in conspicuous places around your home. For example one could read “End self-deception,” and another “Know your own mind.”
     Now you see everything in the world and in yourself too in an utterly different way. You're not at all who you thought you were, and aren’t you glad? You’re not at all this person who had to go around straining to have people accept you and like you. You lived that way so long and got utterly tired of it.
     The Truth is available to you right now and at any time you can honestly and sincerely ask for its help.

Right and Good Associations
Transcribed by Sally Forrest from class lecture
     Once upon a time there was a good and noble King who turned over to his citizens a marvelous beautiful castle where they would be comfortable and happy and safe from surrounding enemies.
     For a while everything went just fine and they grew their agricultural crops inside and outside the castle land. But there was something wrong with them. They had careless minds. They were just plain careless and lazy about the development of their own inner natures. They paid attention to their outer world only where it could do them some good in body and appearance. So something happened that would not have happened had they not been asleep inwardly. Enemies who did not love the good King, who bequeathed the castle, infiltrated the castle grounds and the surrounding yards, and they began to bring their evil into it. And more and more they came into it and more and more the people lost control of both the castle and of their own inner lives.
     Malicious monsters took over and little by little they took over one room and the next room and the next one until the people themselves were forced out of what was once a marvelous happy place to live. While it was happening they did not realize that evil forces were being infiltrated into the castle, and they didn’t even notice that they were becoming unhappier day-by-day. So the monsters took over just as evil spirits have taken over the world.  Now that fact is not clear to you, you’re afraid to face it. Face it
anyway.
     When the people did not rise to the challenge of taking back their castle, the King decided the only thing to do was to send a Hero down in human form, someone who represents Truth, to assist them in driving the enemy out of the castle.
     And here’s where we’re going to have to go to work this morning. The Hero led the people in going from room to room to drive these monsters out — those sufferings, those arrogances, those prides, those vanities — drive them out one room at a time and  finish it before starting on the next room, until the whole castle is cleaned out.
     Your exercise is to begin cleaning out the first room in your inner castle, which is to take paper and write “What I Know About Healing” then write everything you know about it. For example, one could be what does healing mean? Well we’re not talking about the physical body. And another could be everything that goes contrary to the good King. By doing this exercise it will put you into right and good associations. And those associations will become new sources of light on how to allow healing to happen.

If You Do This You Will Make It
Transcribed by Regina Netherton from a class lecture
     You have to see what darkness tells you you’re not supposed to see. If you see evil, you can then go on to see goodness, to see what is right, but you have to see evil first, right? If you see evil first of all, that very revelation displaces the evil which makes room for what is good. Instruction: Watch your reactions and thoughts right now as you’re listening to  this.
     Exercise: I tell you if you will do this, you’ll make it.
     Write down: What to do with your troubles. Instead of _______ing it, I will understand it.
     Isn’t that marvelous? But you have to live it, you can’t read it, you can’t think it, you have to act it. How  many had troubles this morning? Yesterday? The day before? Oh, you’re a very troubled group aren’t you? (Vernon laughs heartily here.)
     What did you do with them? You battled them, you resented them, you hated them, you lied about them, you tried to evade them; it was someone else’s fault, right?
     You are to fill in the blank with what is suitable for that blank — the event, the experience that comes up. Instead of resisting it, I will understand it. (Shouting) What could be simpler?
     Now, let me tell you, when the devil hears simple techniques like this he wants you to forget them. He doesn’t want you to do them. Look, I give you a spiritual order from a higher headquarters than this room, although it’s in this room. The order is, you will write down the method, the technique; you will understand what you’re supposed to be doing in a higher way and you will do it.
     If you want to learn archery, you know, go out and shoot at a target. If you get the archery book out and you just read the book you’re not going to hit the target are you?
     Don’t you dare write that down and forget it. I have given you something that starts with the inner but you’re to connect it with the outer. Every day will present you with ten thousand targets to shoot at. Now, what was the exercise?
     The exercise is:  Write down What to do with your troubles.
        Instead of hating it,
        Instead of fighting it,
        Instead of brushing it aside,
        Instead of trying to explain it away … That’s a good one isn’t it?
        Instead of trying to explain the problem away, I will understand it.
     Please, why do you think we’re doing this?  For the sake of this lady and that lady and that man and that man. Oh, you didn’t understand? This is for you! Why, because you have to work out your own deliverance, don’t you? 
     YOU WILL NOT FALL ASLEEP ON THIS EXERCISE. YOU WILL WRITE IT DOWN; YOU WILL PUT IT IN FRONT OF YOU WHERE YOU CAN SEE IT AT HOME. YOU WILL REMEMBER IT ALL THE TIME.
     You will take the bow and arrow out and you go around and there’s a target over there and we’re talking about going into action. You have an opportunity at the break because you’re going to have all kinds of little incidences in which you maybe feel a little bit hurt or you feel a temptation to blurt out something, or you feel nervous about something and you go over and join someone else you think is stronger than you are. Don’t ever do that!
     Do you know how to become a truly spiritual man or woman? I’ll give it to you and write it down: ALWAYS STAND ALL ALONE. And you’ll stand and shake for ten years. Are you willing to go through it? That river is pretty frozen. You’re going to have to do something to crack the ice! What do you care how long it takes as long the right, true results come? You stand alone and one magic day at the end of 10 years or whatever it is, to your great astonishment, having done the right thing, the thing that God instructs you to do, to listen to no man, to no woman, including yourself, to listen to no one. Right there, in your shaking and trembling, at the end of ten years, right there to your astonishment, right in front of your eyes — your hands are shaking like this because you dared to stand all alone and cut yourself off from false support — your hands are going like that, shaking, and your eyes are blinking real fast; all of a sudden you’ll be astonished to see them be at half that shakiness.
     What’s going on? And then less than that, because you’re standing all alone and standing very, very firmly, without shaking at all. And do you know why you’re not shaking? Because at last you are standing on sacred ground, which is the only solid ground there is — the solid ground where you are not present but Truth is and there’s an awareness in you of that Truth. You’re aware of that Truth and you are living it, and standing with it is now your whole life, both here and later. Want it? We’ll get it together.