1. The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist. Because it does not exist as a reality, because it is illusory, it has only illusory and worthless rewards for you. While employment and geography and people exist for your physical self and your social self, and are good for them, they cannot give benefits to your real spiritual nature which is complete in itself. It always has been complete and always will be, for it lives not in time but in eternity. In reality there is no individual who can win a thrill or a sense of worthiness from the everyday world. In a lost person, rewards or punishments from the world fall on the self-glorified self and cause it to vibrate. This vibration serves as a shaky idol which we eagerly worship for as long as the thrill lasts. But since the worshipper and his idol are the same thing — the same set of vibrations — the ending of the thrill of worshipping the idol causes self-panic; we feel as if we are fading away, that we will not be ourselves any more. The fear of the extinction of the invented self prevents us from seeing that the false self must fade away in order to experience true spiritual birth. Your work in all this is to notice the deceptive nature of your fear of not existing. And one way to do this is to notice how friends, news stories, rumors of doom, how they all try to plant fearful thoughts and feelings into your system. Here is what these people are doing: In order to give themselves a false sense of aliveness by making gloomy remarks, they have no conscience in making others feel the same false sense of doom. They are like mad musicians who demand that you dance to their insane music. Everything in this paragraph connects with the opening sentence, which is: The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist.

2. You need not idolize or yearn for anyone. But you must see very deeply into this in order to discover your basic error. You really do not admire that man or love that woman. Unknowingly you admire and love your own thoughts and feelings about them. Having imitation strength and beauty inside yourself you project them outwardly and then deceive yourself into thinking that they reside inside that man or woman. You will get an endless series of pains and disappointment as long as you unconsciously approve of this kind of self-trickery. You feel the need for something — which in itself is right — but then wreck the solution by trying to get an answer from the same unintelligent mind that asked the original question. You can not and must not answer your own questions. You fail to see that you are doing this when you look outside yourself for wisdom or strength or guidance. You are like the king of a castle who falls off his horse while riding in the woods. In his dazed state he wanders into a cave, thinking it is his home, even while suffering from the cave's discomfort. As his head gradually clears, he remembers where he truly belongs. Then his action-in-understanding guides him back to the castle with its true security and comfort. You have forgotten who you really are. Truth itself will help you to remember.

3. Regarding acceptance and rejection, the day will come when neither word has any meaning to you. Such opposite states have meaning, false meaning, only to a divided mind, a mind looking to itself for a wholeness it will never be able to locate. Wholeness does not reside in thinking about wholeness, but in the lack of a need to think about wholeness. The king who has returned to his castle thinks neither about the castle nor the woods. To go a bit deeper into this, the spiritual castle has no geographical location on this earth. It does not exist in the woods or outside the woods — it exists above both, in a new and lofty world. This becomes clear when you see that a word is a word and nothing more. You need have no concern about being in a good light in the eyes of others. Only the thought — created self has such ambitions and the resulting anxieties. You cannot have either good light or bad light, for there is no individual self to receive it. Try handing either a bouquet of roses or of weeds to an imaginary person. It cannot be done. Only your unself can be truly Good, and that Goodness comes from God, Truth, Reality.