July 2016

TRUTH IS STRONGER THAN ANYTHING
     All right, right now make your choice to look inward and see what is happening to you for heaven’s sake, for your sake.
     See that you're an arguer; that you like to fight and notice while you're fighting — oh, the pain and the strain — notice that you feel unnatural when you’re arguing with someone. An arguer does not know. An arguer has no intelligence at all. He has pseudo intelligence. He has what he calls bluff and bluster and deep down inside of him he knows the strain and pain of that. He knows the falseness of it. He knows his agony. Woe unto any man or woman who finally falls in love with his agony, who finally says, “Argument is it.”
     And it’s so easy for anyone to argue, have you noticed that? You can pick a fight any time you want and if the person you pick a fight with goes away, the next one will be just fine. Anything goes as long as you can look with your physical eyes at the billboard, or look at the person, or look at the heavy traffic and find something to crab about.
     You don’t know the horror of living that kind of a life. I want you to know where you are in the dark desert and I want you to be absolutely horrified at what you have permitted to happen to you. That is the only experience that can produce something new in you. That’s the only thing that can break your mechanical talking, your mechanical thinking, and your mechanical emotionalizing, because the seeing of your state is the first stage of inviting consciousness that will dismiss it.
     So ask God himself to help you to no longer love your repetitious self. The nature that always does the same thing. Don’t you always do the same thing? You know that.... Oh yes, you find a new way to pretend that you're right when really inside you know you are absolutely wrong. You know it. You know you're wrong, which is the reason you argue in the first place. Beautiful Truth comes along and tells you, “Sir, why are you choosing to destroy yourself when you don’t have to?”
     See, if Truth comes along and you listen to that, the word alternative will come to your mind and you'll say, “Well, I didn’t know that I could get rid of this slave-me, of this compulsive me, of this argumentative me, of this hateful me, of this pretenseful me." And after that you will have a swelling up inside of you of the gratitude that you listened to Truth.
     Let me give you another little example. Have you ever been walking out on a gray day with the sun behind the clouds and maybe a little bit cold, a little bit chilly; and you're walking out somewhere and all of a sudden the sun does break through. The clouds drift by and the sun shines through for just a minute, and when it does that, don’t you feel different? Don’t you feel brighter? You can see it all around you and you can feel the faint warmth of the sun. At that moment you know you've experienced something physically. Something outside of you has caused this sunshine, the warmth, to come down and it touches you, envelopes you. And you even walk in it for a ways, don’t you? Don’t you want more of that?
     All that you've heard about being so egotistical and self-centered and not wanting that any more is the invitation. You see, Truth is stronger than those clouds. Reality is stronger than the darkness out in that world, which is the same darkness that is inside you. It is stronger than you and you must realize that nothing — no person, no event, no feeling, no mood, no discouragement — is stronger than Truth. You, in your real nature — listen to this, oh, don’t forget it — your real nature which you can attain to, is stronger than anything, always and forever. All you have to do is ally yourself with who you really are. Then the warmth breaks through with increasing frequency wherever you go in this world. You're just attending to your family at home, or you're at work down at the office, or wherever you go — you will have this real spiritual experience in which you're walking down the hall of that building where you work and all of a sudden you will feel it. It’s coming not from the physical sun up there, is it? It’s coming from the spiritual world, which is an enormous, enormous sun; and it’s coming down to you in spite of anything that may appear to be an obstacle because you've asked it to come to you. You feel that experience as something that you have never, ever felt before. How many of you in this room have had this experience? Let me see your hands. Isn’t it beautiful! Lots of hands.
     Please, if you have ever had this experience just once, yield yourself to it. Want that more than you want walking down the hall where the sun isn’t inside you. Love the sun more than you want walking down the hall of the office building being angry at something that just happened in the office that may have upset you and made you distressed. Don’t love argumentation, distress; don’t love that. Un-love it. It is very important that you get this first glimpse, which will come to you. The first glimpse will win your heart and it will win your life.

THY WILL BE DONE
     Consider, as you’ve never considered before, a familiar spiritual phrase. You’ve seen it in spiritual books, you’ve heard it quoted, maybe quoted it yourself. And I want you to give a new value to it because it’s a summary of every development system that has ever been systematized. It is a grand summing up of everything you must do to escape this sick world and arrive where you really belong.
     I told you that it will be familiar. Its meaning is not familiar to you, just the words. But this is your exercise for you to carry out. Whatever happens inside your mind and happens to you as a result of social contact while you’re shopping, watching television, doing your work, puttering around the house or trimming the shrubbery, you can resort marvelously to knowing what you should do by saying the following: THY WILL BE DONE. Write it down.
     Oh, how tremendous! By saying that, you’re allowing God’s will to replace your will. And if you really do that, I tell you, and you’ll tell yourself when you see it happening, you’ll talk in an entirely different way than you talk. You talk in a certain way now, don’t you? This talking is just one phase of it. Feelings, actions, attitudes are all included, but just specify talking for now. You talk in a certain way to other people. They know more about it than you do because you can’t see yourself talk. You’re too wrapped up and hoping it’s going to give you a benefit if you go into that little speech or whatever. But as a first stage in allowing the Heavenly will to be done, you’re going to know how you talk with someone. Just notice how you converse and notice the emotion that goes with it. And oh, you’ll be able to see a lot of wasted feelings going on inside of you.
     Now, having known by personal witnessing what it means to do your will: to speak, to chatter, to say your will — having known that you’re nothing but wrapped up in what you call your life, which is a memorized and boring life and a flop and a failure life; having noticed that, you can bring the healing statement in: Thy will be done.
     Next step after you say that — and you have to do it a lot of times — do it all day the rest of the day, tomorrow, too. The next step is to notice that you’re not able to maintain an awakened state after you say that. You’re saying it mechanically but that will help you in the long run to be able to talk consciously, knowingly, and you won’t be blabbing about yourself, your world, your interests. You think you’re talking about other people but you’re talking about them in relationship to yourself. You want something from those other people that you pretend to be so concerned about, and you’re afraid if they go away you’ll be lost, which you will be. Then you can say, “Thy will be done.”
     “Thy will be done” must become a spiritual way of life. It will be mechanical at first. Then it will transcend mechanicalness and go up to heavenly consciousness. At the start, you’ll forget what you said. And one week from now you’ll be looking over your notes and see you forgot it for a whole week.
     All right, mechanical reminders are good. Get them down but try to get a little higher back-up than that. Get into the state of mind in which the dominant desire is a spiritual one, a heavenly one. And you’re willing to sacrifice anything that you should sacrifice in order to get out of the trap of “my will be done.” That’s your trap, “my will be done.”
     “Thy will be done, not my will be done.” The change will appear. The level will rise. You’re in the dark valley where the sunlight doesn’t reach. But as you climb up the side of the mountain out of the valley, at every hundred feet it gets lighter and brighter. You know something from above is causing your nature to change. That is, you allowed it to change by going toward the light.  All this can and must be done so that you will not waste your life as a human being for the few short years that you’re here on earth. Stop right in the middle of your fear of stopping and say, “Thy will be done.” Do it anyway. That’s challenging the dark forces way down there in the valley. You will know you’re challenging them when you hear the beasts in the dark valley start to growl. You’re not awake enough spiritually to hear them growl now.