March 2017

FALL OUT OF LOVE WITH CONFLICT
     Once upon a time there was a man who worked at a big tall office building in a big town. And philosophically, he was a man who was interested in the sort of things we’re getting onto here. They fascinated him. He wanted to know more about self-enlightenment. So at his coffee breaks he'd go way upstairs to the roof of the building, and he would sit down on a bench there, and he'd look around and what would he see?
     He would see himself surrounded by hundreds of other grayish looking buildings just like his. And he said to himself, “There must be something more than this! There has to be something more than this building I'm in, filled with thousands of heart-aching people. There must be something more than millions of people in all their little cramped offices. There has to be something more than this!”
     All right, now here is what you’re to practice saying to yourself. This is a definite start. This is a new gate to go through. "There has to be something more than this."
     Don't you tell yourself what it is — what that something else is. That would just be falling back in the same mechanical habit that you've been having, and you'll go nowhere. Instead of that, love that statement, "There must be something more than this antagonistic and agonized world."
     Everybody is unhappy. You know that! You know that it's all a false front, so you’re quietly telling yourself there has to be something higher. Then it is necessary for you to firmly add, “I don't know what that something else is.”
     You must do that! Don't fail to do that, or you'll be tricked by your own sneaky little mind that wants to keep you suffering. And so it says, “Here is what it is. Quit working down in that office. Move to ten states away. Go work at some other place.”
     I told you that there is something more than this, but you don't know it! If you knew it, you wouldn’t suffer. You'd be free of it.
     So our man practiced what he preached to himself, and one thing that became clearer to him was that nobody out there, none of the pained people even want to investigate their pain. They don't even want to know! They're in love with conflict. You will fall out of love with conflict, starting now and continuing.
     When he got the clue that other people loved being miserable, he looked at himself and said, “Wait a minute; it's sure easy to see them clutching and shouting at each other and hurting each other, but what about me?”
     Now the lesson is getting personal, huh? This is what you have to do now. You can't look out and criticize everyone out there anymore. You have to look in and not even criticize yourself, but know what is there. The shock will wake you up. The shock of seeing how careless, how wandering you were, anxiously seeking but never really finding any true answers.
     So this went on for a long time, him saying, “There has to be something better than this.” And then letting the next thought come to him, “I haven't the slightest notion of what it is.” This is spiritual self-sincerity, self-honesty.
     He allowed that to work on him. He began to see something very strange and experienced what you’ll have to go through. He saw that he wanted to preserve his hostility, his pain. He wanted to preserve it so that he could be the center of what he called his own life. “I'm somebody! I'm hostile! I hate that world out there! I hate it!”
     He saw that other people were the same way he was, and then he went on from that state to knowing how to be free of the whole world, the whole deceitful, hostile, vicious, vicious, vicious lying world. He knew how to be free of it. Be free of myself! That’s the only answer. That’s the glorious answer. That’s the God-given answer.
     He went on and on and on, as I want you to go on and on and on. One day he was able to walk up to the rooftop and look around and he was able to say, “I know there's something stronger than you, evil. I know it.”
     Do you know how he knew that? I always come back to this now. He knew he couldn’t be touched by anything out there because he couldn’t be touched, hurt by anything inside himself. It was gone! He was living in a new world. He was living a million miles above that vicious cruel city that he was in.
     Do you understand the point? Why are you wasting your life in fighting the social system, which is, without question, utterly insane? You know that! Why are you fighting what is happening? Why are you being afraid of what you see? You have no business being afraid of anything, anywhere, any time!
     God has promised you freedom within yourself of all attacks, of all hurts. God has promised you freedom. That means that you are the one who has to get your right corrective action, not the world. Let it go where it wants to go! Don't try to help it! Don't smile at it! Don't you dare smile once more at what's going on. They will know why you smile. They will know that that’s your weakness masquerading as friendliness. They will know it, and they will get you again and again.
     I'm talking to you about being consciously serious, which is not glum and gloomy at all. It is freedom; therefore it is happiness.
     Final point. You conquer the world by not trying to conquer it with what you are presently. See what you are presently. Don't want that anymore. Accept the higher gift. Then nothing is easier to be free and happy no matter what happens to you, because it's no longer happening to you because you're not you anymore. You're living with the spirit of freedom and happiness that you have allowed to come into your life.
     Take one step at a time and one day whatever you're doing at home, you'll be a perfectly happy person no matter how little or how much money you have, no matter if you're alone or have a thousand people, because God is not lonely and neither will you be.

SOMETHING REAL CAN HAPPEN
     Absolutely nothing real is happening, only the mechanical running around. Billions of activities and nothing is happening. At the end of an individual's life, nothing is happening but movement. How pathetic. They missed it.
     Something real can happen to you. There's a psychological crime going on inside of your psychological system. All you have is your pretense and fakeries. All you do is try to convince yourself that you are right when you are wrong.
     You can't be lazy and get out.