February 2017

THE NECESSITY OF PERSISTENCE
     The healthy information that you must acquire first seems to you to be unhealthy for you. At first you take the friend of right information as the enemy. And because you don't understand the trickiness of your own mind, you do not see through this initial mistake you make when you hear marvelous, healthy, beautiful statements of truth such as you hear [in these talks]. After awhile, with your right spiritual persistence in hearing truth, it changes magically in front of you because a new hearer comes into existence.
     The bad self always takes good things as bad for it, of course. And as the bad nature is replaced by what is true inside you, then it hears healthy facts as healthy. And that begins the process of continuous growth and your own pleasure of living your own life at last.
     Falsehood comes along, lies come along, and because most human beings live from lying natures, they like it.... Everything you hear at New Life is for correction, not condemnation. Good healthy ideas can never condemn you like you condemn yourself.... They are healthy for who you really are but very unhealthy for who you are not, which you take yourself as being.... I told you, you must never fall into dismay or discouragement, no matter how bad or how black it looks for you. Don't fall into that because you don't have to.

TURN YOURSELF OFF
     You must turn yourself off. This means to simply stop the mechanical movement by which you constantly try to find answers. It means you’re not going to keep going to the usual sources. Now, don’t underestimate this exercise. In the middle of any day, just sit down and watch your mind and see that you can’t do anything at all about it. Don’t go into reaction over that or leap to a distraction. Know one thing only: “My mind is madly churning, but I am watching it.” If you see the impossibility of saving yourself, you will have learned something; for when you do something for yourself, you become hardened. This exercise will begin to do something for all the questions that hound you. It will show you that there is no point in you continuing to let anyone on the human level answer your questions, including you.