October 2018
REAL RELIEF
Why have you given pain, suffering, confusion, authority over you? Why have you permitted them to continue to make you feel the way you do? This desperate feeling that you’ve got to do something, you’ve got to — listen to this — ask your desperate feelings, “Please give me calm feelings.”
It would be just as ridiculous to be out in a boat in the middle of the crashing, thrashing stormy ocean to look up to the storm and ask it to suddenly become peaceful. It can’t. It won’t. So you’re wasting your time.
But what you can do, instead of making plaintive pleas, is understand your mistake. Understand that you’ve been terribly tricked into calling on the wrong source for relief and rescue. You know you’re doing that, and I know it. I know and you know you’re always looking around for help, for answers. You’re always reading books, talking to friends. This is it, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
You’re always trying to find relief from something that has never been given to you before. That is, you’ve never found relief before, but you keep trying. If you want to waste the rest of your life, you just sit out in that rocking boat with the water coming up into it; you just sit there and pray to the storm to stop being a storm.
Salvation comes to the man or woman who simply remains the guilty and foolish and ridiculous and lost sinner that he is, that she is. I’m talking about salvation from time, to where you can be delivered into eternity. Why are you lying to keep yourself lost? Why are you lying to keep yourself in time instead of dropping the lie and the time and going into eternity?
You simply don’t understand the right method for being delivered. You’re to think about this a thousand times in the next week: There is nothing you can do. There is something you can realize, and what you can realize is there’s nothing you can do! If you do, if your present nature does anything, says anything, feels anything, reacts to anything, you’ll be a mile further out in the desert away from the oasis than you were today.
All right, you either accept this or you reject it. You either want to understand or you don’t want to understand. Now it’s very clear of course that it's ninety-nine to one against you. One percent of you wants to understand. Ninety-nine percent doesn't. That’s okay. That’s fine. That one percent is enough. That’s all you need, because you can want to be on its side, instead of throwing the decision over to the ninety-nine percent, which wants to continue to destroy you.
Yes, I am saying that it is the greatest necessity of your life to simply give up. Very calmly know that you’re lost. Ah, God doesn’t want you to have any answer at all. When you know you’re lost and there’s nothing you can do, then the helicopter comes over and sees you and rescues you. That’s symbolic of something higher than your own efforts.
Now, this is something you should be very, very glad about — to know that you do have the power to choose which side you’re going to be on. But I’ll tell you, the big guns are going to open up on you. They’re going to try to blast you out of your little one percent position. You’re going to feel rage, guilt and every other feeling, and they’re going to try to tell you to hang on to them instead of letting them go. You let them go. And after going through new kinds of fears, you'll finally see that one percent grow to two percent, to three percent. And one day you’ll know from the Spirit of God himself that you crossed over, because you have cast your part on the side of God. And when you do that, he proves himself to you and will for all time.
UNPOPULAR TRUTHS
What you dislike in that other person is still unconscious in yourself.
How to decrease you and increase spirituality: lose the argument.
There is no security, happiness in getting married, in getting money.
You still think your problem is because the other person won't change and is wrong. You externalize the problem.
We are tied to anyone we hate.
I have problems with others to the exact degree that I have problems with myself.
Change yourself and the outer world changes all by itself.
Never blame anyone for what you suffer. The response is yours; the response and the response alone is the only problem.
Dare to disappoint others. Keep it practical. Don't do things just to please someone. Don’t agree with that person. For example, maybe you just wanted to stay home, so say, “No, I don't want to do that today.”
We cease to attract the same unwanted events as we cease our negative reactions to them.
