July 2020

PRECISION DECISION
     It’s very essential to the ego-self, the pseudo-self, to think in terms of being punished, of being hurt, because then you are being punished for being bad, for example. Now you’ve got your identity of being bad, which is very bad.
     Now listen, here’s the key point. How marvelous, don’t miss it! Effective as of now, you will never think of punishment as self-punishment. You will think of that crisis that you commonly call punishment over a bad choice as a revelation, which is exactly what it is.
     Hasn’t something been revealed to you when you go out and make a choice of some kind, a low-level choice on the level of the intellect? Because you want to be someone, you make a choice and it backfires and you get what you call punished.
     And then when that individual goes home, because he’s been living from decisions, living from his own very low intellectual level, he begins to feel his nothingness and that’s what scares him, so the act goes on and on.
     You’d better become aware of how you use words wrongly in order to keep yourself in the state of conflict, of choices, as you now do. Now look, follow carefully. You made the choice and it was what you call a wrong choice. You were shocked, you were hurt, you wanted to blame someone. Isn’t that a revelation? Of course, it is. Isn’t that light? You never saw it as that did you?
     Marvelous, I made a choice. I got hurt. Ah, there is something wrong with the chooser. There is something wrong with the decision-maker. And if you go far enough, you’ll see what it is. You’ll see the only reason on earth you made that choice is because you wanted to continue to live your false so-called independent life, apart from God, apart from Truth.
     Don’t get away from the lesson now, because the voices, dark voices, are going to tell you that it’s not very important and just put it in your notebook and forget about it. Can you see that there is a way to live in which the ‘prison-decision’ doesn’t exist because there is no one there to choose anything?
     I’m telling you to change everything around by remembering and practicing this. Every shock, every crisis resulting from a mechanical choice, an intellectual choice, can be — if you take it as such — a bit of light. It can be a revelation that you are living wrongly; that you’re living from your own self which you think is real, which you think is permanent. And therefore, which you think must be enhanced, must be kept going by any means whatever.
     You take your rebukes and rebuffs rightly. Take them as something that’s trying to get through to you which is a right voice. Remember we said someday we’re going to talk about right voices? Well, here it is. The very shock, the very rebuke, that painful condition you found yourself in, can’t you stop blaming people and look at it and say, “There’s something wrong with my mind!”
     That wouldn’t have happened to you unless there is something wrong with your mind, because when you got to that crossroad, that fork in the road, what happened? Your vanity, and your ambitions, and your wish to be appreciated and thought great came up and said, “Now let’s see, which fork in the road, the left or the right is going to do more for me?”
     Already you’re caught, already you’ve listened to a dark voice that’s trying to trap you into taking left or right. And every time you take left or right, you’re falling right back into the trap of thinking that either one of them is going to do something for you.
     A choice — listen to this — a choice that is made with a relaxed spirit, a choice that says I am not going to choose, is what we’re talking about — a precision-decision.