November 2020

PAIN-DRAIN
    It's always with you — pain, suffering, anguish, and agony. No longer tolerate suffering. You’ve put up with it. Something is happening to you without your conscious permission. It slips by, sneaks in, does damage, then seems to go away.
     See clearly what’s happening to you at the moment it happens. Trying to get rid of the pain with the dance and dinner guarantees the continuation of the pain.
     Pain-drain exercise: At the same time you are aware of the pain, you will also become aware of the drain. The enemy has been exposed. Leap into the truth world. Get away from you. Bad forces can’t follow you. It takes years.
     You see it. Then you say, "What’s the use?"
     And you say, “I used to like that, take pleasure in it.”
     Then you say, “That false pleasure was finally seen through by me.
My unawareness of the whole evil process is what has permitted it to go on and on. I am not going to give my energy, force, encouragement to the enemy by shaking, worrying. If there’s an attack, I know it will turn sour immediately. I’m going to keep my feelings and my thoughts out of it and rely on God the moment it is happening.”
     No longer feed the animals with your mind and emotions. Understand the whole process.

BANISH STRESS AND STRAIN
     Stress and strain in life are the result of trying to make the unworkable work. If you are not comfortable with yourself, if you are uncomfortable in society, if you are just plain old uncomfortable living with yourself, you can be quite sure that somewhere you’re trying to make something work that can’t work. That, of course, is the story of the whole world — everyone having his own pet philosophy, or scientific or unscientific system, in which each individual thinks that it will work for him. And he hopes it will work for others so that he’ll get added gold and glory.
     You can start tonight to understand that all stress, all strain, all discomfort inside of you, which you do have, is a result of you trying to force something to happen that can never happen. And one of these peculiar things that human beings try to do in order to find happiness, in order to find contentment, which they really don’t want in the first place, by the way, they prefer strife. But one thing that human beings try to do, which is impossible, is to try and be happy without understanding themselves, or without knowing how their minds work. Nor can they be happy without understanding their relationships with others, or even their relationships with nature or with mechanical things.
     People have an almost complete total lack of understanding of how life works — both their own, and consequently that of other people — which means exactly what you and I see in the world today. That is, people hurting each other and people not knowing how to behave toward themselves or anyone else. Now, I am describing the world you lived in today and the world I was in. And you know it’s a fact if you have even a small amount of insight into yourself and into surrounding conditions. You have to come up with the conclusion that something is very wrong with the individual.