September 2022

UNDERSTAND YOUR MIND
     All your life you have been trying to do things that you can’t do. You’ve been fighting, trying to achieve certain objectives, and you’ve found yourselves defeated. Trying to do things that you find it impossible to do. You’re constantly sending your desires and wishes out into the world, all day long, all night long, hoping to win and losing.
     And you have built up a certain hardened frustration and negative expectation by saying, “What kind of a terrible world is this where I can’t get what I want? Where whatever I try is met by a strength, a power, that is greater than I am. And I get thrown back, sometimes very hurtfully. In other words, I can’t win. So many impossible things that I wish to be possible remain impossible.”
     You should be very pleased to hear that what we’re going to go into tonight will be something that is possible for you to do. There’s something you can start with and something that will change everything in your life. It’ll change the way you see yourself, change the way you see the world, change the way you think toward God. It will change the way you act toward everything on earth including your own inner states. And that one thing that you can do, which will not meet with rebuff, with defeat – if you’re sincere, if you really mean it — that one thing you can do is to understand your mind. Really understand your mind.
     You don’t understand it now. Can you be very honest about that at the start? Can you admit really now that you have no comprehension at all of why your mind works so wildly, so madly — why it has so many dark movements in it, why you are indeed frustrated in your desires?
     Can you understand then that you don’t understand presently how your mind operates? If that is your starting place, it’s a marvelous starting place, because it’s an honest one. And no self-transformation can ever proceed unless you start on the basis of self-honesty, which is to see yourself as you actually are, not as you imagine you are.
     Do you really think that God, that Truth, that Reality has condemned you to unconscious self-laceration for the rest of your life, self-whipping? Do you really think that that is a necessary state for you to endure and suffer from all day long?
     You’re not happy, you’re not free. I’m saying that as a fact; you don’t understand what’s going on inside you, inside your mind. Can you picture yourself as being an enemy of your own life here on earth?
     Question: You watch very carefully your mind, as you answer this. Can any dark mood such as depression, such as vicious criticism, such as sneering, can that be right for you, or is it wrong for you? I’m telling you, you had better start standing aside and seeing how you are identifying with those passing thoughts instead of standing aside and pushing them away in the sense you’re not accepting them as being yours. You are embracing a cage full of wild animals. Doesn’t that explain to you why you’re so nervous living with yourself?
     You will begin to understand your mind which will then instruct you on both ordinary life and higher life. You can begin to understand it, and that very understanding is a force, a force that works for you.
     Now, if you’re a blabbermouth by nature, and that’s the way you want to live, you’re not going to understand your own mind. Therefore you will have to pay the penalty in your preference for mental ‘blabber-mouthery’, or with your mouth, physical mouth.
     Final question. You want something better? Sacrifice everything to the invitation of Truth to understand your own mind. And God, who is higher than your mind, will do the rest.