March 2022

TRUE CONFESSION
     The act of confession plays a very important part in religious, philosophical teachings. Ninety-nine and nine- tenths of confessions in religious and philosophical teachings are false. The confession, the confessor, simply is trying to relieve the pressure of his own estrangement from God.
     Being apart from himself, apart from Truth, he feels the pain of that. And that pain does indeed cause him to commit acts that are against himself — crimes against himself, and crimes against everyone else with whom he's associated, including strangers on the other side of the world.
     So ordinary confession is nothing more than another ego-serving device. For one thing, when you confess to another person that you’ve harmed them, or you confess to God, you are talking about yourself. You are talking about yourself as a transgressor. And there's the familiar love of labels that we talk about. And you can then go into imagination and say, God has forgiven me. Or my wife or husband has forgiven me for behaving so badly. But your nature has not changed. Whatever caused you to be so cruel to that other person, the cause is still in you and it will happen again, and again, and again. Perhaps not in the same way, because we try to hide the repetition of internal crimes which then are externalized. We try to hide them from ourselves. And so, we invent new labels — glorious sounding labels — labels which excuse us from our crimes.
     So, most confessions simply make it necessary for the confessor to confess more and again. And of course, there's always an external authority that will say you are now forgiven. And then you can accept that and say, “All right, I am now OK.” You’re not OK. You're the same person as you were before you confessed.
     Now there is True Confession. And True Confession means that you have looked inwardly, and you have seen the present state you are in. That is True Confession! You look inside and you do indeed see the malice you have for other people. You do indeed see how divided you are inside yourself. And you get torn back and forth all day long, all life long, between one aim and the next.
     You want to be with a person you claimed you loved one day, and the next day you can’t bear the sight of him. This means that we do indeed have internal problems. The first step, a major first step, to getting rid of the problem is to confess that it is there.
     Now you won't be able to confess that you're angry, that you’re lost, that you're petty. You won't be able to confess that until you begin to catch the glimpse of something else, which is why work has to go along together in several ways. You won’t be able to confess it until you see that it wasn't you after all. You have to have a glimpse of what you're doing when you confess. This will weaken the hold of all these mechanical tyrants inside. And when you've gone through the process, not just a hundred times, or a thousand times, but daily, so that over the years ten thousand times you've confessed that you are indeed wrong about something. You can find all day long, ways in which you are wrong. An attitude, a hostile attitude. And you simply see that you are wrong about something. When this purification of True Confession has gone to the very end, you will then see that you confessed merely to the existence of the darkness inside you. You confessed to the existence of it, and you will see fully when you do this that it wasn’t you at all, but you wanted it to be you. Because this is the only thing you knew to do. And at the end of your last confession, you can look back on your life with that ex-wife or ex-husband or friends or crimes that you committed. You can look back at it, and nothing is easier on earth for you to see that you were indeed a criminal. A criminal who hated other people. I'm not talking just about external crimes of robbing a store. I’m talking about being a psychological criminal.
     But it will be the easiest thing in the world to confess, that is to know, to see, to understand that you were utterly lost. That you were — the slightest word from someone could set off a sick reaction in you — and you either hit him or wanted to hit him. And in this state of seeing, of a whole confession you might call it, in this state of whole confession, that confession, there is no guilt at the moment, and no carrying out guilt afterwards. Because you’ve cleaned the whole thing out.
     And what a relief for you, or for me, to go into every one of these practically psychopathic behaviors and acts and thoughts that we had. Simply to know that they were there. And we were one with them. Therefore, we couldn't see them. We couldn't confess. Confess? We LIKE what we’re doing. You don’t confess when you like being psychopathic. You’re just living it out with a hard, dangerous look on your face.
     I’m talking about the very end of things now, where if anyone was to accuse you of being a vicious animal — five years ago, twenty years ago — you just nod your head. Your confession is complete. You knew, you know, you understand that you were taken over. Of course, at that time the only nature you had was that of a psychopathic monster. And you know now it was far worse than you ever thought you were at the beginning of your search. And those two words I use, psychopathic monster, are mild! We were that and far more. And you will internally nod to what I am saying, won’t you, because you know, especially if you’re beginning to confess that this is your state.
     And after it’s all over where you no longer take ego glory in saying “I’m a monster“ — when you’ve confessed that, you’re not even a monster. You've gone beyond that. The cure is complete. And you won’t have to confess ever again. Instead, you'll be very watchful so that there’s nothing to confess about. This is real innocence.
     That’s a long, long ways down the road. But we can start today.