February 2022

VICTORY IS ALREADY WON
     I am speaking to you with words. Try to see the depth of the meaning behind them. A person who, in his self-centered egotism, takes himself as a god apart from all else doesn’t know it! This is why you can’t get through our thick heads and their thick heads, that you have an image of yourself that you take as being real and which you also bow down and worship above all else. Which means you’re separated from God with a capital G. Which means your life is a mess, and you are indeed a cruel hypocrite.
     This means that we’re unconscious, right now. Therefore, the way out is to become conscious — to see, to understand, to apprehend, to have insight into ourselves as we actually operate. Then after that we can cease to call it ourselves, take it as being me. But you have to go in the right order; otherwise, you’ll get hardened in the wrong order, and there will be no hope for you.
     First you have to see the condition as it actually is, and then you cease to say ‛I’ to it. But that’s very dangerous — the whole thing is very dangerous all along, because the devil is watching for anyone to try to make progress. And he’ll trip you up if he can, and he has a million tricks.
     Do you remember, listen? Never forget this morning’s talk. The victory is already won. You don’t have to win anything. There’s no one there to win. There can never be a winner. You can use the word winner only when you’re conscious that you’re using the word ‛winner’ without self-reference. Isn’t that beautiful?
     If you fight, you’re going to lose. You will always lose. Sickness always loses when it asserts itself. The one and only way to win with a capital W is to resist not evil. Right?
     Look, if you have no one on earth to hate, to dislike, if — listen to this now, it’s pretty deep — if you have no one on earth to hate, can you exist as a hater? No. There’s no way you can exist as a hater. But we want to exist as a hater because this is the only existence we’ve known up until now. And we’d rather be hateful than to be non-alive. But to be hateful is death! Did you ever think of that? That this is a state of death — to live in hatred, to live in violence, to live in egotism. And death is always trying to, with all its madness, always trying to convince itself that it is life. And it is doomed to destroy itself daily!
     False love invites hatred from the world — false love, which is hatred itself. Calling the brick love doesn’t make it love. It makes it a label only. And then we believe in the label and say, “I am loving.” And all people who are loving on the surface have great violence in them, and great hatred against the people that they are forced to love. Can you imagine love being compulsive? This is what it is in the dark world! Real love has nothing of that. It’s very loose and free and spontaneous. And it doesn’t look around and say, “I love you. And I hate you.” See, it doesn’t use the words at all. Love doesn’t use the word love at all, which makes it unique Love with a capital L.
     All self-reference dulls you because it’s an illusion that there’s someone there to get excited over. There is no one inside you to get excited over! But you have a thought about yourself, and you mechanically repeat that thought over and over and over again in order to repeat the thrill. And the thrill blocks out your awareness of the fact that you are not that thrill at all, or the supposed person in back of the thrill.
     The real nature, your real self, has no time in it. Therefore, it does not have to resort to time thinking, which exists in the intellect. It’s just there. God already exists. God already is good. All we have to do is — like the prodigal son, the prodigal daughter — is go back home, and all problems are solved.

HOW TO REALLY WIN
     When you are afraid — which you are — that doesn’t mean that your fear, your tension and anxiety has to go beyond itself and explode into other self-injuring emotions. For example, if you are afraid of someone, of a condition, it is not necessary for you to then go on to be hostile toward it. You need not go on to attack it. Because if you do that, then the attack and the hostility will find a third element to attach itself to — accusation, or whatever. And it starts the whole string of freight cars rolling down the track, all unnecessarily. And down a track, by the way, that leads downhill and always — and you know it — to a crash, to a self-crash.
     Now, what’s the alternative? Can’t you just sit down somewhere when you’re afraid of something, and just sit back and know that you’re afraid, and not go beyond it? You are in fear for just one cause — because you don’t really know who you are!
     The Truth, the beautiful, pure, powerful, marvelous Truth itself can’t be lost. It’s always one with itself. It is always found itself. It can’t lose itself. There’s no division. There’s no parts to wander off. There is an Intelligence with a capital ‛I’ that has nothing in common with the way you now think.
     I want you to think how you now think. Look at the madness of it! Look at the scheming, look at the defense, and look at the hardness. And look at the bitterness and look at the changed facial expressions as you try to promote and protect yourself. This is what your mind is like. This is what your life is like. And this, horribly, is what you take as the whole world of existence for you! And of course, what else can you do? Your mind can’t go beyond itself. How can it? It’s limited. You have limited it with your limiting self-descriptions.
     So, now you know what your present life is like — how it rotates. And you come right back to where you started every day. And all you ever have is a new fresh set of despairs of how you are going to win. Will you listen to me when I tell you, the way you are going you are never going to win. You’re always going to lose. There is no way on earth that you can win the way you are now doing it.
     Tonight, and the rest of these meetings, we’ll show you how to really win, which is simply to stop trying to. And when you do that, your nature will change, your mind will change, your spirit will change. And then you’ll see — you’ll see to your great relief – that there actually was an intelligence that was one hundred percent different from yours.
     What we’re trying to do here, and what you can do personally, is to break the barriers of ordinary limited, thinking. And there’s one way to do that.
     You don’t know that this extremely limited world of your intellect is the cause of all your difficulties in life; the cause of every tension you have, of every hardness, of every defense. And if you have defense, you’ll also have offense. And you’ll hurt other people, as you’ve already hurt yourself.
     You don’t understand that you must — if you’re really going to be free, if you’re really going to be happy, if you’re really going to be in another world while you’re right here in this social world — then you have to come to an end of yourself. Which is the same thing as coming to an end of ordinary thinking!
     The way you can understand what we’re trying to get at is to sit back, take in all these impressions, see how true everything is that we’re talking about. See that you are being described exactly as you are.
     Collect knowledge. What an encouraging bit of information you have just been given. You have been told that it is possible for you to know that you’re in prison. You’ve been told that it is possible for you to understand exactly where you are. Admit it! Don’t lie about it! But know exactly where you are, that you’re a prisoner. And when you do that, there is someone on the outside of that prison who has the key. Who senses that when you want to get out, you will get out, and He will open the door. That entity outside the prison that is waiting for you to admit that you’re in it can be called God.