August 2026

STOP DECEIVING YOURSELF
     Catch yourself thinking something you shouldn’t at all be thinking, saying something utterly wasteful just to prove how friendly you are, or how concerned you are with someone else. You catch yourself doing wrong things, and having done that, you’re going to prove to yourself that you can indeed escape yourself.
     You do not have any awareness of how subtly you are deceiving yourself. And I’ll tell you one of the worst self-deceptions of all. You’ve read the books; you’ve heard a thousand talks. You’ve talked with other people about spiritual and psychological matters. And all you have is a mind filled with mechanical motions that you think is power and spirituality — which it is not!
     The only way to shatter that is for you to go out of that door determined that during your twenty-four hours of each day, you’re going to know how bad off you really are, and you’re bluffing it and faking it, even when you try to convince yourself that you know what you’re doing. Your emotions don’t agree with that, do they? Even your overtired body doesn’t agree with that, does it? Look!  Listen to me, you must catch self-deception. If you don’t catch it, it’s going to catch and hold you on and on, and you’ll get worse and worse and worse and you won’t even know what has happened to you.

ARE YOU AT PEACE?
     You like to repeat religious phrases. You like to quote teachers of the past, and you like to think that it has something to do with you. Look, come on, if you were really saved, if you really lived in and with the Holy Spirit, if you really did that, wouldn’t you be at peace? Are you at peace? No, you’re at war.
     Now I am trying to force you to stop telling lies. It ain’t easy! [Laughter] Because your dream castle is built of enormous fabrications, and you don’t want to obey anything higher than yourself. Because you think, in your sick egotism, that there is nothing higher than you.