GIVE UP SELF-REFERENCE
Exercise: all day long, everything is a self-reference, everything. “Oh, I hurt my arm. Oh, I don’t like glazed carrots.” (Laughter) What’s the matter with glazed carrots? (Laughter) You want to believe that you exist. How many guesses would you like to have to see that you’re not existing as you think you are? Well, let me summarize it and get it out of the way. You don’t have any existence at all.
Come on, will you please have the brains if you have them to see that what you have called your life is absolutely nothing but a horrible nightmare that you believe in because just now you don’t believe in God, in Truth and Reality. You want to blame someone for something. You want to worry over your business collapsing. Self-reference. Please, if your business prospers, you make a million dollars or it fails and you go broke, what is that to you? Look, you’ve gained everything, you lost everything.
Look, look, both of those are absolutely nothing in the light of Reality. You wanted to succeed or wanted to fail so that you could make your self-reference solid, something to stick to! “I’m here. I’m me! Everybody look at me and if you don’t look at me, I’ll look at myself and that will assure me that I have existence, that there’s something hard and real and lasting there.” Try to make yourself believe it, you can’t!
That’s what self-torment is. Self-torment is trying to convince yourself that something is true when it’s untrue. So, the next time you think about your business prospering or failing, I want you to do something very brave. I want you to ask yourself, “Who is excited over all the money, my money’s bringing in. Who’s excited over that,” or “Who is morose and bitter and hard and revengeful because the business if failing? Who?”
I’ll tell you who gets excited and depressed. What you have called ‘you’ and it’s all an enormous fake! All right, I’m going to put you to the test. You say on the surface that you want to get rid of the anxiety that attacks you so often. You say you want to be a free and happy human being. Nonsense! You don’t want it at all because if you wanted it God would grant it immediately! You don’t want it. You want to be able to say, “I at least have ‘me’ to turn to, to think about. I’ve got so many exciting things to do or to plan.”
...You say you believe in yourself. What are you talking about, when you say, “I believe I can do it.” Who are you talking about? You’re talking about a delusory man or woman, and you refuse, you refuse to go beyond that level and say to yourself, this is what you refuse to do, you refuse and I ask you to do this from this day forward. I ask you to give up self-reference.
NO MORE TRYING TO IMPRESS PEOPLE WITH KNOWING NODS
You love easy answers, so you don’t have to think, so you can nod your head, “Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.”
Come on, have you ever talked with anyone about anything? At your work or something, you were talking and explaining something to him, and all the while you were explaining it to him, he was going [Vernon shows a ‘knowing nod’ not audible on tape]. (Laughter) It's very important when you do that to have the right facial expression. (Laughter) It must consist of — oh, you're getting something extra this morning — that knowing nod. That’s what we’ll call it. The knowing nod must be a combination of agreement, of strength, of wisdom. And in order to convey it properly, in order to kid the other person into thinking you're listening and understanding and welcome it, even the lips have to play a part in it. [Vernon shows an expression with his mouth.] “Hmm.” (Laughter)
All right, you can't do that here this morning. No more trying to impress teacher. T'aint going to work. (Laughter) That’s t-a-i-n-t.