Monthly Lessons Archive 2023

THE DAMAGE CAN BE UNDONE
     You’ve been attacked all your life. The first enemy is not seeing the enemy.
     Society does not want this good news. The damage can be undone. The damage can be undone.
     Ask myself, “Why hasn’t the healthy inner change come? The damage still hurts badly. How come I can still feel and suffer from wounds when I was little?”
     How come you have failed to undo the damage? From now on, at the same time your attention is outward, you must put your inner attention inside. What ache was going on at the lower level without your seeing it?
     Understand yourself, your life on earth. What is happening to you inwardly while doing something outwardly? If you’d been alert, you could catch yourself being attacked, and your attention wasn’t on what you had been doing. You should be studying your thoughts, emotions so you see that “I’ve not been able to push away the hurt because I’ve never delved deep inside myself because I was too busy pretending I was having fun.”
     Notice how hostile we get when someone criticizes us. Why? Because someone has touched a deeply concealed falsehood inside of me – something I am hiding. Notice a combination of defensiveness and offensiveness. Know one thing – this defensiveness. See, there is so much going on inside of you that you haven’t wanted to face. The level of one’s touchiness reveals one’s level.
     The idea of becoming honest is a long study. Sheer self-deception, “I don’t know what the problem is.” You are. But it is easier to blame someone else. Notice the bad habit of “I don’t know what the problem is.” The truth is you don’t want to know. You don’t want to descend into the dark dungeon to see. You’re working too hard pretending all is well for you to see the problem.
     There will be screams, “I don’t want to see what’s going on in the dungeon!”
     The next explanation must be heard over and over. You have one enemy and that’s all. It’s evil itself. Study it. See it in yourself. It is sly, subtle. A lot more of me is fooled than I thought.
     Study evil in yourself but you must not identify with it or get pleasure out of being bad. I am neither good nor bad of myself. I don’t know who I am. Authentic and everlasting goodness is the absence of the habitual me.
     Discover who you are not. Whatever you see in yourself is not you. Dare to have no idea of who you are. Don’t tell yourself who you are and when you do you will be saved, and you will know who you are.

DO SOMETHING NEW
     If you continue to live with suppressed angers, with concealed jealousies, if you continue to live with chaos inside your mind and in your feelings and in your life, if you continue to live with these hidden harms, then you will have to be an unhappy human being.
     There, I’ve told you. I’ve told you that if you continue to be the way you are, if you continue and make the past, the future in your life with chaos inside your mind and your feelings and in your life, if you continue to live with these hidden harms, then you’ll have to be an unhappy human being.
     There. Now I’ve told you. If you continue to be the way you are, if you continue to make the past the future in your life, then you also have to repeat the strain and the stress and the anxiety and the nervousness and the uncertainty and the pain.
     Now I’ve told you, right? Now I will ask you, what are you going to do with what I’ve told you?
     Now we come to the question: Which do you love more? Do you love the truth, the beautiful truth that you have just heard, the truth of deliverance that if you do face yourself, you can change everything and be free of your old nature? Do you love the truth that you just heard or do you love more the way you have always been and fear to leave it?
     There it is. And I, for now, leave that question with you for you to think about later on. You have been told there is another way you can free yourself. What do you love?
     You have to do something that is utterly new for you. And you have to utterly abandon thinking about the way out and trusting your memorized experiences. Think of something else. The man in the story called for rescue. You call for rescue from your own self, your own unworkable ways. When will you give up?
     I will tell you if you will give up, something else that is not you, that is not a part of the 30-40-50 years old inscriptions in your mind, something else will come to you.
     In the story the man had to cease to believe in what he believed in and he had to consider that hopeless. What you call hopeful is hopeless and always has been and you are afraid to face it. And that’s why you don’t get out. You will continue feeling, being trapped unless you try to understand what you are doing against yourself by consulting your own self-centered, your own self-love, endlessly and thinking it is going to change something. If it could have it would have. And it has changed nothing.

TAKE THE CORRECTION
     Think about this. Have you noticed how comfortable people are in their misery? Think of the word ‘settled’, that’ll make it clear. People are settled down in their routine lives, in their homes, and in their occupations. And in where they go and in what they do, they’re settled! They are “comfortable in what they’re doing.” At the same time their inner life, their feelings screaming out in contradiction to what they said. Have you ever tried to correct someone, and you knew of course that they were all wrong about something? They were behaving in a way that was self-defeating. And this person you tried to correct got mad, struck back, became hostile toward you.
     Do you just suppose that maybe you are living that way? And Reality, Truth, God is trying to get through to you, and telling you that you are wrong, and you rebel angrily and foolishly instead of listening? Do you suppose it’s a possibility that unseen to yourself, you are fighting instead of receiving?
     Have you ever had that experience yourself? Where someone tried to correct you, and you reacted with hostility toward them? When someone tries to correct us as far as our inner life is concerned, about where an authentic spiritual life is concerned, wouldn’t it be wise, wouldn’t it be sensible, wouldn’t it be practical, wouldn’t it be new and different to simply listen to what is being said? Endure the discomfort of being corrected in order to authentically be right. In order to cancel out the contradiction, in order to not suffer from being our old selves anymore. I’m talking about men and women dressed in mental and spiritual rags, having nothing that is truly spiritual, but calling it that, calling it right. And Reality comes along, even in a small incident out in the world — I’m talking about how you behave down at the supermarket. How you behave at home when you’re corrected over a small thing. See, there’s rightness on many levels. Someone tries to correct you in some little, small thing. And all of a sudden because it’s true, you react in hostility and resentment. Right? Ever had that? Some little correction that people make. Look at the point of that, that there are hundreds of opportunities every day for us to begin to cancel out what has been tormenting us. You’re in torment. I know you are, and you know you are. And if you resist and fight what I just said, you just tormented yourself again.
     For the third time I’m going to repeat a certain point. Because I know that it’ll get through to you sooner or later if you’re receptive to it. Why are you pretending that it doesn’t hurt? If you stop the pretense, the time will come when you won’t hurt. But pretense protects your hurt. If you protect your pretense, you perpetuate the pretense and you perpetuate the pain that always goes with pretense.
     I’ll give you a clue how to do that. What happens inside of you when a Truth or a correction comes to you? Now real slow. What happens inside of you? Look at the stream of it. First of all, the immediate tension! Second, there’s the resistance. You yourself have to determine by observing it, all the reactions that go on inside of you when you are corrected!
     Let me tell you something that’s absolutely magnificent! You didn’t resist it. You didn’t fight it, but something that has taken over your life did it! See? Your real nature can never fight Truth. Now if that’s true, then what is fighting correction? What is fighting is all these pretenses that have come and taken possession of our lives, taken us over? So, it seems as if it’s impossible to change our behavior, to change our reactions.
     Now, I’ve given you a clue. And that clue is called honesty. If you can be honest, just in this little investigation that I talked about, begin to see how you react when something or someone comes along and tries to straighten you out. If you can see that there’s something inside of you that doesn’t want to accept it, then add to that this fact. The fact that this is something that is alien to me. Something that has taken me over, taken possession of me. If you can see that, you can go on to the point where you see that your real nature — as I just explained — your real nature never has anything to do with self-punishing behavior. Absorb it all. Learn it all. Take it all inside. And Reality will do the rest. It will change you.

WHEN DELIRIOUS, GO SERIOUS
     THERE IS NO POWER IN THIS WORLD WHATEVER. You must never acknowledge anything as being superior to the Spirit of Truth. There is no power in this world whatever. Dark forces are a bluff. Notice when you’re overwhelmed. Become utterly serious. Say, “I am going to become serious.”

NEVER BLAME ANYONE
     You’re putting the cause of your grief outside of yourself when it’s really in you!
     You look out at the world with fear. “Don’t hurt me, please. Don’t hurt me again.” And you think if you fight hard enough and long enough that the enemy will be defeated. You yourself are imitating the existence and the ferocity of the enemy with your own fighting.
     Stop fighting. Stop fighting! Stop fighting to change the world.
     How much easier it is to point the finger at someone else, to accuse the spouse, to accuse the other country, to accuse that law on the books, to accuse the neighbor down the street.
     How gratifying to sick egotism to look out and say, “There is the cause of my grief.”
     How cowardly can you get? And you had better stop it!
     I’ve described it. Now you’ve got to take action on what I’m talking about. You’ve wasted enough of your life already. Start tonight to start saving your life.
     So, a sense of urgency comes by seeing the actual predicament that you are in.
     Listen to me. Everything depends on you looking within and seeing the horror of it all.
     “My mind drives me crazy.”
     “My emotions keep me awake at night.”
     “I’m afraid of people and places and things.”
     “I’m not in charge of myself.”
     “I’m a lost soul!”
     You’re outnumbered by a million to one enemies, all because you don’t want to listen to the facts about you, so that higher facts can save you from your present way of thinking.
     When your mind is guided by something higher than your own egotism, then it becomes quite another thing.
     So, are you ready to see the chaotic mess inside yourself, and don’t blame mama and papa. Don’t blame the fact they flunked you in school three times in a row. (Laughter) Why didn’t you pay attention to the teacher?
     I challenge you, I dare you, I invite you to — now listen, this is pretty big stuff:  Never, ever again blame anyone or anything again, not once, about your life. Don’t blame someone else for your unhappiness, never again in the smallest way.
     I don’t care how cruel that man was, ladies. I don’t care how awful that woman was, gentlemen. I’m asking you to stop being a little tiny crybaby and start to grow up. And what a marvelous place to start — to never again blame anyone, because when you blame someone, you’re putting the cause of your grief outside of yourself onto them when it’s really in you!
     What brought you into contact with that terrible person to begin with? What kept you living in that condition anyway?
     You see? You choose your own destiny. You really do.

“I GIVE UP”
     You have to do this 1,000 times. Calmly say, “I give up.” Then say, “God, please help me to understand what I just said.” It’s OK for you to know you don’t know what you’re talking about.
     You have to be faithful. You have to do it. The first five million times it won’t mean anything. You’re just mental now. You have to stop there. You have to use what God has given you.
     Finally, you’ve transcended the mental. Now you understand there’s nothing to give up. There’s nothing there but thought and wrongly used.
     Remember that you’re supposed to be doing something for yourself. Say, “I give up.” Then say, “God, please make what I just said very clear to me.”

KNOW FROM YOUR HEART
     I’m going to tell you when the good feeling, the true good feeling will come. It will arrive when you send up an authentic prayer, not based on what you want, but when you have arrived at that rarely arrived-at time when you know absolutely, finally, and forever, it really doesn’t make any difference what you want.
     You cannot ask what you call God to restore the Saturday and its lemonade. You can no longer tell God what you want. You can no longer plead for a restoration of the monthly paycheck and your petty pleasures. You will not do it anymore, but you will allow your true prayer to go up, and you will allow and say so in your request. You will allow God to give you whatever he wants to give you.
     That proper prayer must be proceeded by a realization. And again, once and for all, there is no point in you asking for the Saturday lemonade and for the monthly paycheck anymore. And it doesn’t make any sense to ask for them because, not only are they going to disappear in this world of time and change, but everything else that you could ever ask for will come to an end too, because they are time objects.
     It becomes clear to you that you can take your eyes and your ears off this world all together (your physical eyes and your physical ears) and remember that it’s the invisible world that you must make a contact with. And you don’t have to know who God is. You don’t have to try to explain who God is and how he works. That’s not your business. It is your business to know from your heart that you want the revelation to come to you. The revelation clear and loud. The revelation that you don’t have to want any more of what you formerly wanted, but simply get those wants out of the way and when that happens you will be rescued.
     The whole rescue process, by the way, step by step, you’ll know how to get outside of yourself. You’ll feel the refreshing air. Every step, every step will be shown to you because you finally wanted to ask the right prayer and did so.

GUIDING LIGHT
     “I will not worship pain.” Watch yourself very carefully. Watch small and large concerns, worries come up and ask to take permanent residence. When you accept them, worry, jealousy, etc., you are accepting them as god of the moment.
     When you’re an alert conscious spectator of life, life goes on. Instead of being a role-player, be someone whose role is of being conscious life itself. Get off the stage and be a spectator, neutral, not on stage. Then there is no curtain and you. The curtain can come down only on an actor. Key thought: I WILL NOT WORHIP PAIN.

MISTRUST MUST COME FIRST
     In spiritual meetings such as this is, I can sit here and talk for weeks, and months, and years, and you will not learn a thing. You will not change a thing unless my words are matched by something in you. The thing that must be inside of you is a willingness to listen to the facts behind the words. And these facts behind the words are going to, at the start, seem very threatening to you.
     This will all be unconscious. You won’t know that this process I’ve just described is going on inside of you. That is why it’s necessary for you to sit here and see what you’re thinking about, even as I’m talking to you now. So that you can see, gradually, your fear of the Truth develop, and your defenses coming up. And you might — if you’re very observant — see your resistance to the Truth that could save you. You could see it in your physical posture.
     Don’t you dare start off in your spiritual quest with trust. You’re going to spell ruination for yourself and everyone else that you know. Start with distrust of your present ways, of your present wisdom.
     Do you see why? If you start the spiritual quest by saying, “I’m going to put trust, and faith in.…” What are you putting it in? Your own delusions that you know better, and you don’t know better. What kind of result can there be when you trust your own neurosis? Don’t you see that mistrust must come first? And don’t you see that sooner or later, every person who gets on the path, and stays on the path is going to have to say to himself, “You’re a very foolish human being — all that conceit and all that vanity and all that hardness, and insisting that you know better.”
     Sooner or later, we’re going to have to get to the point where we mistrust ourselves. And do it despite the fear.
     See, what’s going to happen to you when you no longer look on the outside? You are forced to look inside. But you don’t know that there’s anything there because you’ve always had your attention outside — in the government, in your friends, in society which lies to you left and right.
     That’s what you’ve trusted! All you’ve known is something out there which is wrong, which is false.
     You’re going to have to go through this period where there is nothing to think about. Where there is just a letting go. So finally, something that is not a part of you can tell you where your real trust goes, which will be eternal. And you’ll know it from yourself! You’ll feel it. You will live it. You will see your own strength develop, because it’s coming from up there and coming down to you.
     You will know it, without thought, that it’s yours. It’s not depending on your wisdom! It’s not depending on the traveling charlatans of a false government, of other people, of friends, of excitements, of entertainment. It’s not depending on things that come to an end but depending on something that is eternal. And now you know it because you know what eternity is. Eternity is to not think. It’s to be in a certain situation inside yourself that is always being renewed from on high. And this is not philosophy I’m giving you. It is fact.
     Go all the way with it! And someday, you’ll be very quietly and eternally sure of what you are all about, and what life is all about. And for the first time you’ll know what God is all about. And in that is rest!

WHEN DELIRIOUS, GO SERIOUS
     THERE IS NO POWER IN THIS WORLD WHATEVER. You must never acknowledge anything as being superior to the Spirit of Truth. There is no power in this world whatever. Dark forces are a bluff. Notice when you’re overwhelmed. Become utterly serious. Say, “I am going to become serious.”

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