What’s New

AMAZON SMILE (Amazon is ending Amazon Smile as of February 20, 2023.)
     Hello. If you buy from Amazon, it is easy to set up making your purchases through Amazon Smile and they will donate .5% to New Life every time you purchase something. When you shop at smile.amazon.com, they donate to your favorite charitable organization, at no cost to you.
     Go to https://smile.amazon.com and sign up. Once there, click on Get Started and sign in with your existing account. It will then take you to a page where you can type in the search box, New Life Church & Literary Foundation. It will come up as New Life Church & Literary Foundation – Pine, AZ. Choose it and your setup is complete. Then bookmark Amazon Smile and shop through it. It’s exactly the same as shopping from Amazon, but .5% of your purchase amount will automatically be donated to New Life. Thank you.

How to End Suffering — Complaining

     The commentary series below is focused on a particular negative emotion, painful feeling, negative trait or  state of human beings that causes us tremendous pain and suffering. Perhaps you will recognize that you yourself have had personal experience with this condition. You’ll find the explanation of how it causes suffering and how it produces detrimental effects in your daily life. You will also be shown how Truth can help you to lessen these effects and how you can eventually eliminate them from your life altogether. A new negative characteristic of human nature will be gone into each month. It will be great fun to explore these things in order to help us see through them and to be rid of them.
COMPLAINING by Judith Anderson
     Life is met with the wrong attitude. In Pathways to Perfect Living, we’re told, “Strain exists in the gap between what we insist we need and what we actually receive” (p. 147). Life presents itself and we either complain, object, fight and suffer, or meet it with a completely new viewpoint.
     To illustrate what this new attitude would be like, there is a question asked in The Power of Your Supermind about the problem of insomnia. Vernon answers, “Stop fighting sleeplessness…. If your mind and body do not want to sleep, why should you object? Give up caring whether you sleep or not” (p. 150).
     Relinquishing the illusion of control is a monumental lesson. It relates to the esoteric principle of non-action. We must give up so-called self-protection to be cared for by Truth. As Vernon once said in a talk (3-23-84), “If you still take care of yourself, then God can't do it!"
     Vernon once told a story of a young peach tree, which provided nourishing peaches. In the natural course of life, it grew old, died and fell to the ground. But when our body undergoes physical changes through normal growth and aging, we fearfully protest and complain, “I should remain beautiful and young forever.” So people go on diets and exercise regimens, count calories, run marathons and oppose the inevitable changes.
     When you’re young, you think you’ll always be quick and you’ll never be sick. Then things start to change and surprise! You have to slow down and can no longer be as active and spry as you once were.
     With aging and poorer health, more than just physical discomfort usually occurs; if allowed, psychological suffering from negative emotions arises. It is easy to go wrong if these changes are faced mechanically and unconsciously, which results in a lot of complaint and sourness. Unfortunately, negativity toward health matters is often encouraged by so-called friends, relatives and allies. Listen to older people talk. Fear is present, accompanied by feelings of helplessness and a wish for sympathy, a desire to control the body, with an increase in prescription drugs, in doctor and hospital visits, insurance and financial worries.
     Remember, the world does not want us to wake up. It wants to be able to manipulate sheep who are asleep. It wants to snuff out the light we’ve found here and keep us entangled in more and more distractions that can cause distress and anxiety, which can easily consume us as we age. When someone complained to Vernon that he had had many bad breaks in life, Vernon said “to change your thinking.” The negativity is not in the event, it is in you!
     Besides complaint, another way to describe the cause of psychological suffering as we age is that we are strong objectors to what is happening to us. The mind grumbles, “These changes should not be occurring in my life. What can I do to stop them?” The true answer is that we are setting ourselves up in opposition to the natural process of how life unfolds on this earth. We demand certain requirements in life which cannot be met. So the mistake and cause of suffering is our own misunderstanding, which is that I can and must control what happens to me. This is impossible.
     This situation is a whole new adventure of discovery if you’re a truth student, a chance to learn something new. Am I going to go along with what the world says I must feel or will I allow the changes to occur without objection and quietly watch?
     Human beings are unique in that they have a chance to rise above being earthbound; this life is an opportunity to rise to a higher world while still living in a physical body. New Life students can use everything to wake up and to “come out from among them,” so this presents a wonderful opportunity to rise higher spiritually.
     With a sense of curiosity, we can observe: “Well, look at that. I’m going to watch and see what happens. Yes, it’s new, oddly unexpected. I don’t have to like or dislike it. I only have to watch without calling it mine, my body, my eyes, my weight. Yes, it’s where I live now, in a temporary vehicle on this planet. But it’s not me, my essence. So what comes and goes is not mine.” There can be no suffering if I refuse to identify with any painful thoughts or ragged, desperate emotions. Vernon says in “End of Frustration,” in his book Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge, “With the vanishing of the illusion of self, there is no one to oppose what happens.”
     It comes back to the question, will I trust Truth or am I an atheist who battles with life? Do I fight the God who made me or will I learn from Reality as it comes? Vernon said, “Let it all unfold.”
     “The spirit is 10,000 times more important than the body.” We can separate simple and practical health information from the obsession to control what happens to the body. And Vernon assured us that the spiritual has complete dominance over everything, including the physical.
     All these negative conditions and states can be consciously watched, then left behind and ignored. We do not have to be drawn in and engaged by them. We don’t have to go there! See this refusal as a powerful preventative remedy to end suffering. Your force and energy will increase as you focus on true healing and inner health.