What’s New

Wonderful New Booklet … The Braying Donkey
     This true story contains hundreds of rich lessons for you to discover and apply for your own spiritual advancement. “A foolish human donkey never sees himself as foolish, which is both his problem and his pain.... We can be wiser.” Vernon Howard said, “Within this short story is the complete map by which any human being can journey from the dark jungle to the sunny meadow.”  Get your copy today!
(A digital download of The Braying Donkey is now available.)

How to End Suffering — LAZINESS

     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.

LAZINESS by Karen West
    Laziness is defined as the quality of being unwillilng to work. On a worldly level, human beings have learned from the environments they have been raised in and surrounded by since childhood. Those environments have formed how that human will live his or her life on this earth. As children, we really were at the mercy of these influences, which might not have been very merciful. Yet, even as young people, we saw things that we knew were wrong but didn’t have the ability to change.
     We may have been taught to have a sense of self-responsibility growing up or perhaps we learned to rely on others, to one degree or another, to do our work. In the latter case, living from an attitude that we‘re owed something will never work. The false nature wants the easy way out. It doesn’t want to put forth much effort to understand life. It is lazy and wants others to take care of it. Responsibility or the willingness to be accountable for our own actions is resisted. The artificial nature thinks it is clever to have others do what it should do. But being lazy creates great suffering and prevents us from having the new life that we could have.
     Spiritually speaking, it is essential for a person to develop self-responsibility. Worldly actions to support ourselves, paying our own bills and being good householders, though preliminary steps, are essential because we can then go on to be responsible for what God has given us. It is a spiritual law that if a person is given unearned benefits, it harms both the giver of the benefits, and the receiver of the benefits.* Both are living out an imaginary dream in which the false nature is all-powerful and they wrongly believe they are taking care of life on their own terms. One group is getting perceived goodies without actually having to work for them and the other has a self-image of being a ‘good’ man or woman. What an affront to God! In reality, all good things come from God. But people try to take credit for and completely forget that there is a Higher Power in charge. Like God doesn’t see this? Besides, it is a spiritual truth that only when a person raises his own level (with light from God to see and to let go of the darkness inside of himself) can he can really help others. Vernon says, “You have to face your responsibilities to evolve” and “Your first responsibility in life is to live a life of Truth.”
     Spiritual treasures are only given to workers. Vernon Howard talks about the workers, the loafers and the  saboteurs. He explains that only the workers are dedicated to trying to contact the Kingdom of Heaven within. They have the best chance to experience genuine awakening. Loafers can become workers but saboteurs have no chance.
      Rather than letting the earthly life consume all of his or her time and energy, a worker comes back to conscious awareness of thoughts and feelings as as often as possible because that is where the light comes from. Laziness is spiritual sleep. We were never taught as children to watch the thoughts that come into our minds. Now, we can stop being lazy and learn. These teachings can change anyone’s life — and all for the better. Interestingly, when a person really puts God/Truth/Reality first, everything that really matters is taken care of for them.
     Rest is important and necessary but the spiritual mountain awaits our climbing. There is always more to see in the higher life and the experience is the most fun a person can have. We must never stop. It is a life journey up the mountain, dedicated to letting the unnecessary fall away. Vernon said that Christ was on a spectacularly high level, which allowed him to do the miraculous things that he did.  And Christ said we could do even greater things than he did. What are we waiting for? One of the biggest lies of Satan is that we have to die in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
     Let’s go to work!  The spiritual banquet and all good things await us. Suffering only exists outside the Kingdom of Heaven.
     * A Treasury of Trueness, #889.