Tremendous Tidbits
by Vernon Howard
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Open Doors to Happiness
by Vernon Howard
Permitting your life to be taken over by another person is like letting the waiter eat your dinner.
Find yourself, for courage and confidence are as easy as breathing to the person who really knows who he is.
Some people prolong their unhappiness by dramatizing it, which is like expecting applause for having a headache.
Growing up into the fullness of inner strength is as exciting as seeking gold and as rewarding as finding it.
A warring world has no power to injure your real nature any more than darkness can shake a tree.
We are rewarded according to personal effort, like a man who is given as much land as he can walk over during a day.
Talking about love does not make a man loving any more than talking about sugar makes him a slice of cake.
Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.
Danger recognized as danger is not hazardous, as with a sailor who sights and steers away from rocks in the sea.
A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.
Remove the dark cloud of negative thought, and the guiding star of understanding brightly appears.
People worry over the absence of worry, which is like thinking that the end of the storm means the end of the sky.
Man is like a lost tourist who has forgotten he has a map in his pocket which can direct him to his hotel.
If you can talk a monkey out of a banana you can talk logic with someone whose self-interest rejects logic.
Inner liberty can be judged by how often a person feels offended, for you can no more insult a mature man than you can paint the air.
Thinking that stubborn beliefs can give us a new life is like watching a stone statue, hoping it will move.
Life is never too tough for your higher self, any more than a rock is too much for a river.
Talking to the average man about something higher than sex and money is like talking to a rabbit about a rainbow.
Like an army doctor treating enemy soldiers, truth is patient and kindly toward the parts of us which resist correction.
When sad, we need only realize that we are in the wrong place internally, like a lark that belongs in the sky, not in a cage.
Just as a single wave is powered by the entire ocean, a sincere mind has vast resources at its command.
You can refuse entrance to unhappy moods, but you must be alert, just as you might close a window at the first sign of rain.
We can no more enjoy life by hoping for a future result than we can enjoy music by waiting for the final note.
It is as possible to be pleasantly alone with yourself while surrounded by a crowd as it is to walk alone in the peaceful woods.
The truly happy man is one who feels no different when the party ends than he did while it was going on.
Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.
Men who fall from a canoe while standing up to attract attention always claim someone pushed them.
Like helpful librarians who aid your search for books, higher powers do for you what you cannot do for yourself.
Your life makes sense when you don’t need other people to confirm that it does, which is the true independence of a soaring eagle.
The difference between living under your own power and under the power of social influence is the difference between songs and tears.
Just as a piano responds to the touch of a musician, a sincere request for solutions will always be answered from a higher source.
Right daily decisions are as simple as smiling, once you see the difference between natural and artificial needs.
The more you let other people tell you how to sail your boat, the less the boat belongs to you.
Loneliness is an impostor who makes you feel far apart from life, but you can see beyond it to happily find yourself approaching home.
Just as there are millions of unseen stars, there are endless inner riches for you to discover.
Foolishness is simply the nervous preference for wrong ideas, like a sailor anxiously hugging a broken compass.
It is no more necessary to live at the mercy of mental howls than it is needful to live next door to a zoo.
Inner correction guarantees outer correction, just as a repaired clock makes its hands go right.
Your true nature never needs to anxiously prove itself to others, but lives in calm command, like a popular king.
Healing finally comes to the sincere seeker, like a sick man who awakens in the morning to find himself cured.
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Examining the doubts we have about our present way is a highly intelligent act.
Anyone weary of stumbling in the dark has taken the first step toward walking in the light.
The one supreme power that will guarantee personal happiness is personal right thinking.
Inner light shows you what to do with yourself all day long, making everything comfortable.
Acquired beliefs and cosmic facts are as different as pebbles and diamonds.
Please people and you achieve nothing, but please your real self and you start a miracle.
Feel the need for something different, then let it grow by having affection for it.
Cosmic wisdom reveals why unhappy events happen, after which they cease to happen.
You are not required to listen to anyone who demands, “What are you doing about my problems?”
Even if all your friends and relatives do not know how to live rightly, you can surely know.
No one is more qualified than you to discover the true treasures of your inner kingdom.
The very nature of your essence is confidence, so why seek this virtue outside of essence?
Freedom from painful decisions is a happy result of discovering who you really are.
Truth has its reasons for acting as it does, and every one of them is for your benefit.
Calm command can replace agitation as surely as sunshine can replace a storm.
All good things come to anyone who refuses to be intimidated by his own despair.
By eliminating the sheep in himself, a man gives psychic wolves nothing to prey upon.
Welcome higher facts without understanding them and in time you will understand.
Truth does not hurt, rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain.
When a frantic world tries to carry you away, remind yourself that you need not go.
Self-knowledge creates an inner state in which you are valuable to yourself in a new way.
The feeling of being in danger from oneself fades with the application of higher facts.
Be aware of how people insist upon draining your energy, then quietly refuse it.
Heartache can be conquered because a higher part of you is free and apart from heartache.
It is a bright day when we see that cosmic facts are as practical as a recipe for baking bread.
Reflect often on the interesting idea of getting out of your own way.
We attract events which correspond to our nature, so a higher nature will attract higher events.
One thing that is always right is your eagerness for something higher than yourself.
Most people merely rearrange their problems, but with self-insight you can end them.
By seeing what we fear to see we shatter one of the pillars supporting the haunted house.
Wrong action in the past is corrected perfectly by right action in the present.
Self-concern is caused by living from mere ideas, which is cured by living from essence.
Real courage consists of departing from the false while not yet knowing what is true.
We learn to love the light by seeing clearly what the darkness does to us.
One day you will look calmly at a fear and say to it, “You have shaken me for the last time.”
We can either hear what we want to hear or we can hear the rescuing truths.
Starting now, never again permit hard or disapproving facial expressions to intimidate you.
A quiet mind knows the answer, which means we must cease to fight anxiously for the answer.
Living from your real nature is the same as doing something worthwhile with your life.
If you are now reading this line, you have a rich opportunity to make everything new.
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A TRUE SPIRITUAL STORY by Vernon Howard (From a talk given in 1984)
Once upon a time a man lived in England where there are many castles. Over the years when these castles and mansions were built hundreds of years ago, it was a habit to put a secret room in it. A secret room where they could hide their valuables and they did it very cleverly. You could imagine how they could put a secret room in a big castle … put a false roof in a room and put the room under it. Things like that. Now, a lot of these old buildings, hundreds of them all throughout the land had secret rooms in them. But the present owners didn’t know about them and here’s why, and this is a true historical fact. They’d fixed them so cleverly that people never even suspected … the later owners, for example, never even suspected that these secret rooms were there, but they were. And they were filled with old scrolls and jewels and armament and valuables, because that is what they were for. For valuables that they didn’t want thieves to come in and get.
So, this man was an expert in finding secret rooms and he hired himself out for a price. He would go to a mansion and say there may be a secret room in this big castle that no one has ever discovered. For 500 years, there may be a room filled with gold coins of Charles the XXX, Henry the “I” “V”. (Laughter) And so he’d hire himself out and he was an expert. He had studied the old castles. He had studied what they were built like. So he would take a walk around and he’d look carefully and where they were he would find them. So all the treasures of the past were uncovered and the new owner got them.
Point: You, too, can become an expert in finding the secret room inside yourself. Oh, I tell you, it’s pretty well disguised so far, isn’t it? You’ve been looking for it for a long time, huh? No results. No riches. You hear talks about how you can free yourself of worry. How you don’t have to fawn before anyone else. You hear all these good things, but they don’t happen, do they? Come on, I know they don’t happen. I know you haven’t found the secret room!
What’s the problem? The problem is that you have not put that first and foremost. YOU DO NOT HAVE A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION ABOUT IT. So you own the mansion and you’d rather play out in the front lawn, and have a picnic, or you’d rather sit inside and paint pictures. I’m talking, of course, about internal wastage of your energies.
Let’s do one good thing right now to locate the secret room, which exists in everyone of you. Right now, you will drop all thought. You won’t be thinking about the castle and you’ll simply, you can look around a little if you want. You just know where you are, and you might want to change your position a little bit as I’m doing. And now, we’re going slower, and we are more conscious than we were before (Vernon slows his speech down here). Thought has slowed down and you know you’re in this room and you can see the person next to you out of the corner of your eye. You have deliberately done something to detect the secret room.
The exercise I just gave you must be done all day long. Do it at unexpected times. DON’T WORK WHEN IT’S EASY! That expert became an expert by traveling all around the country, by doing hard work, by noticing how the craftsmen of 500 years ago concealed the rooms. He studied trickery. That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it? Internal trickery. How even when you’re confused, you won’t even see your confusion. To see confusion is the end of it.
All right, back to our man. He traveled all over Scotland, England, Wales. He studied every building until he began to understand how clever the craftsmen really were to hide the rooms. But he had his own mission. In this case, it was to earn a living and to bring to civilization all these artifacts and ancient spears and golden crusted cups that King Arthur used. He liked that too. He helped archaeologists.
What’s robbing you? I know what is robbing you. You are afraid to wake up! YOU FEAR WAKING UP! Why would you fear that? See, when you wake up, you have no daydreams. You don’t waste your time. Gentlemen, I will ask you, how many sex thoughts about that pretty girl have you had in the last month? Come on, to yourself. Sex thoughts, you know you see those girls. Now, next question, gentlemen. When are you going to sacrifice it so you can find the secret room? One or the other. You can’t have both! You can’t go into those daydreams of that beautiful girl coming into your bedroom and into your life. You’re going to have to give them up. If you don’t give them up, you won’t find the spiritual life.
Ah, ha! what’s been your choice so far? The beautiful daydreams. Ladies: you’ve got your own. You’re going to meet a man. He’s going to marry you so you won’t have to work anymore. And you won’t have so many financial problems, you think! He’s going to be one of the knights around the castle rescuing you. Don’t count on it. He can’t even afford a horse. (Laughter) Come on! Which have you chosen so far? Ladies and gentlemen, something has to go. It will be very painful for you to give up your wrong thoughts. I know it’s painful, but look. I’m going to help you. Just do it. Just do it and go through the emptiness. That beautiful girl you saw and she even smiled at you and you immediately write your own script of how she’s going to come knocking at your door. Break it the minute it tries to form itself in your mind. Break it right now. Oh, it’s going to hurt. DO IT! AND DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN, AND DO IT FIFTY TIMES A DAY.
This is called breaking the power of dark forces over your life. Exactly what you do when you go against that and say, “I WANT IT BUT I’M NOT GOING TO DO IT.” Not fifty times a day … 100 if you can manage it. Little by little, because of the law that God is stronger than Satan. In fact, there’s no contest. Little by little, the power of images to form in your mind will weaken and fade away. Little by little, but oh, how definite. And what will take its place is the NEW YOU, THE REAL YOU, THE NEW LIFE.
More and more, you’ll get to be spiritually excited! Look, you’ll be working when you fall into bed at night. You’ll be working to make sure the devil doesn’t creep in. All you want to do is find more secret rooms inside of you and there are hundreds of them, not just one. And every room, you understand the analogy of it, every room is a new insight, a new right excitement of seeing that you’ve cut yourself off from that evil human being that you used to be around all the time, and you even thought you liked him or her. Now you want nothing to do with him or her and you understand perfectly that this means that you’ve found one of the new rooms.
FINAL COUNSEL: Use what you’ve heard tonight to grow a little bit every day. You can’t take leaps and bounds just now. Later on you can. A little bit every day, but that doesn’t mean you work a little. That means you work all day long real hard. Sleeves rolled up. You work real hard all day long. The dark forces are not going to yield to you easily. They are not going to let you go easy. They are going to exert every force they have against you. You put every force you have by being connected with God against the dark forces, and you’ll see the law work which is that the devil must yield to God. Darkness must yield to light. -
Realize that using the word love does not make you loving any more than calling yourself a lump of sugar makes you one.
Talking is a thousand times easier than pondering, which is why the talkers overwhelm the earth.
Free yourself of the tyranny of believing in mere words.
There is nothing wrong with nothing happening in your life. See this and something worthwhile will happen.
You are definitely worried about something when it returns repeatedly to your mind.
Knowing that you are lost is exactly the same thing as sensing the way back home.
Lose something before you get it and you will not fear losing it.
Uncertainty is unsafe. Certainty is safe. Safe certainty is spiritual and invisible and is waiting for you to request it to take charge of your life.
Show me what you boast about and I will show you what you hate.
The most common person on earth is the one who causes trouble to other people in order to prop up his shaky and false existence. A rare and sane mind could never commit such evil.
Spiritual facts always sound harmonious. You just have untuned ears.
Only a clear understanding of time-thinking can free you from its folly. For example, an ambitious man can think about acquiring earthly power but he cannot think about finally losing it.
Count the number of enemies you have outside and that is the same number of enemies you have inside.
In a true man, spirit is the king and thought is the obedient servant. In a false man, thought is
the king and the spirit is considered an enemy.The higher power does not need your aid. End your vanity. The higher power seeks to tell you to stop trying to help both it and yourself, for this enables it to help you.
THINKING produces noisy and wrong action. SEEING allows silent and right action.
Did it ever occur to you that your inner kingdom is a sacred place? Now, what is the right attitude to have toward a sacred place?
You must establish a steadfast program for losing confidence in your very own words that you speak so abundantly and so smugly. Your abundant words have no real confidence in them at all — they are scared words.
When faced, a harmful fact can be changed, but you can do nothing with a suppressed delusion but suffer from it.
Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.
The stupidest reason for accepting something as being right is because you have always accepted it.
As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as
self-worship.Think how your life would be wondrously superior if you realized that truth is never absent from you.
Resurrection is a definite spiritual experience. It is something that HAPPENS to you. It happens when you no longer try to make things happen.
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When appearing as agents for social morality, they solemnly insist it is your moral duty to help others; then when you are betrayed by others, they sit back and laugh at your gullibility and stupidity.
They have violent hatred for any person or idea that is truly good and decent, and rejoice when goodness appears to be injured. They are evil, malignant, depraved, vicious, sick.
One prominent characteristic — an animal-like characteristic — is to secretly sneer at everyone, even those they claim to love.
They force you to pretend interest in some trivial event, in nonsensical solutions to life, then leave you exhausted.
They love to predict and talk about calamities, but never tell you that they cause them.
They disguise themselves as friends, helpers, neighbors, good people — then suddenly drop the role when they have used you for what they can get.
They give you bad advice for helping yourself and when you take it they accuse you of stupidity and claim you will never make it.
They hate you, consider you their permanent enemy.
They torment you with suspicion and then claim that the suspicion is helpful and necessary.
They cunningly promise you rich rewards for listening to them, then desert you to suffer alone with your false gains.
Their evil thrill depends upon your cooperation, for without your ignorant gullibility, they cannot exist.
They sneak evil thoughts into your mind and then threaten you with hell for having them.
They tell you to hate God and then say you are of the devil for doing so.
They insist that confusion is necessary and then demand that you try to prove otherwise.
They succeed in urging you to pass your torment onto others.
The last thing they want you to see is their lack of real power for they know that that would be their finish.
They tell you it is clever or heroic to behave in a certain way and then make you ashamed for doing so.
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You will be nervous and uncertain and afraid.
You will try to cover upyour nervousness by bluff and bluster and one lie after another.
You will be in a state of self-deception, a state which angrily refuses self-honesty.
You will be desperately eager to claim that other people, especially prominent authorities, support your false claims.
You will be unable to see the strain and the unnaturalness of believing that untruth is truth.
You will receive a neurotic thrill from the inward burning of your confusion.
You will have no hesitation in attacking and hurting anyone who threatens to expose your deceit.
You will be unaware that you are believing only what you want to believe, for your preferences for delusion has succeeded superbly.
You will be the self-chosen victim of repeated mental movies in which you see yourself as heroically right and everyone else as wrong.
You will refuse to see that the sense of doom you feel is caused by your own refusal of the light.
You will be inwardly tortured, while pretending outwardly to other people that you are free and happy.
You will continue to fall and get hurt unless you stop believing only what you want to believe, and have the courage and the decency to receive what is true and good.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOU AND ME
by Vernon Howard
You are as stubborn as a mule, but I am loyal to my noble beliefs.
You are a blabbermouth, but I am endlessly generous in contributing my wisdom to others.
You are pushy, but I take constructive initiative.
You are a shameless glutton, but I am a daring explorer in the world of food and drink.
You have cunning greed, but I have admirable ambition.
You express childish anger, but I firmly denounce all forms of injustice.
You are rude, but I am not afraid to say what I think.
You indulge in petty gossip, but I discuss other people in order to sympathize and help them.
You are lazy, but I possess relaxed patience.
You think the world owes you a living, but I wish only my rightful rewards so richly deserved.
You have an evil lust for power, but I have a natural talent for social leadership.
You nervously run from one foolishness to another, but I happily pursue many meaningful activities.