DO SOMETHING GOOD FOR YOURSELF

We can always do something good for ourselves and the evidence of that will now be presented.
Please just relax. Start with your physical self, your arms and maybe your jaw, and notice now
where you are unnecessarily tight and tense, then just let it drop. You see when you sit back and
relax, that makes you conscious of the tension and pointless anxiety that you had just three
seconds earlier. When you’re nervous you don’t know you’re nervous. You feel it but you don’t
know it. When you carry the burden of the world around, you don’t know that it’s on top of your
shoulders and head. All right, constantly throughout your day go through the little temporary
discomfort of deliberately allowing yourself to become comfortable.

A LITTLE SELF-HONESTY

It’s not shameful to be scared, it’s not shameful to be angry, these are states. What is shameful is
to refuse to admit it. Your body knows when you are angry, your voice knows when you’re afraid,
why can’t we simply say, “Look how astonishing, I’m far worse off than I ever believed I was. Well
what do you know.” Now with that honesty you have the facts on hand and you can then go on to
say, “You know there must be a lot more of those things in me, there must be a lot of pretense,
fakery, and there must be an awful lot of me that says I know when I really don’t because I have no
gold. Instead I’m carrying a sack of rocks around on my back and it’s pretty burdensome and pretty
painful.” See what a little self-honesty can do for a human being.

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February

GO THROUGH YOUR DAY WIDE AWAKE

I urge you to practice this one simple exercise in your own way, so that you do give yourself a jolt,
which is the revelation that if you think intelligently toward your problem, that intelligence has a
tendency to want to grow, to expand, become more powerful, and that’s exactly what it will do.
One of the beauties of the spiritual path is for you daily, not weekly, to go through your day wide
awake. Other people don’t know it. Gentlemen, you work among all those other men — they don’t
know that you picked up that tool box and carried it consciously from your car to the building where
you work, but you knew it.
Every day you will see yourself living in this secret, silent enormously healing atmosphere that
you have admitted inside yourself. Now, that gives you the inner happiness, the light and the
freedom. This world was made for you to enjoy.
2006

January

IN SPITE OF

Here’s your exercise. Pure spiritual magic will be given to you if you use it. When you get
dismayed over your lack of progress, over anything at all, when you want to leave and go away and
lose yourself in the excitement of this world, just use the in-spite-of technique. That means, in spite
of the depression, in spite of a feeling that I'm the world’s worst hypocrite, and if anybody knew
what I was really like, I’d sink through the floor in shame. You are to counter thoughts of
depression, gloom, dismay when they come up and try to take you over, by simply reminding
yourself, in spite of everything you can simply make your next move a spiritual one. You know over
the years you’ve been given lots of exercises. Let me suggest that you take a long piece of paper
and write at the top, “Spiritual Exercises.” Write those that mean the most to you, say up to twenty.
And in spite of everything, you will go to that exercise and do it, and I don’t care if you fail, if you get
carried away. I want you to consciously start going against wrong thoughts, experiences and
feelings. Also I want you to be quick, quick, quick.

DON’T DO BAD THINGS

This is an exercise for you to take out and think about. Whenever you put another person under
fear by screaming, attacking, slandering and lying, you have put yourself under fear. What you do to
others, you have already done to yourself. If you don’t want to be afraid anymore, you can’t do bad
things to others. Nobody will believe what I just said. I know it’s absolutely true. I know that
everyone is lost and that all lost people are so desperate that one way they get a sense of power of
their false role in front of an audience is to make another person scared. If you will have the
decency to no longer want to hurt another human being in any way at all, not with a frown, not with
a hard look, and if you will abandon and give up hurting anyone, that is a prayer to God Himself.

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February

WHAT AM I LIKE RIGHT NOW

 We’re going to be spiritual adventurers and dare to see whether there’s something else or not,
and I am here to tell you that there is, which you will witness for yourself. Here’s the method:
Dozens of times a day you will turn your attention inward and you will simply ask the question,
“What am I like right now?” Look at yourself and see if in some way you're tense or in an awkward
position. Then just go ahead and see how your knowledge of that makes you want to change it a
little bit and relax, and still be as attentive as you were before. You have made something
conscious that was unconscious. All you have to do is see it without commenting on it. Once you
see the state, don’t add anything to it. If you do, you're continuing the thought process, which will
then keep the state going and other things going too, which are equal or worse.

CONSIDER YOURSELF APART

I’m going to give you a spiritual exercise. Consider yourself living in this world doing exactly what
you’re doing now, working where you’re working, your family life, and consider yourself as being
something that is apart from the sickness, from all secret sorrows, from your inner surges of
jealousy and so on, wherever you see it, inside or out.

CONTACT HIGHER ENERGY

Here’s a way to get something new for yourself. At present you are only in contact with your own
intellect and not in contact with higher energy, which must be invited to act upon your present
nature. Let’s see if you pursue what you’ve been hearing tonight, by thinking about certain key
points, by taking them home with you, writing them down on paper, and saying, “I want to know
what that means.” Do this tomorrow and for the next twenty days.

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March

MATCH NEUROTIC BOLDNESS WITH SPIRITUAL BOLDNESS

Every time you notice the incredible neurotic boldness of lost people, I want you to match it with
your spiritual boldness. You see, right now, in your present false self you're afraid of nervy people.
While you sense there’s something wrong with them, the hard, screaming, neurotic woman — the
demanding man who has authority — you're afraid of them. From now on, you're going to notice
their neurotic nerve, and then you're going to remember that God is more powerful than that human
hyena.

LIVE FROM TRUTH AND NEVER BE HARMED AGAIN

 If you were to face every difficulty that you have inside of you, and if your inner world was one of
truth and reality, that outer world could never present problems to you of any kind, and that includes
piling the bills on top of you. Any problem whatever that might seem to come to you is stopped by
your understanding. There is in reality, no entity inside of you at all that can suffer, that can be
envious, that can be scared, that can go wrong in any way at all. How can falsehood harm truth.
Live from truth and you'll never be harmed again.

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April

NOTICE IMMORALITY IN CONVERSATION

This exercise is for you to notice how immoral people are in conversation. When you have a
choice in the matter, don’t put up with vulgarity, crude language, obscenity. The reason isn’t for you
to be a self-righteous hypocrite nor to condemn them, it’s for you to know that to be immoral is to
suffer terribly.

ASK YOURSELF, “WHAT AM I THINKING RIGHT NOW?”

Ask yourself all the time, “What am I thinking about right now?” Let’s say you're walking into the
office, you're walking through the park, or you're at home preparing lunch, turn your attention to
your mind. Be so attentive, you can know what you're thinking right now, and while you'll be thinking
practical thought about how to prepare the dinner or how to mow the lawn, you will also, with your
attentiveness, be able to distinguish between practical, useful and wasteful thought.

ASK YOURSELF, “AM I COMFORTABLE WITH MYSELF OR NOT?”

Try this exercise all next week. Ask yourself at any given moment, “Am I comfortable with myself
or not?” Tell the truth that you are uncomfortable and you don’t know why. See, already that’s good
progress because before you could blame someone else — what they did to me — which is for
cowards. You're not going to do that anymore because it’s taking you downhill.

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May
THE MOTIVE EXERCISE

This will be your exercise to do some time today. Write the word “motive” on a piece of paper and
in front of it put right words, such as true motive, spiritual motive, noble motive, self-healing motive.
Now you're using words correctly. The true motive is your power, call it your heart, the force, the
energy. This will reveal to you your actual motives, which you really want while saying you want
something else. The true motive will free you of all false ambitions, all false emotions, all false
strivings. Do the exercise and see that it is indeed the discovering of your false motives by the true
motive of wanting the higher that does indeed set you free.

KNOW WHEN YOU TURN ON AND TURN OFF A LIGHT SWITCH

Here’s a very simple and practical exercise, which I want you to do for the next twenty-four hours:
Whenever you turn on or turn off a light switch, know that you turned it on or off. Now, the first
thing that’s going to happen is that you think you can do it every time. You're in for a little surprise,
and you may be quite amused to find out that you're not as recollecting as you thought you were.
The first thing you'll discover is that you can’t be aware of it. This exercise will under its own power
and momentum spread itself to other parts of you, for instance, the simple act of physical
awareness, of noticing that your hand reached out and flipped the switch. This tends to send a
message to your mind and emotions, so that you now begin to be and understand what it means to
be a self-aware person.

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June

SET YOURSELF FREE FROM OTHERS

This exercise I'm going to give you will cover every wrong situation you have with a human being
who has deceived you in the past, and who hopes to exploit you in the future. Oh how beautiful it is,
and I want you to work with it over the next ten years if necessary until you get it.
When you're in association with any human being, I want you to look at that person and when you
see that he’s a deceiver, that she is all wrong for you, I want you to set yourself free from him or her
and everyone else like that by saying the following silently to yourself: “Since you have refused your
responsibility for spiritual development, I am free of you. Since you absolutely refuse to turn your
attention toward what is good, lofty and decent, I am free of you because I want what is right.”
Talk about relief, talk about release from feeling that you owe other people something. Oh, how
nice to know that all you have to do is choose what is true for you, then you can look at that man,
that woman and that group, and if they don’t want what you want, you want nothing to do with them,
and God Himself says, you must absolutely do this.
SELF-TEACHING

See the difference between unhealthy self-entertainment and healthy self-teaching. Unhealthy
self-entertainment consists of you enjoying your all-around troubled life regardless of how
unpleasant it might be. Self-teaching is another thing, quite a different process and a very healthy
and constructive one that you must think about in the right way in order to be able to do it.
Self-teaching starts with you asking yourself, “What makes my life unfold the way it does?, What
makes me do what I do?” and similar questions like that so you can discover the real basic source
of your own self-harm. It also means that you will begin to have a good feeling about yourself.

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July

MAKE YOUR PERSONAL DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

Right now, make your personal declaration of independence. I don’t care how wobbly it is, how
little you understand what you're saying, I want you to actually say, “I declare my independence
from all that hurts me.” There is nothing that prevents you from doing that right now, so I'm going to
pause in a second or two and allow you to say that to yourself. You have done something that is a
small but definite breakthrough, that’s what we want.

MAKE THE DECISION TO GET YOUR LIFE BACK

Make the decision each one of you that you want to get your life back. God alone can help you to
make that decision. Your old nature sure isn’t going to help you. It wants to keep you exactly where
you are. God, Truth, Reality is the only power that can help any human being.

USE A CRISIS PROPERLY

Use a crisis properly by facing it, by not wanting it to be a crisis and not enjoying it. But most of all
any crisis that you have from now on, in order to grow, do just one thing — become a student again.
You do that the next time you have a crisis and watch how the crisis disappears because your
crisis-creating machinery inside of you disappears. Just say, “I think I’ll start all over. I think I’ll just
become a student and listen very carefully to the lessons wherever I get them — out in the world, in
this class or reading a book.” You will feel really good, I guarantee you because you will know that
you're in a right state, and you know you're now going to get higher lessons, and that’s what finally
causes the gate to swing open and you enter the higher world.

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August

WATCH WHAT STEALS YOUR ATTENTION

A spiritual teacher told his students that they were being robbed every day. Something was being
stolen from them, and they were to find out what it was. So they went about their business for
several days and they came back and told the teacher, “Nothing’s being stolen from me. Nobody
steals my money, nobody steals the parts off my car when I park it out there. I don’t understand
what you mean that something is being stolen.” The teacher explained, “Your attention is being
stolen all the time! The news item steals you away, doesn’t it, and you go back to wanting to be
worried over what’s going to happen to the world, because you say that you're in this world. I tell
you, you're not! You have nothing to be worried about.” The students understood and gave more
attention after that.

THE THREE WAYS THE MIND OPERATES

There are three ways the human mind operates. See which one of the following three fits you:

* Firstly, you have a mind in which one wrong thought follows another wrong thought.
* Secondly, you have a mind in which one wrong thought is followed by a right thought.
* Thirdly, you have a mind in which one right thought is followed by another right thought.
You're not in this one yet, are you?

The first classification is that of one wrong self-punishing, uncomfortable thought following
another uncomfortable thought, one after another.
The second classification is the one we’re interested in where one wrong thought is followed by a
right thought. For example, you have a bitter thought, and then you understand that it is
self-punishing, that’s a right thought. Right between the wrong thought and the right thought you
say a very large NO.
After long, long practice, you will find out that when you start to say “NO” to wrong thoughts, a
most astonishing thing happens, which is that the NO is not being said by you any more. You
started it because you understood intellectually that you have to get away from your old nature. And
you practiced it and you yielded yourself to Truth. Then after a while you hear not yourself saying
NO but Truth itself which has taken over your life, taken over your mind, taken over your spirit.
Can you understand the beauty I am talking about, that something other than you is now living
your life for you and something other than you is saying NO to all wrongness and all punishment.
Want to find out for yourself if it’s true? Then follow all the principles that we’re talking about here.

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September
PURE SPIRIT, PURE MEMORY, IMPURE MEMORY

There is a scientific way in which we can pursue this subject of anxiety, a spiritually scientific way
in three steps.

* When you live and speak in pure spirit there can be no anxiety, that’s step one.
* Also when you live, speak and feel from pure memory, there can be no anxiety, that’s step
two.
* When you live from impure memory, there is endless haunting anxiety, that’s step three.

When you're living from pure memory there can be no anxiety. Let’s see what that means. Pure
memory means that you see the fact of anything past or present without you as a self-created
identity being involved. This means that no matter what fact you see, whether it’s in your own past,
you do not connect it with yourself because you understand the folly, the uselessness of
perpetuating yourself by connecting it with memory and saying, “Because I was treated badly many
years ago, I have a right to be resentful and accusatory,” and so on. Pure memory is extremely
beneficial, practical and useful. But the minute you connect yourself with it, bring a false identity into
it, you have wrecked pure memory, and now you're in the third stage of impure memory, which
means that you're not thinking at all from Spirit or from pure memory.

PURE SPIRIT, PURE MEMORY, IMPURE MEMORY

Come on, do a little work, how many times did you fight today, how many mental scenes went
through your mind in which you pictured someone with whom you were fighting? One bright day, I’ll
tell you exactly what will happen to you. All of a sudden you catch yourself right in the middle of
telling that boss off, of yelling at the girlfriend who offended you, and it occurs to you in a flash of
light, where you have been and you call yourself back home. At that split second the mental movie
breaks. You know that you are walking down the street, or you know you are approaching the café,
you know exactly what you are doing now because you are no longer lost in your own mind and
creating these scenes.

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October

THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF TRUTH

Here’s an exercise. Oh, you have to work, you can’t play, you have to work hard at it but it’s fun
work. Say to yourself starting right now and over the next several months a very simple statement,
“I really don’t know who I am.” Now the first thousand times you say that, it won’t mean a thing to
you. You’ll just be saying it mechanically on the level of the intellect. There’s no penetration yet of
that truth because you're so frantically eager to hang on to all these precious identities, and if you
hang on to those you're saying “I do know who I am. I'm someone who deserves a lot better breaks
than I ever had, I'm someone who deserves the raise or the promotion.”
Ah, but you're earnest, you're sincere about this and after a thousand times, when you say, “I
really don’t know who I am,” but wanting in your heart to know what it means, then something will
happen that is absolutely a new and true experience for you. You'll understand for example that you
do have switching personalities, you'll understand how easily you can put on your mask and
costume and go around pretending that you're this or that kind of person, which just wears you out.
You don’t have to live that way. Will you please get out of your mind that success consists
according to society’s standards, it doesn’t. Which would you rather be, successful in society’s eyes
and be sick and miserable, or to be a very quiet, inwardly, spiritually successful human being who
has seen through all your former follies?
The bright light of truth is right here in this room and if you listen to it, you will finally know that you
can take the light out of this room wherever you go because you understand that it’s your light and
it’s not out of the mind, it’s not out of imagination. You will know that that light itself has made you a
different kind of a man or woman, and that new nature that you have acquired through listening to
the Truth, that new nature is forever.

BECOME AWARE OF YOUR TALKING

Here’s your exercise, effective as of now, in all your conversations anywhere, anytime with
anyone, you're to see how you're losing an opportunity to have the light shine on you and inside you
by deliberately, mechanically jumping into the flood of your own blabbermouthery and just talking as
you always have talked without knowing that you're doing so. Please put a block in the way of your
usual speech manners, which will give you a jolt. Let’s say at the end of one minute the jolt comes,
and you're talking unconsciously, just stop, look at the other person and end the conversation right
there.

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November

SWITCH TO THE HIGHER WORLD

Here’s your exercise: Please write down Switch to the Higher World. This means that you now
have an authentic spiritual aim. It involves self-work, self-honesty, a self-wish to rise above yourself.
To switch to the higher world means to abandon the lower world. It means you want to be on higher
ground, and that you first recognize where you were, recognize what your thoughts are thinking all
day long, look at them, examine them, catch yourself going into hostility, into depression, into
moodiness.
Switch to the Higher World will become a very real and practical exercise. Start with doing it once,
then you'll want to do it twice, three times, and you'll want nothing more than to go through your
whole twenty-four hours seeing yourself in the wrong place and realizing you must switch to the
Higher World.

STOP BLAMING ANYONE

 Will you simply say to yourself as a spiritual exercise, “Never, never again will I blame anyone for
anything.” That includes Papa of twenty years ago, Mama of five or thirty years ago. They’ve still got
you unfortunately. Also, the ex-wife, ex-husband — stop blaming and lacerating yourself so that
now you can think about how mean and stupid you are, and thereby keep a false identity going.
You are either building your false identity, which is tormenting you, or you’re dissolving it through
spiritual insight, one or the other, you can’t have both.

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December

START YOUR DAY RIGHT

When you start the day, have the right wish to understand thoroughly, those events and those
people that you are going to meet during the day and want to handle them casually, efficiently, and
with a certainty that something higher than you is doing the work.

STOP THE RACKET

Part of you says, “I want out of the wilderness,” but another part says, “stay where you can be
you, where you can be the center of your own attention.” One ear wants to hear and one doesn’t
want to hear, and you’re caught in the conflict. The question is, how willing are you to stop making a
racket? My instruction for you today as an exercise is to catch yourself a minimum of ten times
making noise because the silence of your isolation is so terrifying. For instance the noise of the
hostile thought toward the other shopper who got in line before you did or the regret over a lost
opportunity. You don’t have to be so noisily going around trying to get anything from anyone. You
can stop.

INTERRUPT YOUR THOUGHTS

Here’s a special exercise: From this moment on and then forevermore of course, you will interrupt
your thought and know where you are and what you're doing at the moment you're doing it. This is
the only thing that’s going to snap you awake. When you're not in practical thought, don’t go into a
negative self-defeating thought. Be in a state of either practical thought or consciousness and
awareness. Work hard.
2005

January

COME TO MY SENSES SESSION

This exercise is called “Come to My Senses Session.” Get off by yourself, sit down, and here’s
how the session goes: First of all, become quite clear in your mind what happened to you; the
quarrel with someone, that idiotic letter you wrote and you wish you could get it out of the mailbox
but it’s too late, the idiotic spending of your money. You fill in what you did — that’s point one. Then
the second part is, ask yourself, “Why did I fall asleep so that it happened in the first place?” “Why
did I fall asleep,” that’s a good phrase because you were in a state of psychic sleep when you wrote
the letter and mailed it, when you went into your love of the disturbance inside you, and you just
love being mangled by yourself.
Come to your senses, come to your spiritual senses, that would be very valuable for you in so
many ways. For example, there’s a certain false pleasure in whipping yourself, in catching yourself
in a defeat, and then shaming yourself or screaming out, “How could I have been so dumb?”
When you sit down on the couch and come to your senses with very quiet reflection of it, that
interrupts your false pleasure of psychic masochism, that is of punishing yourself. Just sit there
quietly and see what happens, which will be that right thoughts will have a chance, an opportunity to
penetrate your mind and they will tell you what is the right thing to do. Simply the right thing to do is
to never, ever do anything from your thought self.

PETTY ANNOYANCE TO OTHERS

I want you to see as a daily exercise what a petty annoyance you are to other people. You can’t
see the big ones yet. Go for the little ones. If you interrupt them when they're talking, that’s called
being rude, and you didn’t know you were rude, did you? Now I want all of you to make a long list of
how you are a petty annoyance to other people. For example, write down, “Sour face and manner.”
Can you take what I’ve just said and practice it?

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February

SEPARATE USEFUL AND USELESS THOUGHTS

 Be like the watchman in the night — at home, wherever you are, right in this room, you're going to
be a watcher of what you think, of what you feel, and watch your attitudes toward the world, toward
yourself. Then you're going to start separating useful from useless thoughts. Be extremely firm,
absolutely honest with yourself. You have to identify immediately a useless, terrifying thought when
you see one. All you have to do is recognize it. You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to
explain it. You just have to know that it went through your mind and then have the spiritual courage
to let it fall away.

STOP BEING A SCATTERBRAIN

Notice how your mind flits from one subject to another inside yourself and within one hour it can
go to dozens of subjects, even hundreds. You think about something, which will always
unfortunately be related to your false nature, your false self, and you'll say, “That’s something I can
think about for a little bit.” Then that fades out. “Well, then there’s something else I can think about.”
You don’t have to think that way at all. You can be what is known as a conscious, awake human
being, who when you think, you think only “That I should peel the potatoes before I cook them.” Or,
“I should drive my car a little more careful because the street is wet today. I will slow down.” That is
the only kind of thinking you do, in which there is no egotistical self-reference at all.

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March

THIS IS IT!

Your exercise is as follows: You will keep a sign up in your mind that says, “This is it!”
exclamation point. Then when you go out into the world and meet events, people, situations, with
that sign flying high inside you, it will remind you that the Truth is all-powerful over all events,
situations, people.
I guarantee you if you keep that flag flying high, all so-called problems, obstacles,
problem-people, difficulties, feeling bad, all that must crumble before your spiritual knowledge.
If “This is it!” what else is there? Nothing that has power at all, and by knowing that “This is it!” you
will prove it because God Himself will always prove His power to anyone who will let him.

STAY WITH IT

Practice this exercise. The next time you are confused about an inner matter, about a spiritual
matter, for example you don’t know what you're supposed to be doing with your life, I want you to
remain with that confusion instead of trying to do something about it. If you try to do something
about your confusion, that’s confusion trying to manage confusion.
 Do nothing about the inner fog but simply watch it as it operates, and if your heart is right, if you
don’t want to live in inner fog anymore, when you refuse to push it away, then the fog will dissolve
of itself because you have invited something that is higher than your nature to come in and turn on
the light and it will happen.

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April

ENTER THE BATTLE

I want to tell you, all of you personally, what you have to do. You have to go a lot farther than you
have. You have to enter the battlefield fully, not stay away from it. And what you don’t understand is
that, if you will make one, even a small, tiny decision to be more receptive to the voice of Truth, to
turn up the volume, if you will make the decision to hear more, Truth is what gives you that
increased spiritual hearing to hear and understand the voice that is trying to tell you that you're
doing the altogether wrong thing with your life, that all the social rewards are nothing.

REQUESTS TO HEAVEN

I want all of you to make requests to Heaven in a new way. Don’t complicate it. “Truth, God,
Heaven, I don’t understand you but I do know that I need help to shed myself of myself.” Your
prayer will be answered but you have to cooperate by staying in touch with Truth, not once a year,
not once every five years but all the time. We’ll teach you how to do that.

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May

PUT YOURSELF IN ANOTHER PERSON’S PLACE

Here’s the exercise: You're to select almost any person that you're with at least now and then,
and you are to put yourself in that other person’s place. You're to think as the other person thinks,
you're to see that man’s anger, you're to see that woman’s sadness. You are to go against this
self-enthronement of your own thoughts, in which you are always churning in self-reference. Now
what’s the purpose of this? The purpose is to break down your unconscious belief that you are the
only one who counts.
Gradually and slowly it will occur to you that self-centeredness is the life of everyone. I’ll talk to
the men now. One day gentlemen, when you have worked diligently on this exercise of putting
yourself in the other person’s place and seeing things as he does, one day when you're just about
to cause pain to that woman in your life, you won’t be able to do it.
You'll be tempted again, because the force of habit of you yelling at her or making the sarcastic
reply, that habit is so powerful, it will come up even after you've studied these principles for a long
time but all of a sudden, something new happens. You look at that woman and you no longer take
pleasure in her pain, you no longer take pleasure in you being a neurotic, vicious human being who
causes pain. There is no longer any evil fun in it for you. You're beginning to see now what it means
that God is all. God is all that is decent and good.

ROB YOURSELF OF FALSE REWARDS

You're instructed to see how you're observing other people’s faces, so that you can figure out
whether they like you, whether they’re mad at you, or if they laugh then you laugh too even if you
don’t hear the joke. You're always taking your cue, your course of action, stealing it and stealing
junk, from what the other person has on his face.
Here’s how to stop it. Watch before darkness creeps up and grabs you. This means that if you're
with people, talking about something, and you remember what I told you about you always studying
another person’s face to see what you should do, and just at that moment your head starts to turn
over to that person of the opposite sex to see if she appreciates your greatness and all that. The
minute your head starts to turn, you will triply remember what I told you, and you will stop and
deliberately rob yourself of a false reward.

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June

STOP THINKING TRIVIALITIES

Among the lessons you will learn is that you always, this is so simple and clear, you always just
go around thinking about the wrong things. Your mind is occupied with trivialities, you think about
things that are unnecessary for you to think about. You go into fantastic detail over the smallest
subject and keep your mind grinding along all the time, not knowing that you have abandoned the
control, the higher control of your mind that you could have had.
Your first work project for this talk is to write down on a slip of paper and remind yourself
repeatedly that practically all the time you are thinking about the wrong things. You're wasting your
energy. The shock of seeing that you're throwing away mental money, life money, will slow you
down and finally stop you from throwing it away any more. Now, don’t forget this exercise over the
days, just stop your daze in the days and look at what your mind is doing, and inquire why it is
doing that?

KNOW WHERE YOU ARE

Exercise: I want you to know that you're here first of all physically in this room. Visual sight is a
part of it. That’s the elementary. Know that you're here in the room. You can see straight ahead.
You're looking at me now. You can see out of the corner of your eyes the person next to you.
Where are your hands — legs crossed, not crossed, physical posture?
Now to know where you are means much more than know the physical self. It means you know
what you're thinking right now, you know what you're feeling right now. I am here. When you're
able, and you are able, to put yourself in the position of knowing you are here, then nothing outside
of you has the smallest chance to interfere into your right world and disturb it. When you spiritually
know I am here, that’s the only world.

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July

A SPIRITUAL KNOWING

There’s a chance for a few people to learn how to stop loving the hot, stormy desert out there.
And the way to do that is to stop loving the habitual reactions and thoughts and beliefs that you now
think give you security.
Here’s an exercise for you to practice right now. Look inside yourself and notice how insecure and
unhappy you are. The day can come when you'll be able to go through your day with a quietness,
with a conquest, with a reality, with a confidence, with a knowledge, that nothing, nothing anywhere,
any place, of any nature can ever take away. It will be permanent, you will know, really know, a
spiritual knowing, not an intellectual one, you will know that you have made it because you allowed
God to make it for you.

RELEASE SOMETHING NEW

Your spiritual exercise will consist of understanding what it means to release something new
instead of employ something old. You know what the old is. The old is everything that is now with
you with the one little exception of your tiny but marvelously bright intention to wake up. That is
never part of the old, it’s never part of time, it’s always fresh and it’s what brings you back to every
class. That’s what keeps you here when you feel insulted or hurt inside because you have at least a
beginning idea of what self-release means. It means release of the Spirit of Liberty, the Spirit of
Truth, which then does all the work of liberating you from all your self-harming behavior.

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August

DON’T JUSTIFY BAD BEHAVIOR

 As an exercise, notice how you always justify your bad behavior toward another person, but you
don’t know you justify it. Catch yourself red-handed in the act of saying something that sounds good
to you, to your old nature, and you may even think you're impressing the other person that you're a
decisive man who knows what he’s doing and doing what’s right. It’s a very sad state.
From now on in your inner-spiritual work, you will give special attention to your critical spirit, which
likes to launch itself out against anyone when you feel a little disturbed.
Don’t you want to start immediately to see when you criticize someone, where you are speaking
from an image, a picture, a belief? You're speaking from that instead of remaining silent in the face
of what seems to be a problem. If you had no self-images at all, you would be a safe, secure, good,
free spiritual human being.

BECOME INVISIBLE

From now on, wherever you are, you're to become invisible so that nobody pays any attention to
you. Let’s say you're in a group, you're not going to talk, you're not going to gesture, you're not
going to attract attention to yourself at all. This, by the way, is proper self-thinking because the aim,
the purpose, the conscious motivation is to get rid of this unseen little self that always wants to
attract attention and be the center of things. The reason you should do this exercise is because the
only thing you ever suffer from is you.

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September

TV EXERCISE

This exercise will tell you how to make rapid and real progress toward liberating yourself from
yourself, which you already sense is the only sensible thing to do with your life on this earth. What
do you do for entertainment? Let’s take television. Maybe it’s a pretty exciting show and it relaxes
your mind for a while, which is good and fine. Then the commercial comes on. Will you please note
carefully what happens to you at the moment the action fades out.
If you will do this simple exercise, you will see how you have invested your life, your time, and
your happiness, in the moving pictures, stories, dialogues and actions in front of you, and blocked
out your aching heart. Notice very carefully the moment the screen goes blank ready for the
commercial, you're already up heading for the refrigerator (laughter), “because if the movie can’t
continue to make me happy, that strawberry sundae is a pretty good substitute for now.” This
exercise is for you to catch yourself playing hooky all the time. You're not going to do that anymore.

DISSOLVE EMBARRASSMENT

Let’s say you have a picture of yourself as being competent, wise or strong, and something
comes along to disprove it and you're embarrassed. You're embarrassed, of course, only because
you had the self-image to begin with. Where there’s no image, there can be no embarrassment.
Here is the specific way in which you are going to learn to dissolve the continuity of the false
feeling of embarrassment. You will say and you will realize the following statement: “I am new now.”
Seeing it is the fact. If you see it, the fact will transform you and capsule the time area in which the
embarrassed feeling dwells.

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October

CHOOSE RIGHTNESS — REJECT WRONGNESS

Follow carefully, here’s a man or a woman, here’s you, and you have forgotten that you have from
God Himself the power to choose what is right and the power to reject what is wrong. In simple
words, you can accept goodness and reject evil, you can accept health and push away spiritual
illness in favor of spiritual health. Why don’t you exercise that right?

ASK FOR HIGHER HELP

If you're hoping that that new relationship is going to lift you up and finally get you back from the
stormy sea, right in the middle of that you catch yourself building that fantasy castle. Gentlemen,
you see the pretty girl and you imagine her walking over to you and smiling, right in the middle of
that you're going to give yourself what is known as conscious suffering, because it is intense
suffering to give up your false life, the dangerous toy-filled life. You will deliberately sacrifice that
fantasy thought about the girl smiling and, even if you can’t give it up say, “Heaven help me to give
it up.” Heaven will help you.

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November

BE WILLING TO BE WILLING

I’d like you to remember a certain phrase, study it, think about it, and it will be an entrance for
you into something else. That phrase is while you are presently not willing to solve your problems
and to rise above yourself, it is possible for you to be willing to be willing. You can start by saying,
“All right, I don’t know what it’s all about, I don’t even know what you are talking about, but there’s a
part in me that’s willing to be willing to understand. Now I don’t understand, but I'm tired of paying
the price of my own folly, my own stubbornness.” Maybe you should say the following sentence
about a dozen times a day, “I'm tired of being scared, so I'm willing to be willing.”

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT INNER DEVELOPMENT

I want to give you an exercise now, and I’ll introduce it by telling you that there is also such a thing
as positive associative thought, a series of right thoughts one after another. You think one right
thought and it sets up another right thought, that’s good, that’s using your mind properly, and is the
gateway to the spiritual life. Your mind must work right and then the spirit will come in and guide it
even more.
At the top of a blank piece of paper, write “Everything I Know about Inner Development.” Number
them and one sentence only for each number. You could start by writing, “I don’t know much about
it,” then you add everything that comes to you about it, such as “I must fall out of love with my sour
moods.” Now as you add what you know and you've come to the capacity of what you know, there
is a right tendency for more knowledge to come to you. I invite you to try that simple principle for
yourself. Write down as few or as many as you can, then read them over again, ponder, investigate,
and think about them. You will see that all of a sudden a new thought, a new way of saying
something, a new revelation, a new idea has come to you to add to the list.
The main point is seeing how starting somewhere in the right way will continue the rightness
flowing.

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December

INTERRUPT FALSE PLEASURE

Here’s your exercise: In the middle of all your good times, all your pleasures, all your jubilant
moods, I instruct you and this instruction is coming straight from Heaven, to interrupt your so-called
pleasure so that you can catch a glimpse of the weak, self-abandoned person that you really are.

MORE PLEASE OF WHATEVER I NEED

This exercise is to send your own message out into the Universe that goes something like this:
More please of whatever I need. You don’t even know what you need, and you don’t even have to
know who you're talking to — just be sure it’s not yourself. If you send that request out into the
Universe, “More please of whatever I need,” someone is listening, a friend is listening. Never mind if
you don’t understand it. You do it and the understanding comes later.

STOP BEING TIMID

 The exercise is from now on when you pass anyone, you're going to know you're passing them.
You can look at them if you want, maybe you speak, maybe you don’t, but you're going to be in
charge of yourself instead of being timid. You won’t have to sacrifice yourself by worrying about, for
example, the impression you're going to make or whether you should speak or not. Be in charge of
your own nature, which Truth will do for you and you won’t have any problem with any human being
on earth.

2004

January

LOOK UP

“Do this exercise please. It will take you time to get it, but repeat it over and over. Something
bothers you such as a remembrance of a shameful thing, a confusion; instead of trying to think your
way out of that difficulty, whatever it is, you’re going to remind yourself to look up and even do it
physically by raising your head. This is a cooperation between the mental and the physical and
that’s good. Now you’ve got two parts of you working for you. Look up is both a symbolic and
spiritual reminder for you to go to the higher world instead of staying where you are. Simple as it is,
it will be very effective for you. All the little parts will come together, and it will be quite clear to you
what self-salvation means.”

RISE ABOVE HURTING OTHERS

“Write down on a piece of paper, “Where and how do I love to hurt people?” I know some of you
may not even want to do that because even that is too much for your vanity, for your self-image,
that you can never hurt anyone. That woman on the phone who didn’t handle that business matter
as promptly as you wanted it to be, and you know that all you have to do is to make a sarcastic
remark and hang up and you’ve got your revenge and you left her with your negative vibrations.
Can you think of anything more neurotic or more self-destructive than liking to injure another
person, making him feel bad by the look, by the snarl, by the scowl? Why would anyone do that?
Very simple, because the individual has refused to see that it’s not necessary and has refused to
rise above himself.”

WATCH YOUR MIND

“In the middle of any day, sit on your couch and watch your mind operate and see that there is
nothing you can do about it. That is where you get the knowledge that you can’t turn yourself off.
Just see that your mind is churning and you can do nothing about it. ”

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February

AWAKENING JOLT

“From now on, you will realize that you go from a practical thought such as fixing the lunch or
answering the door, to a state in which you're not even thinking about anything practical. You're in
nowhere; nothing good is happening and now you are in dreadful danger. Now, listen to what I'm
going to say next. Only when you are spiritually alert are you safe. You could have, from the few
steps from the kitchen to the door, as a diligent student of higher truth, turned away from the lunch
because you don’t have to think about that now and you are going to think about the door when you
get to it.
During that few yards between the two, you could have given yourself an awakening jolt. You
could have done it physically. I straightened my shoulders up as an illustration. Stand up straight,
walk up straight, and you could have noticed your arms dangling, going back and forth as they do
when you walk. You could have looked around the room, noticed the bird that flew right by the
window as you went by. You could have been physically aware and spiritually aware at the same
time.”

STAY HOME

“Here’s your exercise. Write down the ten most common spiritual facts you know including, “I take
myself with me wherever I go.” Start with that one. Now realize that you wrote it on a piece of paper
and you can read the words in English, “I take myself with me wherever I go,” but understand that
that’s as far as it goes. Your understanding is of the words and without the experience, because if
you did understand that you take yourself wherever you go, you'd stop going places. You'd stay
home.

WONDERFUL ENDLESS SELF-DISCOVERY

“I'm going to put this as a question. What happens when you get out of bed in the morning? What
should happen when your feet touch the floor for the first time, or even before that, is that you know
you got out of bed. You know you're walking into the next room. You know you're turning on the
water to make the tea or the coffee. That is the glorious spirit of endless self-discovery.”

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March
THE HIGHER LIFE

“Your exercise is to make first the determination that you're going to keep your mind on high
things, on truly good things, and you know what they are. In your heart, you know. And then you're
going to see how easily the evil influences can come up and take your attention away from you
reviewing what happened to you today. You could have been reviewing some little incident that you
didn’t understand that you want to understand, maybe a disappointment, an envy. See how you're
being tricked, how your attention is being stolen.”

SAY ‘NO’ TO FEAR

“Will you please triple this simple exercise during the day of seeing how you have yielded to a fear
impulse instead of calling up your treasure chest of spiritual facts, which could chase the fear away.
Time to go back to the simplest exercises you can think of: “I am not going to be intimidated again
by any kind of darkness. It’s had its way with me long enough.”
Take paper and pencil and write down more battle cries of freedom that occur to you, and certain
ones will be triply meaningful to you. And when you get these sudden stronger surges of rightness,
hang onto them. Underline: “It’s time I said no, even if I don’t fully understand what I'm talking
about.” You are talking about choosing one little candlelight of light, knowing that it’s only one little
candlelight, but you can use that to put it into the darkness and another candle will appear and
more and more all the time.”

BE AWARE OF PHYSICAL MOVEMENTS

“You're to follow the instructions I am about to give you. Effective as of right now you are to
notice, be aware, of every small or large physical movement that you make — no exceptions.
It is not, of course, necessary to go through all your days noticing every little physical movement
because those are mechanical things and they can be unconscious because they belong to the
mechanical part of you. This exercise will make you conscious of the mechanical. You'll see for the
first time that you made all sorts of little movements that went on in the dark.”

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April

MAKE CONTACT
 “Your life, your existence as a human being on this earth is astonishingly simple and I want you to
discover that simplicity. I want you to know how easy and how marvelous your day can be. And to
help you make this discovery, I want to review something that you know intellectually but I want you
to feel, to see the New World, to explore it.
All you really need on this earth is enough food, shelter, physical freedom to walk around, and a
little recreation. The basics of life are all you really need to be happy with the one exception of
finding something that is higher than this world’s satisfaction.
You don’t have to be anyone but someone who wants to make contact with the Creator, the
Author of the whole universe.”

FAVORITE TEACHER

“Let’s go back to school days, and your first spiritual exercise is to think of the name and face of
any favorite teacher. You sensed that he or she was fundamentally a nice person. Now, can you
see the difference in what you just did by instruction and the way you usually think? I told you to
deliberately, as an exercise, to consciously do something with your mind. Now, that’s altogether
different from the way your mind usually operates.
Over the years you have no doubt thought and seen in your mind the face of that teacher, but you
didn’t know what you were thinking at the time it happened. There was the thought without any
awareness, consciousness, knowledge of the thought. Can you see the difference in the two? Do it
once more. I not only want you to think of the face and name of that nice teacher that you had, but I
want another part of you to be in operation. I want you, at the same time you're thinking of the
teacher, to know that you’re thinking about him. You can do it.
The more you practice the exercise of watching your thoughts, the more valuable it will be to you,
because the difference between unconscious thinking and thinking with a definite conscious
purpose will become clearer to you, and you’ll want to make thought-watching twenty-four hours of
the day one of your favorite teachers.”

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May

THE “I AM NOT” EXERCISE

“I want you to practice the “I am not” method. Write that down please. The “I am not” exercise is
very simple, and you'll be working on it for many years.
I am not my name, I am not my success, I am not my failure, I am not my hopes, I am not my
words, I am not my thoughts. I am not anything that I’ve been counting on to make me feel good
and do good. I am not anything that my intellect can conceive. I am none of those. I am not my
clever little tricks for impressing people with the way I dress, the way I talk, how eloquently I conduct
myself. When I see that I am none of those, I will understand that they have nothing true to give
me.”
BE INNOCENT INWARDLY

“This exercise is to be conscious of how your face attracts wrong comments from others. It’s
better to have the experience, but there are words to describe it, such as poise, being calm, but
most of all it’s called being innocent inwardly. When you are innocent inwardly, that innocence will
show on your face. People will recognize it, not because they recognize innocence so much, but
they recognize the absence of hostility, fear and nervousness.”

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June

STUDY EVERYONE YOU MEET

“This is your exercise. You're to make a study of everyone you meet when you go out of this
room. You're going to stand back, not in criticism of them, not in superiority, but in pure observation
of what they are like and then, of course, see the same thing in yourself. You're to see that
wretched man who, when he talks to you, he doesn’t even know he’s talking to you. Notice he’s
talking to tell you about himself, how happy he is, how successful, how tomorrow is going to be
better and brilliant. And you're to be shocked because you are seeing everyone out there as they
really are for the first time.”

QUIETLY LISTEN AND WATCH

“Your exercise for the week: While talking with other people, go through the terrible pain of not
doing all the talking. Just quietly listen and watch. You're going to be a quiet, composed, passive
watcher of anyone else with whom you talk, and you're going to see that all they’re interested in is
their talk. If you will go through the pain of not talking, the time will come when you'll see that you're
an undeveloped human being. Promise that you will do this exercise throughout the weeks and
months and years until the new experience comes to you, which is the realization that you are
always talking.”

BREAK FALSE DEPENDENCY

“For today’s exercise, you're to break at least one little false dependency that you have on
someone else. You are never again from this day and onward to look at another person and hope
that he is strong, wish that she is the answer to your prayer.
Please think of the word ‘self-transformation.’ It is only the transformed self, the enlightened
nature, that you can fall back on with safety and with authentic progress.”
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July

WHO AM I TALKING ABOUT?

“This exercise is called, “Who am I talking about?” Small variation, “Who am I thinking about?”
Another variation, “Who am I feeling about?”
I'm always saying I, me and mine and I never once pause to ask myself, “Who is this person that
I’ve been talking about, the person that I’ve been so eager to save but never gets saved?” Of
course, the basket full of self-descriptions is the opposite of salvation. It’s degradation, it’s sorrow, it
keeps the individual wandering in the wilderness of his own made-up versions of himself.
So now you know how to get tough. You have a start for getting tough on what’s been tough on
you. You can catch anything whatever that leads you into saying “I.” It really is as simple as that.
That’s the knowledge. Now you have to go into action with the knowledge.”

NO EXCEPTION!

“Here’s your work project: You're to be very alert to the next time you feel afraid, feel nervous, feel
left out of something, feel that you're not going to make it, feel that you're a permanent weakling — I
said anything.
Now, don’t you dare make an exception to that, and I’ll tell you, oh, the new jungles that you'll find
around you. You conquer one jungle and there’s another jungle there. You conquer another with a
different kind of animal, and on and on you go, but now you're confident, no not confident, it’s more
than that, confidence is there, but you have absolute knowledge from the Spirit of Heaven itself, that
you are victorious. You don’t have to be afraid. You got rid of the nature that used to be afraid by
exploring it and it went away.”

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August

HAVE A RELAXED AND NATURAL FACIAL EXPRESSION

“This exercise is to go around wherever you go with a relaxed and natural expression on your
face. Now if you forget to do it, start all over. All falseness wears a false facial expression. Please
look into that and see the truth of it. Then wherever you are, you're suddenly going to catch yourself
and you're going to say, ‘I'm going to first relax my facial expression. It’s not going to be unnatural
anymore. I'm not going to put on the kind of expression that I think is expected of me by those
people. I'm supposed to be interested in what they’re saying and get excited over something. I'm
going to own my own life and I'm going to start with my face.’”

CATCH IT

“I am going to give you a practical work exercise. Be watchful when uncomfortable, hostile
thoughts invade you. Even when you’re seated in this room, I want you to know when a hostile,
uncomfortable thought or feeling, a disturbing idea, mood, impression comes to your mind, and
catch the thief in the night. That’s the first step, to catch it. If you don’t catch it, you can’t go on from
there.
Now here’s how you're going to go on. Let’s generalize, a wrong thought comes to you and tells
you to speak, act, do something in accordance with its evil nature, and you listen to it and
unfortunately you obey it.
From now on, after you have caught this insidious intruder, you're going to not obey that
self-destructive voice. That’s how you change your life. That’s how you find a life that goes on
forever.”

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September

SAY GOODBYE TO DEPRESSION

“I am asking every one of you hearing this talk to never ever again be depressed over anything
that happens to you — business, romance, socially.
I'm asking you to never express any kind of sour spirit whatever. For instance, no matter how
close that reckless driver came to you on the highway, no matter what happened to you, you're
never ever again going to allow any happening to turn you into a bad person. You're not going to fall
for it. Instead, you're going to understand it.”

TRY NOT THINKING

“Why don’t you try not thinking sometime?

That’s an exercise. Sit down on your couch and don’t think about anything. Watch what happens.
First of all, you'll be able to see the madness of your own mind, how it’s always chasing off in a
thousand directions. After awhile if you were to sit there on the couch and watch your mind go
crazy, and if you watched it without trying to do anything about it, it would slow down a little bit, a
little bit, little bit. Pretty soon do you know what you'd become? You'd become one of the rare, truly
sane men and women on this earth. I highly recommend that process to you.”

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October

THINK OF PUNISHMENTS AS REVELATIONS

“I’ll tell you a marvelous method. Never think of your punishments in making wrong decisions as
punishments. Now, real slow on this, it’s very important. You make a choice of some kind, and it’s
the wrong choice, correct? You have a bad marriage, a bad human relationship, you lose your
money in a bad investment, you get humiliated, you get disgraced in some way, now you call that
punishment. You say, “Something happened which hurt me.” All wrong.
When something doesn’t turn out according to our choice, according to our desire, we say, “I'm
being punished,” and then you wonder who’s punishing you, could it be God, could it be man? It’s
very essential to the ego-self, the pseudo-self, to think in terms of being punished, of being hurt,
because then you are being punished for being bad.
Now listen, here’s the key point. How marvelous, don’t miss it! Effective as of now, you will never
think of punishment as self-punishment. You will think of that crisis that you commonly call
punishment over a bad choice as a revelation, which is exactly what it is. You never saw it as that,
did you? Don’t get away from the lesson now because the dark voices are going to tell you that it’s
not very important and just put it in your notebook and forget about it. I'm telling you to change
everything around by remembering the exercise and practicing it.”

LIFE LESSONS

“You can read, as you've done many times, a whole page of a book without seeing the text —
your mind was somewhere else. You've had that experience. It means you saw the words vaguely
with your physical eyes, but there was no lesson, no meaning there.
The same with the lessons of life, I tell you they are there, but you must want to see the meaning
as well as see the words. All the time that you go through your day, I want to assure you of
something very nice and pleasant. Those guards who represent the King’s truths, righteousness,
consciousness, represent safety.
All through the rest of this day and tomorrow and on, if you are a student of spirituality, if you're
just trying to love the King, the King will be faithful in keeping those guards around you wherever
you go, so that when you in your conceit decide you want to break away from what is right and do
what you want to do, those guards are ready to say, “No, that’s wrong, don’t do that. Stay out of that
temptation and that dark kingdom and don’t want what you think you want because it is your
weakness that wants that, and you have abandoned your true identity as a son of the King, as a
prince.”
Exercise: Notice the anxiety and the shaking that is going on when you're trying to convince
yourself that a certain course is right. If you're shaking over it, it is wrong. If you have to argue with
yourself, if you have to get mad, if you have to try to convince yourself, it’s all wrong. Why?
Because when you are naturally and spiritually right, you feel right when you're doing the right
thing.”

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November
TEN-MINUTE EXERCISE

“Try sometime like tomorrow or tonight for ten minutes only, putting your whole heart, mind, spirit,
intelligence, body, the whole of your being in doing one single task. It makes no difference what the
task is, whether you're cooking or whether you're straightening out some books on your library
shelf. This is an exercise, which will enable you to see how you've been scattered and it will bring
all these parts together so you'll get the beginning of what it means to have control. When you're
scattered, one part of you makes you go east and the next minute another part takes over and you
go west, then you go up and down, so you have no real direction at all. Don’t let anything distract
you while doing the ten-minute exercise, but if you are distracted, come back to it.
You will see what it means to bring yourself together and that is the same thing as rising and
escaping that awful valley and getting over the mountains into the beautiful place.”

THAT IS UNHEALTHY FOR ME

“All next week you're going to be an alert sentinel to the armed camp called humanity. You're
going to notice human beings, yourself first as always, but with special emphasis just now on the
anger, hostility and fury of other human beings. You're to see the anger behind that person’s words,
attitudes, physical movements and you're going to say, “That is sick behavior, therefore, unhealthy
for me.”

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December

CHOOSE THE SIDE OF TRUENESS

“When you make a decision to place yourself on the side of God, there is nothing in hell that more
infuriates the forces of hell than to think that you might escape their sick kingdom, that you might
become a child of God. Things are in the balance, and I want you to tip the balance to fifty-one
percent of the weight being on the side of your decision to simply say, mean it and stick with it, ‘I
choose the side of trueness.’ Having made that declaration, you can expect to find fresh assaults by
the enemy who doesn’t want to lose you, because then he can’t use you as he has been doing. So
when you are attacked left and right after making your new decision, I want you also to write down
in your own words, in a dozen different ways if you want, “God, who really exists, is stronger than
any kind of attack.”

SEEK ANSWERS UNTIL SOMETHING RINGS TRUE

 “Here’s your exercise. When alone, say out loud and listen to yourself saying it, ‘I will seek
answers until something rings true to me personally.’ Here’s what you're doing, you're connecting a
spiritual fact, a truth, with yourself, with something that is not just your intellect. It’s something that
you want to make a part of your essence. You said you want the Truth to be a living part of you, you
want to feel it, you want to know it, you want to do more than think about it. So again, here’s your
exercise, you're to say to yourself, ‘I’ll search until something rings true to me personally.’ It will, and
it will come to you, even that phrase itself.”

2003

January

NOTICE EVERY THOUGHT

“Noticing every thought and every action that goes through you is the same thing as asking God
to be your strength. Now you know why it is so important for you, right now as you are listening to
the talk and watching me, it’s important for you to know how you’re reacting to it without judging it.
When you see that fast, elusive, painful, wretched thought going through you, and you are aware
of it instead of being one with it, you’ve detached yourself from it. It is essential for you in your daily
spiritual work to begin to see the difference between thinking something and seeing something,
simply being conscious. Do it now. Don’t think about your physical position, just know it, just sense
it.
When you merely have a thought life, an emotional life, a physical body life, when you only have
that, you are living the life of thought, feeling and body, and God has no place in it at all.”

GO THROUGH THE PAIN

“Don’t fall into the trap of self-hatred, self-condemnation. Know that that is a trap itself. Go
through, without resistance, the hurt that you feel when someone corrects you over anything, and
simply realize that Yes, I don’t want to admit it, but I did do something wrong. I did something false.
Then after that God can help you because you’re asking for help. That’s a prayer to know that you
are wrong.”

EVERY MORNING
 “Every morning from now on when your eyes open, your physical eyes open, you’re going to open
your spiritual eyes, and you’re going to remember why you’re here on earth, and you’re going to
serve the Kingdom of God instead of the Kingdom of Darkness.”

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February

END THOUGHT

“So I’m going to catch myself without making another mistake of living in time. Thought is always
in time. So I break thought, then there will be a pause in which there is no thought at all and in that I
am free. And when you do this for the first time, when you really see that you can be without a
thought at all, you’ll want to work on yourself every minute because you have sighted the way out at
last. So that you are not depending on thought to keep your false personality intact. It is only
thinking that keeps it in place. Our task is not to just get it out of place but to throw it out altogether.
So that I can see that something is self-defeating and then say “All right, I saw it.” I am not going to
linger on it so as to feel myself as a great sinner. I am going to drop thought. I would say that the
most frightening thought that ever comes to a human being is the idea of coming to the end of
thought. Because when there is no thinking anymore, you, I, cease to exist, which thank heaven, is
what we were looking for all along. But we are afraid to look at it because what would happen if I let
go of my success, my reputation of being the nice man? What would happen is that you would be
out of the cage. But we don’t know this. We have it exactly backward. What we value is ruining us.
And what we reject could save us. It is best to reverse our thinking.”

UNCHAIN YOURSELF

“This is internal work. When you free that man, that woman, you’ll free yourself. If you chain them,
you’ll chain yourself.”

CATCH AND DETECT WEAK WORDS

“A spiritual exercise is valuable. The more concise and clear you can make it, the more valuable it
becomes, and the more you connect it with your daily activities, the more practical, healthy and
helpful it becomes for you. The exercise is as follows: You’re to detect weak and wavering words
while you’re talking. You’re in hundreds of conversations a week. You may be on the street talking
with someone, in the factory, on the telephone and so on. When you talk to other people, you say
things to them, make comments, observations, you might even be helping them in some way, giving
them information that they might require, but weak and wavering words is to be your reference
point. You’re to hear yourself say them, which indicates of course weak and wavering attitudes. You
change your mind about something, or you suddenly feel that maybe you had to say something to
explain your previous remark because, if you didn’t explain it, they would suddenly think less of you
or get ready to criticize you. You’re to catch your weak and wavering nature in moment-by-moment
action as it expresses itself through weak or wavering words.”

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March

CHANGE FAILURE TO SUCCESS

“Here is a very important exercise. It will change everything. It will change failure into success if
you do it constantly and remember that the object is to put yourself aside, so that the new self can
take over, so that the path is always lighted, and you don’t fall down anymore.
It is good and necessary to make your requests known to heaven, the request for you to be a new
person, have a new mind and a new spirit. But you can’t make this request known to heaven with a
low nature, with a crabby mind. You can’t do that. It’s not going to reach heaven. Dark minds can’t
reach the light of heaven, so I am going to give you a two-part exercise. Oh, what a change it will
make in your day and your whole life.
(1) Come awake. Do it now. Come awake. Set thought aside. Just know that you are here in this
room. Don’t be thinking of anything in particular. Just be looking up here (where Vernon was). All
right, that’s the first step before you make your request known to heaven. Awake—not in a state of
sleep, of anger, of worry—but wide awake. Your mind is as free as you can make it. This is a good
exercise. You come awake and then you make your request known to heaven. It has to be a right
request. Ah! How about this for a right overall one. God understands this. He understands your
stating it simply and as best you can.
(2) Your request to God is, “Let your way be my way.” That includes everything. Remember now,
it’s a two-part request. Oh, how many mechanical prayers go up all over the world. Billions of them
everyday—useless, pointless, self-deceptive—nothing happens. Aren’t you kind of glad you didn’t
get some of the things you once prayed for.”

WHAT SETS YOU OFF?

“Your next exercise is to note what can set you off. You see the sign on the gasoline station and
what’s the first thing you think? Let’s see, ‘Did the price go up, ooh, that’s awful! Did it go down,
ooh, that’s great!’ You have done that hundreds of times in hundreds of places, and now, for the
first time tomorrow, you’re going to notice that you reacted in a certain way to what you saw. A way
that wasted your mind, you gave it away to nothing.

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April

GO SERIOUS WHEN IN A WRONG STATE

 “We’ve been talking about problems, about difficulties, and here’s one method which I want you to
think about for long, long time after hearing this talk. Give it your own very special attention, so
you’ll understand it and then put it into practice. Here it is:
From now on, when you notice how your mind is noisy, how it’s running away with you chattering
all the time, or when you feel jealous of someone, when you feel overwhelmed - now listen very,
very carefully - the minute you notice the jittery state you’re in, any kind of wrong emotion, I want
you to become utterly, completely serious. Now, I’ll explain that.
You see, you’re not really serious when you’re carried away, when you’re dancing around the
bonfire and your mind’s going a hundred miles an hour or when you’re jealous or when you’re
impeding yourself. Your mind is not serious. It has a certain dizziness and a certain giddiness to it,
right? You’ll agree with that, won’t you? It has no seriousness, it’s going off somewhere.
Absolutely from now on, you will practice this method of deliberately saying to yourself, ‘I am
going to become serious.’ Now you won’t understand what it means at the start. You may have to
do it a thousand times before you understand. But if you make this your aim, it will be able to
counteract the fire of your mind, so that you have sent a message saying, ‘I am not going to be a
slave to my own jittery mind any more. I’m going to become serious, not grim, not heavy, not
depressed.’
Haven’t you noticed the certain beauty in seriousness? Haven’t you noticed that you’re in
command of yourself when you’re serious without being grim? Think all this through and let it work
through you and you will change.”

NOTICE YOUR STATE

“I want you to practice the exercise of noticing what’s happening to you when your reward has
been denied and before you go into anger and hatred over it being denied. I want you to take a
picture of yourself, and I don’t want you to ever again love the false reward of going downhill and
going into a negative state.”

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May

PHYSICAL SIGNS OF INNER NERVOUSNESS

“At the top of a plain page put, “Physical Signs of Inner Nervousness.” Number each one, and
make as long a list as possible: The fluttering eyelids, the impulsive remark, the shaking hands, the
going somewhere, the running somewhere when you could have walked because you nervously
want to get somewhere so you don’t miss the last part of the murder mystery on television. There
are endless examples that you can find and you’re to write them down.
Then having written them down, you’re to refer to the list often, so that that part becomes clear to
you. The list is going to be longer than you think, so have fun with it. Always have fun with spiritual
exercises. Just let yourself go, and what you don’t see in yourself, see in someone else.
For instance, you’re tenth in line at the checkout stand, and the nine lonely people in front of you
nervously chatter to the checker and you wish they’d shut up and not be so nervous so you can get
out and get home, right? So that’s your exercise physically, and then do it inwardly.”

WATCH HOW YOU’RE LURED AWAY

“As an exercise, a short but powerful one, I want you to remember how easily you forget to live in
the spiritual world. Just notice how often and how fast you wander away from living from your
spiritual nature. The moment you notice that you have been lured away from who you really are and
have gone into foolish and useless thoughts, call yourself back home. Obey and come back home
to the spiritual world.”

REMEMBER THE HEAVENLY MUSIC

“Actually and factually when you rise from your chairs tonight, when you go home, you will
remember that the heavenly music is coming down from your real homeland and trying to penetrate
you, so that you can hear and understand it and become a whole, self-unified human being who
can get back home.”

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June

THE LAST STRAW

“You know what it means, ‘the last straw.’ You know the story of the farmer, the farmer was
bringing his load of straw to town and he had a lot of straw, but only one horse, so he put all the
straw on, but he wanted to be very efficient, so he said, ‘Well, maybe one more straw. If the horse
can carry that, I’ll get more to market and make more money.’ Then he said, ‘One more straw, one
more straw, one more straw,’ till the horse finally collapsed. With the last straw, the horse collapsed
and refused to go along with it any more.
Have you reached the last straw yet? The last straw of you piling all this junk on your own back.
Why don’t you collapse and refuse to go along. I tell you part of your definite spiritual experience
will be several last straws, maybe hundreds of them for that matter, where all of a sudden you knew
you were not going to repeat any more, you were never going to be weak again toward that person
that you fawned before.
Something in you…the last straw consciousness came to you and you knew absolutely, knew in
your heart that you had made an enormous advancement, that you were not going to be weak
toward that person any more. When that other person made a sarcastic, critical remark to you, you
knew you weren’t going to smile weakly back any more and take it. (Vernon pounded table). Stop
taking it. Don’t take it. ‘That Sir, that relative, is the last straw.’
The divine fierceness will shine through your eyes, will sound in your voice, will express itself in
your now nature, and they won’t dare treat you that way any more, and you have no hostility toward
them. You’ve found something better than the hostility, which you’ve been using all these years.
What you’ve found by no longer excusing yourself, what you’ve found is that you don’t have to
take it any more because God says so, and that is who you’re listening to from now on.”

RISE UP IN RIGHT REBELLION

“Detect and note little petty egotistical character traits that you have that you think keep you in
place, such as your favorite ways of daydreaming and little ways you behave with other people, not
knowing that you’re behaving that way. These are your prison cells, and knowledge of them will
make you dislike the torment they keep you in. You are unconscious of how you allow evil forces to
torment you.
Now you’re going to rise up in right rebellion and, as best you can, you’re going to use a spiritual
weapon and say, ‘Since when do I have to surrender to you.’”

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July

THIS IS IT!

“Your exercise is as follows: You will keep a sign up in your mind that says, THIS IS IT! Then,
when you go out into the world and meet events and people, situations, when you meet them with
that sign flying high inside you, then it will remind you that the Truth is all powerful over all events,
situations, people. And when you keep that flag flying high, remembering it, that remembrance is
the power itself. I guarantee you that if you do it, you keep that flag flying high, THIS IS IT!, all
so-called problems, obstacles, problem people, difficulties, feeling bad—all that must crumble
before your spiritual knowledge that THIS IS IT! If THIS IS IT what else is there? Nothing! Nothing
that has power at all. And by knowing that THIS IS IT! you will prove it because God himself will
always prove his power to anyone who will let him.”

FIGHT FOR YOURSELF

“The sick world out there wants to steal from you the gold you have received here at New Life.
Don’t let it! You know what you’ve felt here, everyone of you. And what you’ve felt is right! Don’t let,
don’t let anything inside you, outside you steal it away. Say no to it when it comes up and tries to
make you doubt, tries to make you weak, tries to steal your gold. Don’t let it. Now look! Listen to me.
You have to do something you’ve never done before, so start doing it! You have to FIGHT for
yourself. YOU CAN’T LAY BACK AND JUST DRIFT! Now come on! STRAIGHTEN UP!!! Physically.
Now straighten up the same way outwardly! Now fight for yourself! If you will, I tell you, that the
minute you start to fight for yourself, you’ll feel something outside of yourself helping you…and
that’s God. Now go out and fight. Fight rightly.”
 Line

August

SNAP FASCINATION WITH EVIL

“This is a spiritual exercise that’s going to snap your fascination with evil and your past. You will
suddenly become awake right in the middle of walking and know that you’re walking. That’s not the
same thing as saying, “I’m walking, I’m walking, I’m walking, I’m walking.” You’re thinking you’re
walking, not seeing you’re walking. You’re supposed to be above your mind in a state of
awareness, consciousness, spirituality, where thought has been suspended and you simply know
you know, and you also know that it’s a different state from thinking about it.
Keep at it until you begin to see the faint difference between thinking you’re walking and simply
knowing that you are. The exercise is endless. Be aware of the weight of your body on the rug or on
the floor. That’s a little physical addition to it. You feel the weight of yourself, which is part of it, but
at every moment remember your aim, which is to be apart from yourself.”

COUNTER DARK FORCES

“Dark forces are swifter than you for now and I’ll tell you how to counter them. This is an exercise
to take with you while you’re driving, at home, over the days.
Write down the following, “If it’s wrong, it’s wrong for me.” All wrongness is wrong for you. See
how many different ways you can say that: “If it’s ridiculous, it’s ridiculous for me. If it’s self-pitying,
it’s wrong for me.” You see two men quarreling, having irritable words with each other, “That’s
irritable and that’s wrong for me.” The reason for this is so that your knowledge and your
consciousness of whom you have been living with becomes shockingly clear.
See you haven’t made that connection before and I’ll tell you why. Evil can be extremely
exhilarating; there’s no words that can tell you how exciting sinfulness and wickedness can be.”

DO IT YOURSELF

“For this entire weekend your special work assignment is to notice the tendency that you have to
ask someone to do something for you, and you’re to stop and do it yourself. Obviously, I’m asking
for things that you can do. ”

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September
A HIGHER LOVE EXISTS FOR YOU

“You have in short a false love that you think is a true love, so from now on you're going to love
something different; you're going to find out the fact, this is you determining to do this now, you're
going to find out the fact that the level you're on is not the only level there is and you're going to
dare, you're going to be very brave and very bold in leaving the level that you're on right now. Now
let me tell you an incredibly vital point for you to understand, then I can go on with the talk, it’s
essential to get this in. Unknown to you in the inner depths, you fear to rise any higher than the
level you're on right now, you don’t want it. You're afraid to go any higher lest it take something
away that you call valuable. You will no longer have that attitude. Instead you will take a very
simple, right attitude of saying, ‘In order to go up the mountain, I have to leave the lower parts of the
mountain. How can I get to the top parts when I'm staying at the lower parts? To leave the lower is
essential if I'm ever going to get up there higher.’
I want you to determine tonight to find a Higher Love. How can I tell you what I'm seeing, I am
seeing things I can’t convey to you with words. I'm conveying it to you with the Spirit of Truth and
with words, but you are the one that has to see it. I’ll repeat it, I want every single one of you
hearing this talk to find a Higher Love. Then you'll be happy. Then you can go out and conduct your
business, you can have the family around you, you can find the proper right entertainments and
recreations that you like, then you can live your life in this world no longer the victim that you were
before.”

EXHAUST YOUR ENERGY

“How much of your energy are you going to devote, and I want you to devote all of it to it. Never
be afraid of exhausting energy by the way. If you exhaust your energy, that’s the way to get more. If
you save energy, you’ll never get more. Go all out with yourself! Exhaust yourself completely!
There’s a little side thought and you put that under a microscope too.”

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October

VERBOTEN—SPREADING YOUR TROUBLES

“Every time you say the smallest word about your troubles to anyone else, you’ve fallen asleep.
Your exercise is to get ten sheets of paper, number them one, two, three, and so on. Here are
some examples: ‘Oh, do you know what happened down at the office today? Do you know what
happened while I was shopping? The traffic was so bad and three different people almost banged
me.’
If you try to spread your troubles around the world, to your neighbor, you have guaranteed the
fact that you’re going to lose any enthusiasm you might have had for reaching Pleasure Island, the
island of true pleasure. You’re going to lose that because you’re increasing you and the object is to
get rid of you, not to increase it.”
OBSESSIVE THINKING ABOUT OTHERS

“I want to tell you of an obsession that you have that you’ve never, ever thought about, never,
ever called an obsession, which is with thinking about other people. You didn’t even know you had
such a demander inside of you which said, ‘Think about other people, that other person.’
Look at some of the most common ways in which all human beings think about other people.
Because your neighbor’s life is so empty, your fellow worker at the factory, because his days have
no direction and no meaning, he or she tries to fill up the awful vacancy with thinking what he calls
‘pleasurable, rewarding thoughts about other people.’ The poking and prying into the man who
works alongside you, with the lady whose desk is across from yours at the office… ‘I wonder about
her finances. She makes about the same as I do, but she seems to do better than I. She got a new
car and I didn’t.’ Need I go on?
Think, look, the subject is you constantly looking at someone, or you don’t even have to see them
to do it, and wasting your life in foolish, useless questions, speculations, conclusions with petty little
thrills over what you think might be their private life.
There are obviously lots of times when you think about other people in practical matters. Draw a
line down the center of your mind and use your wish to wake up as a basis for judging just which
one of those thoughts about other people are good, healthy and practical and others which are just
holdovers from a lazy, gossipy nature.”

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November

WATCH YOURSELF WATCHING TELEVISION

“Here’s a great exercise. How many watch television? Everybody raise your hand. For the next
week at least, when you watch television, you will also watch your face and your hands.
Gentlemen, when that world series baseball hero gets up to bat, and he swings the bat, and he
hits the ball this time, and the ball goes way, way over in the field. It’s going! It’s going! It’s going! It’s
going! And the left fielder out there, he’s going back and back and back. And he gets off the grass
onto the warning track. And there’s a fence out there. And there’s the ball. He can’t quite see it all.
You see the ball out there and the catcher’s going ‘Hmmm, is he going to get it?’ Right before
he…(Laughter) I am going to make it a nice outcome. It’s a home run! You can cheer if you want.
Just at that moment…oh drop the scene there, and look at the scene right there. (Laughter) And
your happiness or gloom depends on which team you have identified with. Right? You see the
opposites in that?
A little exercise like that will get you acquainted with a self that has been living its life through you,
unknown to you.
You never knew that every time you watched TV or were at a party or anywhere else, you never
knew that you were reacting so fully—that it had taken you over. It was stronger than you, because
you were simply weakness inside.
From this day forward, you will know your weakness, and don’t be afraid to look at it altogether,
because I tell you, every weakness, every criminality, even inside of you, is not you.
You are not good or bad.
 When you rise above the intellect, above the mental and you rise to the spiritual, you will know
everything that this talk has talked about, and you will live the victory of it.”

MAKE TIME FOR YOUR SPIRITUAL SERVANT

“You will now forevermore be very aware of where you go and why you go there, and the best
thing that can ever happen to any of you is to see how you are bothering people thinking you are
giving them your marvelous company— you’re bothering them. Now if you will do this, a very happy
thing will happen to you. You will begin to see how not only have you wasted their time but yours
also, and that in turn will make you value the time that you do have. It’ll make you so rightly excited
to use every minute you have to read one of the books or hear one of the tapes or to do an exercise
when you’re out somewhere. It’ll make you make time for your spiritual servant. It’s not now, it’s
your commander, it’s your tyrant that makes you chase everywhere spending your money and
spending your energy.”

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December

THE FOLLY IN TAKING PLEASURE IN FALSE REWARDS

“When you get any kind of little cheap reward from this world — somebody gives you a gift, an
unexpected ten dollars in your paycheck, an unexpected compliment or flattery — I want you to
know that’s a reward of the prison system of this world, and you are not going to take pleasure in it
any more. The reason you take pleasure in it is because that’s all you’ve got. You don’t have any
real pleasure of knowing that you have made solid contact with God. You don’t know that. That’s
why you settle for the little piece of cake and the slice of dry bread they give you. You’re settling for
that because you don’t know of another world which does exist and with which you can make
contact.”

PURITY AND INNOCENCE

“I talked about purity of mind and of nature that can be attained by you taking the following
spiritual statement, keeping it close to you always and allowing it to be the clean healthy guide it is:
I need never attempt to get anything from anyone. Once more, try to feel it as well as hear it. I need
never try to get anything from anyone. When that true, clean statement has its way because you
allow it to have its way, the whole meaning will come to you and you will never enter another frantic
race again in your life. You will never ever hurt another person and you will never hurt yourself of
course. You will never want to win any trophy that a man can build and offer to you, but you’ll be
quite content to remain in the health and wholeness and completion that is coming to you because
you’ve understood every small detail about this talk and you still want to know more. Will you please
do that? Want to know more, for then you will live more. You will live the Heavenly life of purity and
innocence.”

CONSCIOUS DECISION

“There is such a thing as a conscious decision, a conscious NO and with the help of Almighty
Heaven, you no longer are going to waste your life in foolish thoughts about a petty incident. Make
a conscious decision to drop it and if you think of it again, drop it again. Every time the temptation to
think about it arises, remember your conscious decision.”

2002

January

ESCAPE THE WALLS OF THE INTELLECT

“Think how you answer people — in order to hurt yourself. You always get yourself back. You
must escape the walls of the intellect; mind cannot understand spirit. The higher choice must be
made. It comes automatically when the false ‘I’ is dissolved at last. When spirit and intellect join, it’s
an explosion of insight. Strength alone survives. So have a right attitude, and want to know from
spirit alone what spirit already knows. You have to be what it is. The spiritual life starts right now!”

PERFECT SEEING — PERFECT LIFE

“The way you think is the cause of your problem! See that you really don’t have any life at all and
are the slave of your preferences. You’re going to have to straighten out your life. You’re going to
have to make some experiments. For example, note how you project onto others how they should
respond to you. As an exercise, be with others and want absolutely nothing from them. Start by
seeing how you have all the time been sending out your preference—hoping it will come back to
you. It’s extremely subtle. And you don’t see how you’re still in the mire of wanting to be liked. No
wonder you’re psychologically drained by the end of the day. You must never get psychologically
tired! Even when the body is tired, the mind must be alert. As you doze off, use this period to work
on yourself. Stay alert to what is going on inside you, also to your physical discomfort, and let go of
the body. When it relaxes, it will send a message to the mind and emotions. See how you can do
nothing for yourself, but allow what can help you to do so. And you will feel the new displace the
old. First a slower mind, then a silent mind! Your preferences are lying in wait for you, but Truth is
lying in wait for them. Make slight changes of position to help shake off dark thoughts that want to
sleep with you. As you relax, what has been trying to take you over builds to attack. Open your eyes
and look around the room—and that will help to break it. Night after night, your night-work will
connect with your old habit of demanding something from him or her, and ask yourself, “Why did I
want that person’s approval?” And that will be the end of that preference. Then you will see things
as Truth sees them. And perfect seeing brings a perfect life!”

NEVER TRY

“Every time you break down, which is whenever you get negative, remember that you must never
enter the lunatic asylum to try to straighten out the inmates —they will only combine to attack you.”

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February

GOOD AND BAD

“There is in this universe only white and black, purity and criminality, goodness and badness, God
and Satan. There’s no third thing. No mixtures. Lost humans don’t want to face this fact because
they want to hint that they’re OK! This fact destroys the lies they live to tell. As an exercise, work on
understanding the little right part (baby essence) for that is what must grow until it occupies and
becomes the whole being. Look for where you can learn to suffer while doing nothing about it. See
how the one bit of rightness is completely non-personal. Increasingly, as you know that you have no
virtues, no strength of your own, you will sense how you need not and must not have any goodness
of ‘my own.’ So you must put yourself on the side of goodness and let it do the work for you! This
means you must drop all ideas of being in charge or a leader of any kind. All you have to do is
refrain from doing anything virtuous. Everyone on earth is either destroying the world or contributing
to it. Everybody you know or see is determined to destroy everyone he sees—but you can’t take
seeing this yet. Only the lack of opportunity to do evil keeps people ‘good.’ How honest can you be?
Can you see how your little power over others is used as an excuse to blast them? Nobody loves
anyone! As you grow into more insight, you can look out and see how monstrously sick and stupid
everyone is. Watch the temptation to fear what you see—and stay in the right place. To be cruel is
to be insane! Someday the dawn is going to break and you’re going to get hurt for the last time. The
little right part will cry out, “I’ll never go back again!” You’re so dumb, you never see what’s right in
front of you: You don’t have a single friend out in that world! God/Truth exists, and is the only
chance you have to escape your ignorance and insanity.”

THINK, KNOW, DECIDE AND LIVE FROM YOURSELF

“When you don’t have the solid answers from yourself, you’ll ask anyone, which is folly because
you can think for yourself. When you begin to think, know, decide, live from yourself, your life will
change! So study yourself very carefully for daily evidences that you are asking people to think for
you. See for yourself that you don’t think for yourself. If you did, you’d never ask anyone for
approval (which can only be approval of your wrong nature). Now see how gullible you are, so you
can use shocks to dissolve shocks. You do have a helper—Truth!— something that will come to you
upon the invitation of your sincerity. Observe Truth working on you, rebuking bad parts and
encouraging right parts. Ask Truth to reveal your foolishness to you! After the storm comes the
rainbow. So go through it and get beyond the urge and compulsion to let someone else think for
you. Submit to the tutelage of Truth!”

CONSCIOUS STEP

“The first step onto your property—either walking or getting out of your car— is to be a conscious
step.”

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March

TRUST GOD

“See that everything you do to get rid of pain only increases it. Your scream of “No—I’m not going
to stand for it” is too feeble. You’re hoping for something to come along. It isn’t—you have to go to
work. The feeling that you’re only repeating pain must lead you to the resolve to enter tomorrow
without your love for the repetition of collisions. Finally you’ll get smart enough to see what it means
to trust God. Your new aim will be to get up in the morning wide awake, trying to see the devils that
are trying to drag you down. There is great purity in the force of truth. Be incredibly fierce with
darkness, for it must obey the higher impulse to change! There’s really not any difference between
levels on this level. Make a resolve to see that your feeling of futility is itself wrong—there’s no self
to feel futile over. Something exists that you do not see. Right now everything is done; it’s complete.
Accept!”

MY ABSENCE IS MY ANSWER

“All sickies try to convert others. So whenever people seem to be so very friendly and dedicated
to your best interests, say (mentally) “My absence is my answer!” Then watch as they fade out of
your life. Blast, and drift off—that’s their pattern. When you understand this, you turn your back on
them and they mean nothing to you any more. Remember, the thing sickness fears most of all is to
be ignored.”

EXORCISE WITH EXERCISES

“When you finally face the enemy, every attacker will go away. Eventually something happens to
you that is not from you. Exorcise yourself with an exercise. Go home, get paper, write “Exorcise
with Exercises” on the top, and then, in separate, short, numbered items, write everything you know
that exposes foreign, fake forces for what they are—fakes! Keep them short little items. And go over
the list every day, even when you don’t want to!”

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April

SET YOURSELF FREE

“Don’t you know that everyone’s lost, that all they have to offer is lies and nonsense? When they
can’t fool you any more, they’ll laugh at you for being so gullible. To cover every situation with a
human who has deceived you, look at them, see they’re all wrong for you and set yourself free from
them: “Since you have refused your responsibility for spiritual development, I am free of you—
because I want what is right.” Say this mentally, and see what you feel inside— oh, the feeling of
relief! All you have to do is choose what is right for you, then look at other people and groups, those
who don’t want what you want, you must have nothing to do with them. You don’t want to face this,
how lost people scorn you. Just go ahead and defy angry people. This will absolutely take you
further down the road than anything else. Go through, with awareness, the new dark tunnel of not
knowing what to do when they get mad. Up until now you’ve just cringed and fawned to avoid the
crisis. What do you need a human sicko for? You must know this from yourself so you no longer
worry about how to act!”

THANK GOD

“For the rest of today, thank God for existing!”

WATCH YOUR WALK

“What liberty to walk through the world and be free of it, of yourself. Even your body feels better!
As an exercise, you will walk in a new way: watch your walk, especially how unnatural it is. The
noticing of your unnaturalness is what begins to eliminate it.”

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May

FREE YOURSELF OF COMPARISON

 “See how your mind goes wrong regarding human relations. And notice (even on the telephone)
your habit of instantaneously comparing yourself with everyone you meet. Do this for the next three
days, even write it down. (For women, it especially involves feminine qualities; for men, financial
success.) You know you haven’t succeeded; you’ve only painted a picture in front of you, frantically
asking, “When will I finish this painting and be at rest?” and you insist on feeling elation or
depression at the comparison. You have to give both up, which will leave you free of comparison.
All this false life will go—compulsive, horrible, nothing but a habit! Be aware of this process going
on. Your reacting is what you call taking the journey, which is why you never arrive. See you’ve only
made a big circle in the jungle, and where have you gone? Right back to yourself—liking and
disliking are both part of the false self in you. So away with all comparison. It starts with you; it can
end with you.”

INTERRUPT THOUGHT

“Until midnight tonight, interrupt thought!”

SHAKE YOURSELF AWAKE

“All you do is doze. You have to shake yourself awake. If all you have is a physical body, start
with that. For the next three days, wherever you are, continually shake your head awake. And let
this remind you to shake yourself inwardly. Only you can supply the necessary number of jolts to
show yourself you’ve been sound asleep.”

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June

LIVE LIFE FROM SOMETHING NEW

“Whenever you turn a light switch on or off, know that you’re doing it. You may be quite amused
to see that you can’t do it all the time. Isn’t awareness of unawareness actually awareness? This
exercise will spread to other parts of you. The physical tends to send signals to other parts, so you
begin to understand what it means to be a self-aware person—not lost in wandering thought, but
with all elements in you under the power of your consciousness and wisdom. Now operating from a
spiritual source, which controls every part of you (including how to react properly!), this awareness
works for you while you sit back and relax and let it work. Your life is lived for you (not laziness)!
You can switch your day everyday to where nothing bothers you. Everybody clings to excitement, to
quarreling. That is the ordeal. That is the false life. All this, beginning with the exercise, will lead you
to seeing something new each day, to feeling something new, a new experience in which you are
no longer involved in what you have called your life. The whole world of frantic self-concern yields to
a new kind of involvement where you are not. Have the simple daring to stop doing what you
always do, to stop being what you always are. You can’t know there’s something different from what
you are. There is something different though, where you will be at complete rest, never having to
look around frantically. If you want peace of mind, you will have peace of mind!”

TURN YOURSELF OFF

“You must turn yourself off. This means to simply stop the mechanical movement by which you
constantly try to find answers. It means you’re not going to keep going to the usual sources. Now
don’t underestimate this exercise: in the middle of any day, just sit down and watch your mind and
see that you can’t do anything at all about it. Don’t go into reaction over that or leap to a distraction.
Know one thing only: “My mind is madly churning, but I am watching. I am not it!” If you see the
impossibility of saving yourself, you will have learned something; for when you do something for
yourself, you become hardened. This exercise will begin to do something for all the questions that
hound you. It will show you that there is no point in continuing to let anyone on the human level
answer your questions, including you!”

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July

RIGHT USE OF THE MIND

“Here’s a proper use of your mind: See the difference between man-made objects and natural
objects. See that there is a difference. This applies to your inner work too. Remember this exercise,
for the only place to ask from is somewhere other than your present nature.”

WRONG USE OF THE MIND

“Imagination is a place of pain! What you can do is just waiting for you to see it. As long as
imagination is operating, Truth can’t. See the results of what you’re doing, how it all does nothing
for you. Imagination says that, if you think about something, it will come to you. Not so! A first
glimpse of this is what you need. For an exercise, label a piece of clear paper: “Imaginary rescues:
Things I hope will change me.” (You’re believing in a magic wand—from reading too many stories
out of childish books. You wave your wand all day long, but nothing happens.) Then as a symbolic
gesture tear up the piece of paper and throw it out. Throw out one false dream a day—that would
be super progress. It knocks out all confidence in self-contrived solutions.”

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August

HOW TO HANDLE SICKOS

“Sickos never know how patient ordinary people have to be with them. So, when meeting anyone,
notice how you react to them, what’s going through you when you talk to them. Let the little bit of
virtue in you do the perceiving for you, and you’ll know exactly how to deal with them. Be glad when
you see where this leads. For if you’re fully in charge of yourself, living from the spirit, that very high
level immediately solves all problems you now have.”

KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING

“From the moment you get up from your chair until you enter another room, you are to know what
you are doing.”

MORE PLEASE

“Start to do something right by understanding that what you’re doing is not right. You’ve taken the
friend as an enemy. Would you like to feel good all the time? Feeling good is something very quiet.
So, put up a new sign, a message to yourself, saying, ‘More, please, of whatever I need!’ You don’t
even have to know who you’re talking to. Someone is listening, a friend! Just do it! The proof, the
evidence, will come.”

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September

DON’T TRY TO SAVE THE WORLD

“Would you all please show me the certificate signed by a higher authority by which you were
given the instructions to go out and save the world? You don’t have such a paper. Why do you
behave as if you do? Because you don’t know any better. Because you think that self-salvation lies
in intruding into other peoples lives when as a matter of fact, self-destruction is the result of that
action. Stop interfering!”
TO BE FREE

“Everything depends on where you live inside yourself. Abandoning the old must come first to
receive the new. Why don’t you want to leave your misery—like falling madly in love? It’s because
you want to believe in your own feelings. False love always betrays you right at the moment. Pick
up the clues by which you can stop being in this dreadful, seemingly exciting life, so you won’t be in
pain any more. Your dreamland is all nightmares. Ask, ‘What is this in me that prefers to be
tormented than to be free?’ It really is better to not be the slave of every pretty face and figure, and
being free is the meaning of life. So, seeing all these ridiculous behaviors is an invitation to the
higher world. Here’s an exercise in right memory. No longer think of yourself as virtuous in any way,
for if you do, you’re a hypocrite, lying about yourself. The truth is you care for nobody. So simply go
through this dropping of all self-pictures and a miracle will happen. You’ll no longer exist as you did
formerly, but you’ll be happy, free, the slave of no one, because you’re no longer the slave of your
thoughts. I’ve explained to you the way out. Follow it!”

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October

EXERCISE IN RIGHT MEMORY

“Everything depends on where you live inside yourself. Abandoning the old must come first to
receive the new.
Seeing all the ridiculous behaviors is an invitation to the higher world.
Here is an exercise in right memory:
NO LONGER THINK OF YOURSELF AS VIRTUOUS IN ANY WAY, FOR IF YOU DO, YOU ARE
A HYPOCRITE, LYING ABOUT YOURSELF.
So simply go through this dropping of all self-pictures, and a miracle will happen. You’ll no longer
exist as you did formerly, but you’ll be happy, free, the slave of no one, because you’re no longer
the slave of your own thoughts. I’ve explained the way out. Follow it!”

THE DOOR

“The next time you enter your home or leave your home, know you’re passing through the
doorway.”

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November

LIFE AIM
 “Write down or say to yourself, or both:
A. My aim in life is to (use as many phrases as you want): 1) Wake up; 2) Be authentic; 3) Find
God; 4) Live in the light; 5) Do something different with my life; 6) Give my life real purpose.
B. Regardless of what happens, I will always return to what I really want.
Your aim to wake up is always stronger than what opposes it. That aim is stronger than anything
in the universe.”

CANCEL SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

“The next time you’re ready to pounce on someone because he doesn’t jump when you yell, and
you want to criticize him, think of something wrong with you.
Now, what’s the purpose of that? It’s not to condemn yourself or to wallow in your negativities, but
to cancel out that self-righteousness by which you are always the innocent party and they are
always the guilty one.”

BE AWARE

“From now on wherever you are, you will know that you are there. When in the kitchen, be aware
of your physical self. Also be aware you are in the kitchen by seeing the stove and refrigerator. This
is the cancellation of divisive thought, and illuminates the physical outer world and your inner
feeling. This cuts off the flow of your heartaches so that they don’t rebuild you. At the time you see
the physical kitchen, you’ll know you are in it. You’ll know what is right for you and that’s what’s
important.”

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December

START LIFE ALL OVER

“As often as you can, you will become awake and start life all over. Whatever you are thinking or
doing, you will realize that you can start life all over right now. Just say, ‘I am new now. I am starting
life all over.’ It is not a reality to you yet. It will come to you that you are new any time you realize
that you are. Snap yourself awake constantly and suddenly realize that you are starting life
absolutely fresh right now; that you are as fresh as the present moment is. Start life all over many,
many times.”
STOP FIGHTING REALITY

“We’re going to destroy through a little special exercise—work now—your bad habit of fighting
reality when it wants to shake you awake. Here is what you’re going to do: For the next seven days,
you are going to do one simple but very effective thing. You are going to notice how other people
influence you. You’re going to notice in your talking, and walking, communications, relations with
other people, you’re going to notice how they affect your mind, your emotions, how they cause you
to say a certain thing, react a certain way.
For example, notice whether you want to linger around them or whether you don’t, and also notice
whether you would call that contact a pleasant relationship or an unpleasant one.”

BUILD A NEW NATURE

“You can build a new kind of a nature, which is strength and wisdom and right action. You will be
taken over by something that you should be taken over by, which has nothing to do with your old
nature or anyone else’s and it operates through you, and here’s what it says internally, silently, and
with 100% pure success.
Something happens to make you feel angry, despondent, and you want to strike back and get
revenge. You now have 100% power to say to that and all other weaknesses and evils, ‘There is
something in me that does not submit to that.’ It is superior to everything.
You must never acknowledge that anything is stronger than the Truth, God.”

2001

January

INVOLVEMENT WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS

You get involved a hundred times a day in vagrant unnecessary thought, one of which is the false
belief that you must get involved in other people’s problems. It can be a small difficulty such as not
having enough money or a large difficulty such as a serious illness. When someone comes up to
you with his problems you automatically go into the “right” reaction, which could be sympathy,
advice, making a decision and so on. You will see that you really resent doing this. The next time it
happens just watch the other person and say to yourself “What has that to do with me? Why are
you crying on my shoulder?” This reaction is very unacceptable to your false self and can be an
authentic new experience for you because you are breaking out of the rut of your old habits. Never
do anything to keep your image of being a nice person in place.

TRY TO BE CONSCIOUSLY KIND TO ANOTHER PERSON

 Try to be consciously kind to another person, even to the point of wearing yourself out. Try to do
things for others. Little things. For example, someone asks you for directions. You deliberately,
consciously help them because they won’t help themselves—but they ask you—do it for them. The
value in this is to see your own resentment.
Do something for another person consciously so that we break down this self-interest we have all
the time. This is an exercise in becoming an aware person. (You will know when not to do
something for another.)

I WILL REMEMBER

Write 10 to 15 single sentences each beginning with the same three words, “I will remember.”
Examples:
I will remember to use the devil to destroy the devil.
I will remember not to be a burden to anyone.
I will remember that I always need more effort.

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February

LEAVE THE “OUCH” ALONE

Write down, “Ouch, but that’s right!” on a piece of paper, followed by “do nothing with the mental
pain.” Then underneath add several things you usually do with your pain—fight it, resent it, etc.
When you do anything with your mental pain, you are adding “you” to it. Leave the “ouch” alone and
it will go away; otherwise, you’ll be an “ouch-grouch”! Your weaknesses will now collaborate to find
ways you can do something with the pain. However, light is always stronger than darkness, which is
absolutely nothing. Do this exercise for three days on three separate pieces of paper and do not
look at the papers until the fourth day. The written words will be imprinted inwardly where they can
work on you automatically.

LIFT THE CURSE OF IGNORANCE

Make everything, every day, as hard as possible on yourself. Be awake to the environment,
without thinking about it with this objective: to go through a new hell, a healing hell of not knowing
what to do. Hell is the avoidance of hell. Go right up to it and go through it! You cannot lift the curse
of ignorance on yourself unless you are willing to let the hell blaze as furiously as it wishes — and it
wishes to blaze far more furiously than you have ever dared to see, which is why you’re suppressed
and cursed. Do you really care more for the inner dictator than for your deliverance? Go through the
hell of a supposed “you” disappearing. Practice this daily: “Let’s see what this machine says and
does today.”

ENTER THE EMPTINESS

The only proof is self-proof. Find some wrong, emotionalized state inside yourself and practice not
being that. Be willing to see what happens to you as a result of no longer crying over anything,
including the hideous injustice of this world. Everyone complains, everyone feels he’s a victim. To
live outside yourself, you can never live for complaining, for revenge. You’re going to have to just
open your hands, let your life slip away and enter a horrible, terrifying emptiness—and just stay
there.

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March

FIND THE DEEPER MEANING

Do this exercise, which will help you understand the prison you’re in and the key to it—you must
earn the key! Free yourself from words by making two lists on a piece of paper. Name the left-hand
list ‘Non-Religious (Psychological) Words’ and the right-hand list ‘Religious Words.’ Then match
pairs of words which have one reality behind them:

Non-Religious (Psychological) Words

Recovery...............................................
Egotism.................................................
Reality...................................................
Delusion.................................................
Insanity.................................................
Schizophrenia.........................................
Self-defeating behavior.............................
Alienated from society..............................
Admit wrongness.....................................
Understanding.........................................

Religious Words
Salvation
Self-love
God
Devil
Possession by evil spirits
Hypocrisy
Lover of darkness rather than light
Prodigal son
Repentance
Spiritual perception

When you’ve written them down, study your list. Break down the division—find the deeper
meaning. This is to help you work against the mechanical part of the mind.

HIGHER JUDGMENT

Ask yourself, “What was I about to say?” Since you only read a wrong inner script, all the parts
you read are wrong too. This exercise is designed to bring higher judgment down to the mechanical
inner script to correct it. The suspicion that something is superior to the old, mechanical, boring life
will produce the questioning of what you’re about to repeat. Awareness has peripheral vision. When
you’ve determined to give yourself little jolts, you can start to give up your familiar reactions,
phrases, posturing—what you ‘always say’. And now comes the spiritual revelation that you can
cross out that reaction. Dare darkness. Go right into the new situation, daring to have nothing to
say. See the blank space yawn before you and don’t rush in to fill it!

STUDY PEOPLE

Look at people who have no interest in studying truth, and make a list of their negative qualities. It
works every time! Watch their facial expressions, their words, their eyes, what they do or don’t do.
This is a good mental and spiritual habit which will gradually spread throughout your life.
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April

BANISH SELF-TORMENT

As an alert spiritual detective, detect your words and thoughts and actions and listen to yourself
talk to any person, anywhere, anytime, with the wish to be instructed by the Spirit of Truth. Watch
the revelation come that that was insecurity talking. Watch both verbal and mental statements. And
seeing your actual state, know there’s an alternative. We’re here to banish self-torment. Want to do
it? Do the exercise!

DISCOVER DECEPTION

Deception in any man or woman can never hide from clear thinking. So take one deception a day
and look for it in a particular human being, and then in yourself. It never fails, because a sea of
troubles is indeed a sea of troubles.

SELF-SURPRISING

To produce the necessary jolt to see that you don’t know where you are, learn self-surprising. Pull
a trick on the devil! (Do this exercise by yourself or with someone else.) When tempted to react with
a harsh word or hostile feeling, surprise yourself by being pleasant instead. This a guaranteed
method for building a life that is stronger than anything else in or out of life! You can know when you
are in an unpleasant position inside yourself. This knowing will bring the wish to test it: “I’m going to
find out what happens to this supposed ‘me’ if I catch it, scream ‘no’ and just remain pleasant.” No
mechanical, volcanic action. Just endure the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen. Then you
will understand what has enslaved you all these years.

KNOW THAT YOU ARE DOING IT

The next two times you flip a light switch, know that you’re doing it.
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May

HIGHER VALUES

Learn to understand that there are values that last far beyond time into eternity. Everything in time
is weakness, is evil, is harmful to me. So, be disloyal to your sick nature and say “NO” to your sick
thoughts, and to human sickies who seek to wreck you. The Spirit of Truth—which is strength—is
available. Just wipe that stupid, sick grin off your face! It is possible to listen and learn and become
strong.

STOP SELLING OUT

Why do you think about the thoughts of other people at all? As an experiment, try not to care what
another person thinks of you. No longer care whether anybody on earth cares for you! Selling your
soul means giving up the chance you have to be real.
GIVE AN HONEST ANSWER

Anytime you do or say anything to be safe, you’re in danger! Here’s a technique to use. Ask
yourself: “Am I a problem to myself?” You’re so dumb, so self-destructive, an honest answer would
always be “yes.” Whenever you come to a crossroads, you always dumbly think from self-interest
alone, trying to protect your miserable little world. Saying “yes” to this question is still on the level of
thought, but it is right thinking—it redirects the flood to the productive power of a higher energy.
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June

OBSERVE HOW IT AFFECTS YOU

Why do you want to have anything to do with sickness, with talking about useless things? Notice
how one sick comment can set you off. As an exercise, hear a comment from anyone, and observe
how it dictates to you your comment back to them. Notice the negative, defeated comments people
make, and how they lead you downhill—because you fell asleep. See how you are the slave of
everyone you meet.

ON YOUR WAY HOME

As you leave for home, ask yourself what kind of a person you’re going home with. If you have an
overwhelming feeling of despair and hopelessness, congratulations! – for you have spent your life
up until now covering up this fear of ceasing to be by not knowing that now is your eternity. Oh,
you’re so fast at covering up that sense of desolation, of inner wilderness: too bad. Do you have the
intelligence to do what you’ve been told to do? Go through your dark valley so you can get past it.

SHAKE YOURSELF AWAKE

Every five minutes shake your head awake from dreaming.

RESCUE IS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW

You don’t know how close you are to rescue. Please stop believing in yourself as you now are.
Catch yourself starting to feel dismayed, and say “NO”! Disconnect from the world’s vicious defeat.
Be very serious about this sentence, which scares the devil: “Just one more time.” It’s for a
self-awakening exercise. That is, you can form new right habits to counteract your old wrong ones.
Remember this—“Just one more time” and then the next and the next. Say, “I’m going to go against
everything I’ve known in life.” Your love for tears is your world! The other side is closer than you
think—right here, right now.
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July

NO MORE

Human beings are the same everywhere. Crabby, know-it-all, degenerating progressively. So
make this your philosophy of life, let it seep all through you: “That may have worked at one time, but
no more!” Really look at her, at him. What does he or she really want? (You are now teaching
yourself many lessons.) Say, without words, “What you’re saying has no connection with the new
me!” Now a small spark of light begins to talk for you: “I am really, in a small way, not me anymore.”
Say this mechanically at first—for after the saying comes the understanding, and after the
understanding comes the power. And then you’ll see yourself walking all alone, comfortably,
through life.

THE NUT LIST

It is possible to see how idiotic and foolish human beings are without feeling superior to them. As
an exercise, list human types you have observed or known.

WATCH THE TERROR GO AWAY

Study humans who seek to appear powerful and authoritative, and connect them with ghosts, who
are supposed to look scary, appearing to be light and having life. Light, however, dissipates ghosts,
reveals them as being nothing, which they always were! So catch yourself in a little bit of terror and
false anxiety. Realize there is only one thing you can trust, which is the light itself. Only that can
dissipate the ghosts, and when the ghosts go away, the terror goes away. See how mad your mind
really is—that’s the only chance you have.

SEE THE LIE

Observe how everybody uses physical objects to lie about themselves. Make a list.

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August
CHANGE YOUR NATURE FOREVER

If you do this exercise, your nature will change! (And post notes around your house showing you
that you don’t do the exercise.) For the rest of your life, you are never, never again going to
dominate ordinary social situations. Let the other person do the talking and you be passive. Just sit
back and let the other person blab on and on uninterrupted. Note everything about the
conversation, about them and about yourself, like how nervous you get. Then when they ask you a
question, notice how your favorite topic of conversation is yourself. There is no condition worse for
you than to stay glued to yourself. Unless you get rid of this false personality, the pain will never go!
For the pain exists nowhere outside of you.

REFRIGERATOR

For the next seven days, every time you open the refrigerator door, first know that you are. To be
gone from yourself at any time is wrong.

I CAN’T AFFORD IT ANYMORE!

It is bad for you to be sick and neurotic and unhappy. Look at who you are trusting. See how
dumb you really are. You are worshipping self-sickness, trusting it to lead you out. So, suddenly
examine your state from time to time, see how you operate wrongly and badly, and realize that
remaining in self-punishment is bad for you. You are terrified right now that, if you were to
understand this, something would be taken from you, that you wouldn’t know what to do. Exactly!
Don’t spend one more day going on as you are, afraid you’ll lose something good. What do you
have that’s good? Nothing! All you have is weakness, cowardice, a sheep-like mind. If truth takes
that away, you’ll be able to walk free and live the life you want. What is going to be taken away from
you is everything that has been keeping you depressed and gloomy and one of the many sickies in
this sick world. What would be different would be to have no reaction to others’ behavior toward
you, from your mind or conditioned emotions. Just say, “No, I can’t afford it any more!” and in the
silence that follows, you will understand other people for the very first time in your life.

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September

INVITE SOMETHING HIGHER

“If all you can think of is getting advantages, you’re always losing. You have ‘pillows’ in your mind
which prevent you from seeing how weak and vulnerable you are. You’re sitting in a little corner of
your mind, thinking you’re safe. You’re not. You’re only lying to yourself. True goodness is only what
is higher than your present nature, which means you must study your present nature. As an
exercise, see how your dress and words and behavior are constantly telling everybody who and
what you are. Since imagination has taken the place of reality, you must first destroy imagination in
your life—by listening to yourself, watching yourself behave, actually catching yourself in your
secret thoughts with your hidden motives—so you can in time learn what is good for you, so you
can choose the right over what is habitual and easy and popular. All this has to be broken by
something you have invited in, consciousness. To get your reward, you must do your work. You
must follow the exercises!”

STUDY YOUR FEAR

“Practice this exercise intensely for one full week, and be pleased and delighted by what you’ll
learn. You’re to study your fear of somebody being angry or insolent toward you. You will see, for
example, that a wrathful human being is completely sick. Why do you want his or her approval?
Learn that the fear is a false state in you. As you get healthier, see how everyone is far sicker than
you knew! Watch everything and the end result will be complete freedom from yourself.”

WITHDRAW SELF-DESCRIPTION

“As a practical experiment, when you’re asked this question, answer it silently to yourself, and
especially notice the inner process that happens immediately after you read the question as you try
to answer it. Just forget the outer world for a moment. Now, please tell me who you are? Notice how
the first thing you did was to start to think, and to think with memory—which is all utter nonsense.
You are nothing that thought can describe. You have got to stop describing yourself. You will know
who you are when you no longer try to answer the question. When you realize you are nothing you
think, you are a free person. Withdraw all self-description.”

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October

COOPERATE WITH TRUTH

“You are going to have to find some crack in the wall of egotism so you can begin to see what it
means to cooperate with Truth. For example, notice the emotional states as they pass through you
daily. Are they pleasurable ones? Who calls them pleasurable? A very lost and antagonistic nature
does. You don’t know the tricks that your emotions are playing on you, unseen to you. You have
made a horrible mistake in your inner life, which is to call your self-harm (lust, revenge, etc.)
pleasure. Why would you be so evil as to feel pleasure when your enemy is hurt? Wouldn’t you
have to be a devil to enjoy that? You are! When ‘you’ exist, all you are is evil. All you do is tell lies
all day long, secretly destroying yourself! Why would you mislabel things, calling something that is
evil good? It’s so that this self can continue to exist as evil. If you saw all this, it would crumble. So
you have to take an extremely close look at what you call pleasure—which is setting yourself up for
greater destruction, all based on keeping the ‘I’ intact. What this ‘I’ calls pleasure can now be seen
through by your new nature, which is trying right here and now to develop.”

REGARDLESS

“Make a list: Where are you arguing for the devil over your ‘rights’? You have only one right and
that is to learn to be a pleasant person regardless of circumstances. Understand thoroughly that
you’re living from a false bundle of needs, and you’ll never again care what comes your way in
life—because you’ll be living in eternity!”

BE A THOUGHT WATCHER

“Take one instance of a depressed, forlorn, heavy-spirited state and trace it back to its origination
point in some thought or comment. Thought-watching is absolutely necessary for you to catch
thoughts and comments passing through your mind: false elation, gloom, etc. No matter what you’re
doing, be a thought-watcher. Watch them until they dissolve and watch your life and mind become
new and fresh.”

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November

THE INVISIBLE WORLD

“Your mind must surrender to the spirit. (Leave hypocrisy to the spiritual kidders.) So, see how
long you can go during today simply alternating between practical thought and spiritual
self-watching, which are both good. Don’t fall asleep by going into negative thought, loving self-pity.
This means to study and put first the spiritual world. Think of everything in life as belonging either to
the visible or the invisible world—and remember, the invisible world precedes and creates the
visible world. So why would you ever try to change the physical? When you understand real
causality, the last thing you’ll be interested in is altering the visible. You’ll want to spend as much
time as possible in the invisible world!”

HOW TO TRULY PUT AN END TO WHAT IS FALSE

 “All imitation is a burden. Mimicry is sad. Catch the strain and lack of naturalness in being an
imitator and the uncertainty over whom to imitate. To leave the desert, cease following all human
beings. Just be lost right in the middle of it all, until all that is left in your life is complete despair,
complete hopelessness. Note how you’re following false guides, unnatural ways out. Despair is
great, as long as that’s all there is. But you always seek a way out. Simply collapse right in the
middle of the emptiness with no hopes at all, and don’t fear this state. Go for one small victory a
day, a small bearing of your loneliness with no attempt to end it. This is ending it!”

FLIP THE SWITCH

“Just before flipping the light switch on the wall, flip a light switch in your mind, and know you’re
flipping the switch on the wall.”

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December

BE MORE MATURE

“Whenever anybody does what is wrong, do what is right! Say, “I really could have been more
mature—I didn’t need to be so childish.” Cancel time and space, and stay where you are right now!”

DEFEAT THE ‘OR-ELSE’ MONSTER

“Detect the threat, for anyone who threatens you is sick, and have nothing to do with anyone who
uses the ‘or-else’ monster. You don’t need them. Say “I don’t need you, I don’t want you.” And isn’t
it ridiculous that you intimidate yourself all day long. God is here for a purpose—all you have to do
is ask. Don’t want to stay you. God will help you to choose something higher than yourself.”

RAISE YOUR LEVEL

“To attain the level where you are neither attracted nor repelled by the world and all it contains,
know that you are now living from attraction and repulsion — so that you no longer know how to
appear or what to choose. You forget your spiritual promises to yourself. Only you can keep your
promises. God/Truth/Reality is above all, but you let that petty thieving mind steal what you could
have. You have to have more problems so you can use them to grow! Why, you have griefs you’ve
never even met. You want to deny to yourself that you’ve ever promised yourself to get straightened
out. You have (and everyone has) an unseen hysterical shriek inside of you. Some event could
produce this result in you! As long as you have it in you, you’re a terrible danger to yourself and to
others. This is part of your work, to invite spiritual help to dissolve it. When you lose yourself, there’ll
be no fear of exploding, for there’ll be nobody to explode. You do not have to fear the shriek, the
explosion.”

ABOUT TO READ

“The next time you pick up anything to read, know that you’ve picked it up.”

2000

THE PROBLEM … THE SOLUTION

It will help us get our minds in order to write down the problems and solutions to them on paper.
Draw a line down the center of the paper; head one column “The Problem” and the other “The
Solution.” Some examples are as follows:

The Problem

The Solution

1. I misunderstand the world.

2. I am my own enemy.
3. I fear the loss of someone.
4. I fear there is no answer.

1. Make sense to myself.

2. Drop associative thinking.
3. Refuse usual responses.
4. Study while being afraid.
INTIMIDATION

The state of feeling intimidated blocks your awareness of what is going on, so it is necessary to
observe this.
Someone you are afraid of makes a minor contemptuous remark and you don’t even notice it.
You grin weakly. Will you stop that defensive weak smile when people make cutting remarks to you.
KEEP THAT FACE OF YOURS STRAIGHT. Look them right in the eye and send them a message
like “Knock it off.”
Did you know that if you were being intimidated by the six billion people on earth and were free
there would be no reaction. This can be yours.

3 WORK ASSIGNMENTS

WHO SAID THAT? You can begin to catch your false behavior by asking the question “Who said
that?” and you will catch false personality being pleasant, sarcastic, and so on. As often as you can,
you will interrupt yourself and say “Who said that?” and if it is negative in any way at all, that is the
invented self speaking in your name.
FACIAL EXPRESSIONS. Watch how influenced you are by facial expressions. Catch as many as
you can as often as you can every day. Say to yourself “That severe look has bluffed me for the last
time.”
HOW TO BUILD STRENGTH. The next time you find yourself in a strange embarrassing situation,
caught out of a role, and you catch yourself saying “What if people should find me out,” why don’t
you find yourself out.
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February

ACCUSATIONS

The cause and the cure of your pain is in you. You keep it going by answering the world. For
example, why do you answer an accusation from inside or outside you? You answer because you
want to protect yourself. Why don’t you just sit back and listen to what is being said very attentively
and not do, say or feel anything in return. When you first start this you won’t know what to do, which
is the precise objective of it. You’ll be scared and confused of what is going to happen to you. You
always knew what to do before — you got nervous, rageful, or passed it off as a joke. The demons
inside you will try to force you to go into the grab bag of your usual responses because they know
they are in danger.
Do practice this very simple, very basic, workable and profound technique of sitting back.

APPEARANCES
 You will change your life to the degree that you are willing to appear foolish in your own eyes and
everyone else’s on earth. Just now you don’t want to appear foolish—you want to appear wise and
strong. You believe in appearances and take the appearance as the state. You are deceived by all
these people because you’re deceived by the people inside of you.

EXPLAINING

When someone pokes and pries into your life, say inwardly, and outwardly if necessary, “I don’t
wish to explain.” After bearing it consciously and nervously for the first 50 times, the trembling will
begin to fade away the 51st time.

RIGHT THOUGHT

Make a concentrated effort at remembering a simple task. When I call for the break, you will rise
from your chair knowing that you rose. You won’t do it without thinking about it—you will do it while
thinking about it so that you know you got out of your chair. Between now and the time I call for the
break, you will repeatedly remind yourself of this task. After you have done it, you will do a second
and a third and thereby gain momentum.
You will find that if you practice this you will open up the door quite consciously because you have
a right habit of reminding yourself what you have to do.
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March

SELF-INTEREST

Unless you make super effort to see that you are completely self-absorbed, you will never, ever
know while you are alive that there is another way to go through life where you don’t say “How is
this going to affect me.”
Exercise: Tomorrow, any time, I want you to see how long you can go without mental
self-involvement. When you see an object, I want you to see if you involve yourself in it. Example:
“Well, I don’t like watermelons.”

THE STORM IS IN YOU

“My curse of the storm is the only storm there is.” Your disappointment is the storm. You caused
the storm itself, now you can complain about the conditions you caused.
When you complain about anything, that anything you are complaining about is you yourself. You
think it is out there. The way that person treated you. “Look what they have done to me.” That is the
storm. It comes from the false way you think, from your undeveloped emotions, from your childish
reactions. If you haven’t got to the point in your inner journey yet where you know that you curse the
whole world, you are going to have to go through disappointment after disappointment. When you
are willing to die and fall down on the ground psychologically, Truth will be able to come and talk to
you because now you will listen where you would never listen before.

FIND WAYS TO DISAPPOINT PEOPLE

How deeply we are in love with not trying not to disappoint people, so as to retain our self-image
of being nice and kindly. We will sacrifice anything to get approval. We don’t want to be afraid of
displeasing people. There are little phrases, such as, “Oh, I don’t mind.” You do mind. You had
better voluntarily start making yourself afraid. Effective as of now, you will find small ways to dare to
disappoint people who want something from you. Go home and make a list of small things that you
are afraid to do and do them when the opportunity arises. Get 10 or 15. Example of list: (1) Please
return this to me, Mary. (2) No, I can’t take your children to school. (3) No. No. No.
It doesn’t matter what happens.

YOU START DOING SOMETHING RIGHT FOR YOURSELF.

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April

SELF-RESPONSIBILITY

There was once a man who wanted to raise his two children by right laws. So one day he
gathered his family in the living room and said he had an important lesson to tell them. He then
looked at his son and said, “Jimmy, the next door neighbor said you’ve been taking a shortcut
through his garden on your way to school. Because of this, you’ve spoiled some flower beds. He
was very nice about it and when I asked him how much the damage would cost, he said $3 for a
packet of seeds. Now, Jimmy, I want you to get a job to earn the money and then go to our
neighbor with the $3.”
The father then turned towards his daughter, “Pamela, your friend, Gloria, called and told me you
had borrowed a book. Every time she asked you to return it you evaded her. The fact is you have
lost the book. The price of replacement is $4. Now, Pamela, you have to earn the money, buy a
book, and return it to Gloria in person.
I am going to give you a fundamental law of life, which, if you ignore, will make you unhappy.”

THE WRONGDOER MUST CORRECT THE MISTAKE.

THE WRONGDOER MUST CORRECT THE LOSS.
THE WRONGDOER MUST PAY THE LOSS IN PERSON.

“Now, children, there are parts of your mind which don’t accept this lesson because human
beings cause damage but want someone else to pay for it. There is no escaping the law that you
must pay for your own damage. In human law you might be able to get away with it by blaming
someone, but you can’t get away with it inwardly because the very transgression of the law of
rightness is punishment itself.
It is the knowledge of this law and the willingness to obey it that will free you from punishment,
both interior and exterior. Correction depends upon admission of the wrong and then doing what
you can to correct it inwardly and outwardly. The principle of this law of self-responsibility leads to
eternal life.”

BE SEEN THROUGH

Say to yourself and to the world, “You go right ahead and see through me all you want. I am not
going to hide anymore. I am not going to pretend anymore. I am not going to pretend that I am
intelligent, decent, in control, and so on. I plead that you see through me as the faker I am.” (Note:
This is about exposing your phoniness, not your private life.)

WHAT I DO WHEN I’M SCARED

On a piece of paper write, “What I do when I am scared.” Then list numerically what you do. Keep
it simple. Write down everything you remember. This includes all the centers: physical, mental,
emotional, and the sex center.
Example: I get tense. I get anxious. I get jealous. I retreat.
The longer the list the better work you are doing, and the more you know about the machine. With
that knowledge, something higher than the machine will repair it for you.
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May

BLOCKAGE

Blockage, opposition, what you call the enemy is thought itself. You have problems. The reason
you have problems is because you THINK you have problems. There would be no problems unless
there was a person there to refer them back to—I—“I have problems.” You think of ways to solve
them. You think you must get back at that person who opposed you. You must win over that event.
The thinking about it IS the obstacle. You are using the mind to try and correct the mind. It can
never be done. When you see the blockage, this insight is the action. Insight and action are the
same thing.

CRISES FEED THE DEVIL

Your prayers, your requests, are what you are. Example: When you see that house you could
have bought for $20,000, and it’s now $70,000, you feel regret. The house is your crisis. You
prayed for and got regret. There are hundreds of daily crises that arise. You think people have more
money, have more friends, are younger, happier and healthier. Watch these thoughts over and over
until you see what you are doing against yourself. You are praying to the devil for destruction. If you
watch this, the day will come when you see the house you could have bought for one-third its
current price, and you are just about to fall under again, when you remember what you’ve learned
and the mechanical motion stops. When it stops there will be no pain, no regret, no feeling sorry for
yourself. That little success is all you need. The time will come when you no longer even look at the
house.
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June

HOW NEUROSES WORK

Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do, and no
matter what the results are, you will win an ego victory. That means this. When you send your
desires out into the world: 1) You will get what you want, 2) You won’t get what you want. If you get
what you want, the pseudo nature says, “I have at last been given what I so richly deserve, ”and the
sickness feels affirmed. If you don’t get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel
affirmed because you get a feeling, and that’s all that neurosis wants is a feeling.

WRONG SELF-INVOLVEMENT

Watch your mental conversations. Watch your conversation with other people and you will notice
how “I” is the most important word in your life. Everything revolves around “I”. I am aware you have
to use “I” in practical situations, such as “I want the car repaired.” I am talking about the
psychological “I”. Effective as of now, you will catch yourself saying “I”, which is false self-reference,
and you will say “THERE.” For example, instead of saying “I am angry,” say “There is anger.”

START DISAPPOINTING OTHERS

You had better start disappointing people and not feeling guilty about it. To be a true person you
had better start saying NO. God has not put you at the mercy of this world. You are now helpless to
your own neuroses; your own misunderstanding. Don’t ask anyone for anything. Go through the
agony, the hell of losing everything and everyone. Walk away and if they follow you, walk away
again because they are going to con you. They don’t want you. They want to keep their sickness in
place.
You can let reality say NO to sickness. And as you do this over the months and years, you will get
thrilled over your new power, which you know isn’t yourself.
You will now be extra alert of how you fear to disappoint people who want something from you
and you will quietly sit there and say NO, NO, NO! Ten thousand times if necessary. If they get
disappointed in you and their disappointment turns to wrath, so what! Why don’t you face the wrath
and the sarcastic remarks. They were there all the time. You are in danger from what you don’t see
in others and in yourself. Reality will deliver you from all dangers, now and forever.
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July
SWITCH YOUR ATTENTION

Switch your attention from self-torturing thoughts to self-enlightening thoughts.

SWEET LOLLIPOPS

Write a list of the sweet lollipops that people say to you to make you feel good, such as flattery.
“You look like you’ve lost 20 pounds.” When you refuse the lollipops, you will feel the strength of
rightness in you.

YOUR GOOD AND REAL GOODNESS

You do a good act because you are not good inside. Anyone can give you money and a pat on
the shoulder. Understand why you are good to other people. This will take 50 bricks off your back.
Are you “good” because of the gratitude on the face of the person you are giving aid to? Is it the
formation of the old self-image of being “good”? The hope for some kind of future reward here or in
heaven? I order you to stop doing anything for anyone. You just can’t get over being “kindly.” There
is no way you can be good so stop trying. Remember the last time you comforted someone or you
gave them something. Couldn’t you see that there’s a part of you that wants to be free of that.

SECURITY

To feel “right”, to feel comfortable, is what keeps us asleep. Fill in the blank and see what keeps
you asleep. “I will feel right when ___________.”

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August

SAY “NO!”

When you feel a negativity coming on or are in a negative state, say “NO!” Get a right idea in
your mind and do it. Example: “I am going to walk consciously; I am going to read a right book.” Be
aware of how you would rather go asleep. When you meet an inner or outer challenge, turn it
towards staying awake. You have to work against yourself. You are the only enemy you have.

REMEMBER THE PAIN

Mr. Howard said, “If I forget my shocking pain, I will have to repeat it. Remember it.” Let’s say
something “good” happens in the exterior world. For example, I get a raise. I then forget the pain I
had before I got the raise, so I am right back where I started.
The next time I feel pain (psychological) I will stay with it. If I stick with it, it will go away of itself,
which is not a distraction. I am going to remember it as long as I can. If it comes back, I am going to
stay with it, remember it.

PLEASE TRUTH

You waste so much energy by trying to please other people. You are trying to please false ideas
of who you are: A considerate, good, loyal, etc., person.
Do you want to please your wife, your family, and that social organization. Here you are 40 to 60
years old and you go to your relatives, that social event, and try to please them.
Why don’t you sometime try to please the Truth that is within you, instead of trying to please
others when there is no pleasing of them anyway.

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September

WHAT IS MY STATE RIGHT NOW?

Vernon Howard told us to force ourselves to do this exercise:

Ask “What is my state right now?” Go through the day and night asking yourself that question.
Some answers to that question could be:
(a) Practical everyday thought (Baking the cake, etc.)
(b) Practical spiritual thought (Trying to understand, make connections about esoteric ideas.)
(c) Confused (Don’t go into despair over confusion and say “Why am I so confused, why does it
exist, etc.” Instead sit back and observe it. Say to it “I am not going to be afraid of you one second
longer.”)
(d) False enthusiasm
(e) Defensive...........and so on.

BUFFERS
 The majority of people don’t know how to live without the wall. They need the wall to tell them who
they are. If you give up the wall, which means giving up you, and get into the battle, this is the
beginning of freedom. Our neurosis creates and demands walls because we don’t know who we
are. Try 5 seconds without a wall, then 10, then 20.

PUT ATTENTION ON THE RIGHT THING

Mr. Howard likened our behavior to that of trained animals when we try to live up to what society
expects of us. Endure the discomfort of not doing what another expects of you. When you try to see
why something happened to you psychologically and pay attention to it, it will not happen again.
Mr. Howard then illustrated with a story of a man being attacked by a lion in the jungle. He gets
up, grabs a stick and starts chasing the lion. His mind is so engulfed with the thought of punishing
the lion he is unaware of a tiger slinking up to claw him.

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October

FREEDOM FROM MENTAL TORMENT

Mr. Howard said, “One feature of a tormented soul is a compulsion to pass it on to your wife, your
husband, to everyone you meet. All that giddiness, that confusion, the madness has to go
somewhere and it will go to anyone gullible enough to listen.”
Here’s how to work on hostile forces:
1. Do not fear them.
2. Do not obey them. (We obey them because we think they are necessary; because we think they
give us life. Right disobedience is part of your work.)
3. Do not give them attention. (To fear them is to give them wrong attention. The right attention is
fighting properly, i.e., not creating an opposite, etc.)

Descriptions of Mental Tormenting Thoughts

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. One prominent characteristic—an animal-like characteristic—is to secretly sneer at everyone,
even those they claim to love.
 4. They force you to pretend interest in some trivial event, in nonsensical solutions to life, then
leave you exhausted.
5. They love to predict and talk about calamities, but never tell you that they cause them.
6. They disguise themselves as friends, helpers, neighbors, good people—then suddenly drop
the role when they have used you for what they can get.
7. 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.
8. They hate you, consider you their permanent enemy.
9. They torment you with suspicion and then claim that the suspicion is helpful and necessary.
10. They cunningly promise you rich rewards for listening to them, then desert you to suffer alone
with your false gains.
11. Their evil thrill depends upon your cooperation, for without your ignorant gullibility, they cannot
exist.
12. They sneak evil thoughts into your mind and then threaten you with hell for having them.
13. They tell you to hate God and then say you are of the devil for doing so.
14. They insist that confusion is necessary and then demand that you try to prove otherwise.
15. They succeed in urging you to pass your torment onto others.
16. The last thing they want you to see is their lack of real power for they know that that would be
their finish.
17. They tell you it is clever or heroic to behave in a certain way and then make you ashamed for
doing so.

Some of the above descriptions were later included in a booklet

by Vernon Howard entitled FREEDOM FROM HARMFUL VOICES.
This booklet is now included in the book SOLVED—The Mystery of Life.

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November

ESTABLISH THE MOOD WITH EVERYONE YOU MEET

You don’t know what to do when you look at another face, even a face you’ve seen a thousand
times before, do you? You study them to get your clue. If they’re laughing, you laugh. If they’re
solemn, you’re solemn. WHY DON’T YOU ESTABLISH THE MOOD WITH EVERYONE YOU
MEET? Why don’t you be 100% spiritual, therefore, 100% in charge of yourself, and you take the
lead. Watch what happens. The first thing that’ll happen is that you’ll be so at ease. You’re not
concerned with any wrong reactions that they may have, whether they’re angry or whether they’re
trying to trick you because you know what’s going on. You’re in charge of yourself. No one else can
be in charge of you.

FORGIVENESS
 What you really long for is to feel right about yourself. One obstacle in your way of working is to
feel unforgiven. You try to do good acts to cancel the bad. As you progressively become spiritually
good, not humanly good, you’ll understand that forgiveness is the same as waking up; as instant
recovery. When you instantly recover, you’re forgiven for any badness you’ve ever done. When you
fall asleep and go under the doom spell, no problem, just relax the physical body, see and know.
Consider, ponder, and never forget this: YOUR AIM IN LIFE IS NOT TO DO BUT TO BE. Only a
tired man can be saved. If you are weary enough, tired enough, willing enough, God is right there.
Here are two guarantees: If you go along with the world, it’ll destroy you. If you go along with the
teachings, they’ll heal you.

SPIRITUAL WORK IS SECRET WORK

Spiritual work is secret work. Withdraw yourself secretly, spiritually from any individual whom you
secretly depend on for anything at all. It can never even be a memory. Just thinking about them
seems to give you comfort, but it keeps you tied to the past. Work in secret to cut yourself off from
that person who is dominating you. Don’t say a word to them. Inside yourself make the spiritual life
the one love of your life.

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December

THE SECRET FOR A HEAVENLY EXISTENCE

The secret for a heavenly existence is to learn how to discontinue yourself from moment to
moment. This means that you are mentally vigilant at all times so that you can see with your
spiritual eye every thought as it enters your mind, and then be very careful that that thought does
not form an “I”, a self, a me, a mine. This in turn means that when a thought appears it is going to
be recognized. You must not try to stop it and claim it as your personal property. It is the spiritual
nature of thought to appear before you and fade out of your mind. Just notice the thought and let it
go.

BEING TRULY SORRY

People do everything wrong with their blunders. They will do everything but simply be sorry for
them. Being sorry really means that there is no way in this universe that you could ever do it again.
Being truly sorry recognizes that you’re the cause of that bad event that hurt someone else. You
also realize the reason it happened was because you were a mechanical, unconscious human
being who was possessed by a foreign entity from the depths below. Your recognition of being
possessed must precede being sorry.
When you know you allowed yourself to be taken over, then you’re sorry that you were so weak,
so gullible, so stupid. The realization of that makes you determined in the right way — determination
is not enough but it’s a good start — to not do it again. But you will do it again, if not in that precise
fashion, you will do it again in another way. Instead of making an enemy of that man by making a
curt remark to him, you will make a curt remark to your wife or girlfriend. You did it again. It is
necessary to know when you did it again that you did it again, When you say, “I don’t want to be
possessed any more,” you are now beginning to feel sorry for what you have done and for what you
have been.

SPIRITUAL SERIOUSNESS

Start now to have spiritual seriousness. This means no more joking at the wrong time. No more
laughing at things that are not laughable. From now on you will not make jokes about staggering
drunks going down the street and you will not speak lightly of that woman who can’t stop criticizing.
You may say, “Ah, she’s a nut.” She is a nut but you have to understand that, below what appears
to be an amusing character trait, is a perniciousness that you must see without trying to relieve
yourself by laughing at it.
Always take wrongness very, very seriously. Don’t allow levity or lightness to enter into it. The
reason you’ve done this in the past is because you sense the dreadfulness of that person’s
condition. It frightens you and so you joke about it. Spiritual seriousness is an enormous power.
You will understand this as you practice it.

1999

STUDY INSTEAD OF FIGHT

This sentence should be enough for you to study for the next year:

STUDY INSTEAD OF FIGHT

In order to do that you have to be aware of how much you fight life. Try to see the wide variety of
ways you fight, resist, strike out, cry out, instead of just standing there and studying your condition.
Example: Watch your resistance to something higher than you.

BE IN CHARGE OF YOUR LIFE

Suppose you are in a thick jungle with a cabin in the center. Your friends come and visit you.
Among them are the hyena, the vulture, the little lamb and the crocodile. You begin to notice how
these friends have taken over your home. They eat your food, watch your TV and come and go as
they wish. You finally decide to take a stand. You go out to the porch where they are relaxing and
tell them:
“This is my home. This is my life. I am going to take charge of it from now on. Don’t you dare
come knocking on my door again and five minutes later try to con me. You are either going to
behave in a right relationship to me or you can just turn out into that dark jungle and stay there.
What I am trying to tell you is that from now on there is a new relationship between us in which I, a
working human being not a fawning human being, am in charge of you and this jungle. And if you
forget, I will remind you again. I will remind you until you hear and you may disappear.”
Most of the animals snarl and retreat into the jungle. They know they cannot con you any more
and the only place they can live is in the jungle. A few remain. They are the ones who want
something different than being an animal.
You find out there is no loneliness as long as you are what you’re supposed to be: a self-complete
human being not needing animals at all because the animal part of you has gone.

DON’T IMPOSE YOUR THOUGHTS ON OTHERS

Have the courtesy and decency to let other people think the thoughts they want to think instead of
you imposing your thoughts on them. The reason you do this—yelling, interrupting and wanting to
be the center of the conversation—is because you want to try to prove to yourself that your
thoughts are real; that they are important and that they back up a very real person.

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February

HOW GROWTH PROCEEDS

Weariness with life produces a yearning for something else.

A yearning for something else produces investigation.
Investigation produces a submission to spiritual lessons.
Submission to spiritual lessons produces the rule for self-noticing.
Self-noticing produces self-shocking.
Self-shocking produces new thinking.
New Thinking produces higher values.
Higher values produce the urge for inner change.
The urge for inner change produces the wish for harder work.
The wish for harder work produces insight into saving energy.
The insight into saving energy produces cosmic confidence.

TRUE CONTROL

If you are compelled to think about the condition, it controls you. If you don’t need to think about it,
you control it. But this kind of control is unique. It is a state in which there is neither a controller nor
anything to be controlled. It is non mental control, something like a man in good health who never
needs to think about controlling illness.

CONSCIOUS SPEECH UPLIFTS BEING

This is an attack on muttering. Speak loud and clear, with head up. This will tell our emotions and
mind not to be a mutterer and not to be afraid of the consequences.

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March

TAKE THE ADVICE OF THE ANGEL

A veteran angel was showing a novice angel what life is really like. The veteran angel took the
novice to a large office with hundreds of desks where people were working. At one desk a man
lifted his waste basket and took it to a lady at another desk. They chatted friendly but before leaving
he dumped his trash on her head. The lady then took her waste basket and went to another man’s
desk. They talked and when she departed she emptied the contents of her basket onto his head.
The veteran angel explained, “We are seeing what these people are doing psychologically. There
is a way to react correctly when the trash bearer comes to your desk. I have a number of signs
which come from a higher source, and maybe by associating with them you will be able to let them
work for you. You will see how you feel guilty at the start but you’ll begin to see the beauty of doing
what is right even if it hurts the other person. When you do and say what is right you are not
responsible for their hurts. Here are a number of signs for you to hold up as the situation demands:

Don’t dump your trash on my desk.

 Who said I had to explain myself to you?
If you want to fight, find another enemy.
What if I made the demands on you that you make on me?
I won’t lift a finger to solve the problem you have caused.
I was not born to be the ear to your chattering mouth.
No, I don’t owe you a thing.
You are several years too late to play that trick on me.
How evil of you to try to drag me down to your low level.

STEALING ATTENTION

“You will start to stop letting others steal your attention. Because you are asleep, you think it’s
natural and friendly. You don’t know how you resent it. Watch for instances where people attempt to
steal your attention. You don’t want people to steal your money, but you let them steal your psychic
energy. For one thing, you will no longer feel obligated to participate in a social conversation. Save
your energy for the enormous task of waking up.”

SIMPLIFY YOUR WORK

Make an effort to simplify your work on yourself. Use simple words. If you have hatred, use the
word “hatred,” not “a mild resentment.” Don’t use nice words to complicate the task. Use the words
that hurt. This shows us what we are really like.

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April

BE ALL ALONE

Be all alone until you can’t bear it any more and then make yourself more alone. This doesn’t
mean to go and sit by yourself in your room. It means to be alone wherever you are and not be
stolen.

INVITE THE SHOCK

Why do you wait for exterior events to get the shock? Why don’t you deliberately be in an attitude
of saying, “I am going out into this world, down where I work or in the home, etc., and be in a state
where I am going to watch what happens to me as a result of getting that letter, watching that
newscast, etc. I am going to invite my own disappointments” (which are already there waiting to
come up). Invite the shock by not protecting yourself so you can go to the next step. DO IT!

REMEMBERING PRACTICAL MATTERS

Think of two or three small things you have to tell someone. Instruct yourself to remember to tell
the person. Expand on the number of things until you become confused and then you will see how
you really are.

Special Lesson for this Month

Questions to ask yourself at the end of the day.

“Did I impose myself on anyone today?
“Did I allow freedom to others?”
“Did I listen attentively when someone spoke?”

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May

DO RIGHT

Do right even if tempted to do wrong.

Do right even if it means losing a friend.
Do right even if you don’t understand why you should.
Do right even if you fear the consequences.
Do right even if you don’t want to.
Do right even if it feels strange.
Do right even if it arouses criticism.
Do right even if it’s you against the world.

BE DEFEATED

Suffer the glorious victory of being defeated. Let yourself be defeated and see how you sense
you have done something right for the first time. Let all your friends leave you. Don’t get the new
home. Don’t be popular. Lose everything, including the wish to fight for yourself in the wrong way.
BE PERSISTENT

“There was once a School of True Wisdom. An angel stood on guard before it, blocking entrance
at the front gate. One morning a seeker approached the gate and asked admittance. The angel told
him, ‘If I step aside and you enter here you will see that you have been a shameless faker all your
life.’ The seeker answered, ‘ I wish to enter. Please step aside.’ The angel then said to the seeker, ‘
If I step aside and you enter you must abandon all your usual and beloved hopes and ambitions.’
The seeker said, ‘I wish to come in. Please step aside.’ The angel continued, ‘If I step aside and
you enter here you will come face to face with every evil and secret thought you have ever thought.’
The seeker replied, ‘I wish to go inside. Please step aside.’ The angel smiled, and stepped aside.”

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June

ADMIRATION

Admiration is a terrible thing. It is division. Admiring God or someone else means you are apart.
The idea stands between you and the good life. How can I put an end to what I call “me”, and there
may be more to this than I imagine—the little girl—the daughter—the mother—the wife—the
husband—the son, and so on.

BECOME A SPIRITUAL DETECTIVE

Go out into the world and select one, two or three people with whom you associate constantly.
Very secretly watch this person all day long and notice a number of things about him. Notice
specifically, as examples, the following characteristics and features. Notice when watching him what
state he’s in. A person might be dominated by:

— An attempt to appear wise

by aggressive ignorance.
— Pouncing upon another’s mistakes.
— Pleading for acceptance.
— A demand for attention.
— Wishing to appear generous.
— Unconscious blabbermouthery.
— Anxious self-explanation.
— Pleasure over evil victory.
— Boasting about a trivial success.
— Wishing to appear important.
— Embarrassment over a mistake.
— A desire to hurt someone.

— Reluctant agreement.
— Not knowing what to say.
— Nervous indecision.
— A wish for flattery.
— A closed mind.
— Self-centered apathy.
— Sudden insolence.
— Pretense of happiness.
— Unloading his troubles.
— Suppressed hostility.
— General unpleasantness.
— Hinting for a favor.
— Unawareness of self.

Notice how a person changes his behavior many times a day. Your part is simply to see this.
Don’t judge. If you do you won’t be able to do the second part of the exercise, which is to see the
same thing in yourself, i.e., to turn your attention equally on yourself from moment to moment. This
knowledge of human behavior will lead you to God.

DECISIONS

Everyone you meet will try to get you to think for them, make a decision. As an exercise you will
not only think for yourself, you will, as a conscious project, think for others. Be aware that they are
shoving it on to you. Accept this work and watch your resentment. You are deliberately burdening
yourself. Double your burden. Force your brain to wake up.

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July

LEAVE THE EVENT ALONE

Begin to practice detachment of the event. Practice watching clearly an event in your life — an
unkind remark for instance — and see how you are driven frantic to try and do something about it.
Watch the urging to answer with a snappy, sarcastic remark. Begin to see that something, of which
you are unaware, is living your life for you, and it will continue until you start to work.
 Wrong Way
1. The event
2. Wrong thought reaction
3. Arising of false self
4. Creation of problem

Right Way
1. The event
2. Practical thought reaction
3. No arising of false self
4. No problem

OBSERVE YOUR THOUGHTS

Sit or lie relaxed and watch what is going on in your mind. Whatever you think —that is what you
are at that moment. You will see there is no controller—just vagabond thoughts. You will also see
that thoughts come to you rather than you promoting your own thoughts. Look at these thoughts as
if they had no connection with your real nature, which they don’t.

IDLE CURIOSITY

Watch how much attention you waste in nervous glances at nothing. When walking down the
street you see that person with the nice dress and you are lost. It satisfies your idle curiosity. That’s
what you let capture your attention for a minute, or five or so. Watch how anything attractive or
repulsive can take you away from yourself. You have your reward. I assure you there are much
better things to do with your life.

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August

START YOUR DAY RIGHT

Start your day in an upward direction and the rest of the day will follow the uphill path. Here are
three methods:

A. When you begin to awaken do not let yourself fall back into another minute or two of sleep. Do
the opposite. Stay awake and deliberately force yourself out of bed. This will give you a mild but
healthy jolt.
B. As you slide out of bed be conscious of the exact moment when your foot touches the floor. Feel
the weight of your foot against the rug. This is an interesting experience that will keep you
conscious of other small daily events.

C. As you walk away from the bed, notice everything possible about yourself. Notice that you might
feel drowsy or depressed or uncertain. Then actually shake your head as an act of shaking the
sleepiness from your life.

These methods instruct body and mind and emotions to wake up spiritually. They make your
whole nature conscious. And conscious action is true power.
If it seems difficult to work against your usual habits, remember this spiritual law: Do things the
easy way and you perpetuate the hard life. But do things the hard way and you finally come to the
easy life.

NEVER GROW OLD

There is a certain very insidious trap called “Growing Old.” I want you to know that millions of
human beings on earth fall into the trap of playing an old man or woman. Almost all people do
because they love playing an old person. They say, “I have contributed my part to the world; I have
taken my responsibility; now I can sit back.
NEVER PERMIT YOURSELF TO GROW OLD. YOUR MIND AND SPIRIT CAN ALWAYS BE
YOUNG.

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September

THINKING ABOUT OTHERS

When thinking about another, you must realize that you ARE thinking about him. Then ask
yourself “What did I just think about him?” It is a valid thought on the practical level, but invalid on
the psychological level. An example of a valid thought is planning to keep an appointment with
another. An example of an invalid thought is getting false thrills, such as anticipating the pleasure of
a romance or a financial benefit. See how much of your thought about others is invalid and start to
break the chain.

IDENTIFICATION

A small negative incident happens and you allow it to grow and assume great importance. While
you are carried away by this incident it seems you are going somewhere in a definite direction.
When the force weakens, you become anxious because you feel in your delusion you are losing
your sense of direction. You then latch on to the next negative force. Such is your day. Be alert to
this and go through the strain and pain of NOT getting carried away.

SLOW DOWN

It is right instruction to slow down and very beneficial to make small aims to do this. You will see
how you forget to do the simplest of instructions. This observation of failure is success. Make aims
to slow down, for example, (1) your reaction for three seconds when another speaks to you, and (2)
when entering your home.

YOU HAVE TO DO THE WORK YOURSELF

For heaven’s sake grow up. You have to do the work yourself. There is no big daddy to do the
work for you. You want someone to do your thinking for you, to tell you what to do, while you
regress to a small child again. Let mama and papa make the decisions for you while you play. You
can play with your toys of agitation and pretense; feeling that someone else is going to take care of
you. When are you going to abandon infantile ways of living? When you don’t get what you want,
you scream about injustice and how you have been put upon. To stop your infantile ways, stop
fawning, worshipping, and admiring people.

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October

VALUABLE CHECKLIST FOR SELF-TEACHING

Here is a technique for logical thinking in our everyday life. This technique is to make a checklist
of our daily behavior. Then at the end of the day when we check it, we will see where we were
asleep and where we can do better. Eventually, we will be able to check it mentally when it happens
instead of at the end of the day. Write your own check -list numbered 1 through 100 at least, of one
short concise sentence ending in a question. Write them in your own words. The following are some
examples from Mr. Howard:

1. Where did I react mechanically instead of consciously?

2. Where did I fall under the spell of social propaganda?
3. Why did I permit myself to feel guilty or intimidated?
4. Did I fear others would see through me?

An example of using the above is, say you have a mental argument with someone, you would go
down the checklist and see where you made your mistake. Note: A checklist is only of use when
used.
STOP BEING AFRAID

Here is an order from Vernon Howard: Stop being afraid of this sick world. Stop it! That man or
woman can’t do a thing to you—not if you really understand. You have nothing, nothing to protect.

VIOLENCE IS NEVER RIGHT

Don’t you ever accept anger in yourself or others as being right. If you will refuse to accept anger,
hostility, hatred—this inner violence—as right and necessary, you will then begin to see where the
actual cause of your problems is. You now justify violence in yourself and others you are allied with.
They hate the same things you do and you justify each others hatred.

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November

PERSEVERE

You give up too easily. You go out and try to accomplish something that’s very
difficult—something that’s a thousand to one chance of success. And persevere and persevere.
The results of your task are not important. What is important is the knowledge you will learn about
yourself.

MAKE CONNECTIONS WITH IDEAS

One way in which we can create understanding is to make connections between ideas. Here are
examples of how two ideas that don’t seem to go together can be put together, and your part is to
see how all ideas are connected to each other.

Connect:
Demands with a dull life.
Dizzy thinking with cunning.
False values with confusion.
REFUSE ALL ADVANTAGES

No one is nice unless he can be so without nice possessions and nice advantages. May heaven
help you if you cling to your supposed advantages, your securities, your comforts. Anything you
look forward to will destroy you as it already has.

TIME AND ETERNITY

Time is my thoughts, my physical body, my attitudes. They are not part of my real nature. Neither
are my past and future. When I understand that, then the sensing of nowness, which is eternity,
takes its place. Nowness then directs the present time-nature intelligently without conceit or
self-centeredness.

Eternity can understand time but time cannot understand eternity.

Nothing changes in time. Things change in the absence of time.

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December

REMARKS

Deliberately rob yourself of the pleasure of making that remark. Go through the hell of not saying
what your old nature wants you to say. For instance, somebody is talking about where they’ve
been, and you want to say “I’ve been there too,” and so on.

ANSWER YOUR OWN QUESTIONS

Asking a question of another is easy—which doesn’t mean you don’t ask questions. Do the hard
thing with yourself—answer your own questions. Otherwise they will remain unsolved.

FEAR OF FAILURE

Why do you have a fear of failure on the inner journey? Simply and only because you rely on the
imaginary self which you carelessly take as real. This is like trusting a picture of an apple to satisfy
your hunger. Remember you don’t have to succeed; you need only be completely convinced that
you cannot succeed. This convincing erases the imaginary self and all its useless attempts to
succeed. You are now left in union with cosmic power which owns the entire universe and which
therefore never needs to try to succeed at anything. Cosmic power is total success itself.

YES AND NO

Truth operates above yes and no.

Truth operates within yes and no.
But it never operates in maybe.

June

THE “THEMASWOT” TECHNIQUE

After many years of being led into traps I developed a magical technique which I am going to give
you and which you are never to forget. It will save you being dragged into things you don’t want to
be dragged into. It is as follows:
Them as wot makes the suggestion:
Does the work,
Makes the decisions,
And pays the dough.
This will free you of one of the slickest, smoothest, outrageous con games that one human being
can ever play on another. Watch carefully in your human relationships how lazy people who want a
thrill will try to con you into doing something while they get the maximum amount of pleasure and
the minimum amount of work. You have no idea how subtle they can be. The suggestion might be
“Don’t you think we had better do this,” and there’s a pause until the other person takes the bait.

DON’T GET INVOLVED WITH NUTS

Always leave a nut with his own nuttiness. There is your liberty. Watch how a nut challenges you,
criticizes you, and don’t fall for it. I am not saying you can’t learn from the criticism. You watch how
a depressed, sour person tries to drag you into his problem. Refuse it and leave it with him. He
wants you to become involved. You are not required to. See how neurotic people try to drain your
energy by trying to get you involved with what is bothering them.

WRITE DOWN THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE:

“WHEN LOST IN THE JUNGLE IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE

 WHETHER I STUMBLE LEFT OR RIGHT.”

You don’t make choices—they make you. Catch yourself saying “What should I do?” And ask
yourself “Who is asking the question?” What is asking the question is a very apprehensive so-called
you inside that wants to perpetuate itself in needing to go this way or that. You can’t perpetuate an
illusion. What you can do is cease to identify with your stumbling to the left or to the right. Make a
supreme effort when you make a choice to watch what is happening to you and watch which way
you are impelled to go, but don’t say “I am going left” or “I am going right.” Just see that there is a
going.
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July

WHAT TO DO ABOUT PAIN AND HEARTACHE

If you and your pain are the same thing, what can you do about it? You can do this. You can
consciously refuse to do anything at all to relieve it. Don't phone your girlfriend to talk about it or be
bitter because that man left you for another woman. What you can also do is understand that the
slightest move towards removing the pain will keep it going. If you consciously refuse to do
anything, about the pain, that will increase the intensity. This intense watching is what increases the
separation so that there is born in you something new that is not a part of emotional heartache. This
is the beginning of God, Truth, operating on the darkness inside of you. The light shining on the
pain does the one thing that puts it away, which is to show you its actual nature. What it consists of
is unseen movements passing through you that you in your non evolvement say “I” to.

GET EMOTIONAL IN A RIGHT WAY

When tormenting thoughts invade you, I want you to scream with right emotion,
“NO MORE TORMENT! NO! ABSOLUTELY NOT! 100% !!”
You get fierce in a new way—not in hostility.

DOING THE RIGHT THING

When you make the decision that you are going towards what is right, what is true, stop right
there. You have made the decision to be true in preference to people liking you; in preference to
wanting things from the world. So far the resolution is pure. You have said you are going to choose
what is right—you don’t know what is right and you don’t have to. If you refuse to do anything to
carry out your resolution to go along the right path, you’ve begun to separate yourself from the
savior in yourself. Don’t do what you consider the right and moral thing to do. Then the idea will
come into your mind that it is the right thing to do—not because you’ve convinced yourself, but
because you’ve let yourself go.
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August

NEGATIVITIES ARE POISON

Someone makes a gloomy remark and you think you have to take it and react to it. The only
reason they give you the poison is because you accept it. They have no choice but to want you to
be as they are. They know all the gimmicks and tricks to keep you reaching out and accepting it.
When conversing with others, I want you to know what that other person said to you. I want you to
notice his spirit, see if he makes some small negative remark. See if the negativity consists of a
certain facial expression, a certain manner, even the way he carries himself. When you see how
your weariness and discouragement are caused by accepting the poison, this will give you the
strength to refuse it.

INSTANT RECOVERY

You ladies are instructed not to break down and giggle foolishly when in a crisis, like spilling the
coffee, for example. You are to remain poised. You know it happened but you have not to let
anyone looking at you, their attitude towards you, nor anything inside you take away your poise.
Walk through this world and don’t look left or right. I don’t care who it is. You walk forward and no
one will be able to stop you.
Remember the lesson, “Instant Recovery.” Don’t you dare let anyone intimidate you.

DO SOMETHING FOR TRUTH

Every spiritual step must be accompanied by the willingness and the appearance of feeling
foolish. There is no escape from the prison of your old acquired self without a deliberate, consistent
willingness to appear foolish before yourself and other people. The willingness to appear foolish
causes great, beautiful destruction. The only question that is left is this, “How fast can I go? How
ingenious can I be in inventing ways to be foolish before you and myself?” You know that the
reason we want to appear wise before others is because we want the picture of ourselves
presented to them. We are doing the exact opposite of everything we used to do.

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September

DON’T BE DRAGGED DOWN

 When someone speaks to you about something, you don’t have to be dragged into it. Just leave it
alone. Practice being in this life and not permitting your weakness to let another drag you off.
You can develop yourself to the point where you can hear every bit of bad news that has ever
existed since the founding of civilization on earth, all the bad news that is presently on earth, and all
the prophesied bad news, and be unaffected by it.

DO ONE THING AT A TIME

Do one thing at a time and know you are doing it. A tremendous secret of right action is to do one
thing at a time and to know that you are doing it. When you do that, there cannot be any resentment
of doing an unwanted task, such as the dishes, for example. You do it because it has to be done.

NON-INTERFERENCE

Let anything that happens to you happen and just sit there and watch it. Don’t interfere with it.
Don’t do anything about it. Don’t try to correct it. Don’t try to ease the pain, the tension, the anxiety.
Just sit there and take it. Let the outer situation do anything it wants to you until you see that it is not
doing it at all but that you are. That’s why you have to remain right where you are until you see that
you are doing it; not that man, not that woman, not that society — I am doing it all by myself. I am
attributing power out there because I am falsely attributing power to my negative self which doesn’t
exist.

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October

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

The purpose of life is to find out what is real. The purpose of life is to free myself. The purpose of
life is to understand all these false desires and wishes to protect, to cling, to what you call your life.
To find out the purpose of life requires a certain kind of responsibility on your part, and that
responsibility is to do more than other people. To stay all alone. Others, unless surrounded by
like-minded people, unless they are flattered, don’t know who they are. How long will you endure
not going along with the crowd and say, “This is not for me.”
For instance, try not defending yourself some time. The next time someone says something that
is insulting, why not just sit back and be quiet so that you can understand your nature.
Whenever you are threatened psychologically, silently say, “Do your worst.”
DEFEAT DEFENSIVENESS

How ruthless can you be with yourself? How can you refuse the little cat naps the devil has
prepared for you? Example—take defending yourself, even if the accusation is true. Why are we so
quick to explain, “Here’s why I did that.” Why don’t you be quiet so you can see this false part of you
wanting to defend yourself, and give no explanation at all. You are tied to people with your own
defenses.

STOP SELF-REFERENCE

The next time you want to tell somebody about your car, your house, your plumbing, etc., STOP
and don’t do it. Be conscious of how others talk incessantly to you about THEIR interests.

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November

REAL CORRECTION

Pay attention to the mistake, not the correction. You made the mistake in the first place because
the correction was unknown to you. If you knew what was correct you would not have made the
mistake. Correction reveals itself by seeing that you and your mistake are the same. This forces you
to abandon a correction gleefully announced by the mistaken self. Any correction offered by the
mistaken self will be a cruel deception which guarantees the repetition of the original mistake. A
mistake is always followed by an excited and talkative demon whose aim is to keep you in misery
by supplying lying correction. Real correction arrives by turning these facts into personal perception.

STAY OUT OF IT!

You get involved a hundred times a day in vagrant unnecessary thought, one of which is the false
belief that you must be involved in other people’s problems. It can be a small difficulty such as not
having enough money or a large difficulty such as a serious illness. When someone comes up to
you with his problems you automatically go into the “right” reaction, which could be sympathy,
advice, making a decision, and so on. You will see that you really resent doing this. The next time it
happens just watch the other person and say to yourself “What has that to do with me? Why are
you crying on my shoulder?” This reaction is very unacceptable to your false self and can be an
authentic new experience for you because you are breaking out of the rut of your old habits. Never
do anything to keep your image of being nice in place.
IN SPITE OF

You can’t as yet stop the evil imps in you that despise Truth and decency, but you can work in
spite of them. This is the entire secret of recovering your taste for Truth. Spiritual growth cannot just
happen, it needs a very, very special effort of going against life. You can work in spite of your own
laziness. You can work in spite of your own hatred. You can work in spite of that person who might
be displeased with you. In spite of is magic.

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December

INSTANT INSIGHT

“What your usual mind cannot comprehend can be understood instantly and fully by your spiritual
nature. This is why so much emphasis is placed on becoming passive to ordinary thoughts. This
mental passivity permits your spiritual nature to become active with its instant insight which then
becomes your own instant insight.”

WHO IS THE YOU WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND TRUTH?

Mr. Howard asked that you write down the following and stressed its importance. He said if you
could track it way back you would see wonders that you have never seen before.
“Who is the you who cannot understand truth?”
When you have any kind of difficulty of any degree at all, why don’t you try to NOT solve it. Just
let it go. It will keep coming back. Why don’t you give up the compulsive need to have an opinion
about the problem. Track it back and find out who is frantic over solving the problem. The frantic self
wants its answer. You say to yourself, “If only that person who is obstructing what I want will get out
of my way”—I think that will solve the problem. What if I don’t create the problem in the first place by
creating who I am. There is not a thing you can do about solving the problem. All you can do is
cease to be the problem creator which means the absence of me. Then there is a totally different
kind of self.
The you is nothing but impulses, opinions and ideas. If you can see that the who consists of that,
and that is the problem (the problem creator in the first place), then the whole question disappears.

BECOME INCONSPICUOUS
 Try some day to not attract attention to yourself. Try to remain inconspicuous. See how many
times and ways you can do it. See how others attract attention to themselves.

SEE THROUGH FALSE STRENGTH

This exercise is to see through false strength. On top of a piece of paper write False Strength,
then number them and keep each point short. Your first point might be, I suspect that one of my
false strengths is trying to please someone in a short conversation by saying the right thing. Point
two, I suspect that one of my fakeries is dressing a certain way that would create a favorable
impression on me. Go on as long as you want. The good news is: Seeing through false strength is
what eventually enables you to see what true strength is.

BE MORE INTELLIGENT THAN NEGATIVITIES

At the exact moment of the appearance of an egotistical thought, a fierce hateful feeling, at that
precise moment you must want to be more intelligent than it is. You can’t run away, you can’t
excuse it, you can’t lie and most of all you can’t enjoy it.

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March

DO NOT OBEY IMAGINARY PERSONALITY

You will never again suffer along with any other person. What you will do — and I realize this is
much easier to say than to do, but I am giving you the blueprint. When someone in trouble wants
something from you, you are not going to go into any kind of a false reaction at all. What you’re
going to do is stay on top of that ditch and understand everything about that man who’s down in it
suffering. Don’t you dare ever again obey the promptings of your invented self-image of being a
helper, a kind person. Don’t you ever again obey that wicked order from your own imaginary
personality, and jump down to help him. You’ve done the exact opposite, you've injured him and
you've injured yourself. You were weak and you deliberately disobeyed the law of Truth inside you
and got punished by it.

EXPAND THE LITTLE BIT OF PURITY

Your desire to be in this room, to study, to practice exercises, that one ounce of rightness in you,
as little as it is, is one hundred percent pure. How can rightness ever be ninety-nine percent, it’s
one hundred percent pure. However that little bit of light is all by itself, so to speak, in surrounding
darkness, and there’s a lot of darkness against that light, but the little bit of light is always pure. God
is pure. God is innocent. Truth is light. The idea is to try to expand the little bit of purity, which you
are now doing.

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April

IS IT REALLY NECESSARY

When you're alone or out in the world, from now on I want you to see everything you do as a need
— something that you must have or do. Don’t label what you do and think. Don’t call it a noble
ambition, don’t call it being in love, don’t call it a great thing that’s happening to you, but rather see
the act, the feeling, the thought as a need that you have. Now throw everything you do into a basket
which you call your need basket. Then look at every one of those things that you've called a need
and find out whether they’re true or false. Your work comes in where you examine a thought and
ask yourself, “Was that really a necessary thought or did I think it was a need?” Oh, how shocked,
and yet edified you will be as you look at that basket with its dozens of items in it, and simply try to
see which needs are true, which are false, and which are natural. It’s natural to talk with others for
example. You know what physical needs are, the need for rest for instance. As a spiritual student,
you must begin to separate everything you do into what is really necessary, and what you say is
good, necessary and even happy for you. As you do this you will invite a higher intelligence than
you now have which will do the separating for you.

GENTLEMAN — TAKE RIGHT CHARGE

Please write down three words, Gentlemen Take Right Charge. I want you to take that piece of
paper with you for several days and let the message sink into you, and when you do, you will know
that the understanding of it is the same thing as the action you will take with it.
I told you to take right charge and you’ve lots of questions about it. “How should I talk to a
woman?” for example, or “How should I handle that sudden crisis that came up?” You will know how
to take right charge by understanding the spiritual meaning in back of it.
If you have an apple tree, you understand how to take care of it, which is perhaps to water that
apple tree every other day. Your understanding of that apple tree is the same thing as your action.
You know that it needs water and that knowing puts your physical body into action and the tree gets
what it needs. And you've handled the situation rightly.
Gentlemen, ponder, reflect upon the one fact that you have not taken into consideration yet is that
you — you as a man — have your special requirements and your special rewards. The reward is
you becoming a right kind of man. Gentlemen, take right charge.

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May

VALUE THE ONLY THING THAT HAS VALUE

What is worse than someone who doesn’t value the only thing in this world that has value, which
is the salvation of his soul. God says you have to go one hundred percent in favor of Me and one
hundred percent against darkness. I want you to start thinking about that. Write in your mind and on
a piece of paper, one hundred percent for God, one hundred percent against Satan.

WHAT WAS I ABOUT TO SAY

I’m going to give you a practical exercise. Ask yourself, “What was I about to say?” You’re going
to talk to people just a few minutes from now. I want you to put your attention back on yourself and
to see that you’re just about to say something to another person which is totally impractical, and to
see the motive behind it. See, when we’re nervous, we talk all the time, and we try to explain
ourselves, “Well, this is what I really meant.” Slow it down to the point where you can actually see
the thought and catch what you were going to say while it’s still in the mind before you express the
words. If you catch it there, the light of awareness will cancel out the sentence such as something
you later regret.

MY REACTION IS WHAT I REALLY AM

Here’s an exercise to practice for a long, long time. It will give you astonishing although perhaps
shocking self-knowledge. Write down and remember the following sentence: When I spill food all
over the floor, my reaction is what I really am. Understand?

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June

RUN OUT OF YOURSELF

 The fear of running out of yourself, of being empty, of having no place to go, that fear is so
enormous that you live in it as your protector instead of as the enemy, which it is. Not knowing,
never having experienced anything outside of you, you insist that your anxieties, your ramblings, is
all there is. I tell you that it is not all there is.
Now I know this as a personal fact so I can describe the voyage to you, what you must do. I can
tell you about the island itself that there are no wild animals to attack you there, there’s no fear and
loneliness or isolation on that other land, I can tell you about it, but you have to make the decision
yourself to start sailing away from yourself.
How do you start? Start now while I'm talking, to describe yourself to yourself as you are at this
very moment. You can do it and still listen to me. I want you to describe the wasteland with all its
various beasts and ghosts and demons and hauntings, I want you to confront it, bluntly, fully, so
that something in you shuts up. So that the blabbermouth, the phony neurotic, the phony
flamboyant human being inside of you shuts up and because it can no longer talk in the face of the
awfulness it has discovered inwardly. And you will shut up. You will stop this nonsensical blabbing
and you'll look in stunned awe at it. Thank God that a human being has the opportunity to run out of
words. And when you run out of words, that’s the same thing as running out of intellectual, phony,
pursuits of trying to find yourself. Want to go faster? Then all you have to do is perform the exercise
I just gave you, perform it fifty times a day at the minimum.

WORK ON THREE DIFFERENT EXERCISES A DAY

Select and write down three different exercises and use them for the whole day, which I will
explain. Let’s say that exercise one would be the watching of your thoughts as they arise. And you
say, “What did I just think? I see that I thought I was very clever in that remark I made.” The second
exercise could be simply knowing what you're doing physically. For instance you caught yourself
falling spiritually asleep, and because you caught it, when you picked up a book you were aware of
doing it. The third exercise could be observing what kind of a mood other people are in — that
person I live with, just now is befuddled over something, or the man I saw in the supermarket, he’s
irritated over something. Then the next day get another three exercises. It’s very good to
concentrate on just three because you can remember them.