Enlightening Lessons
Special lessons by Vernon Howard designed to help you make contact with the higher.
Little Advanced Secret
If you will see the horror of human nature, that’s what qualifies you to go higher than it. There is something higher than horror. But you have to see the horror first. You think you are nice … “Oh, I have my faults, but I have my good points, too. He has his good parts, too.” No. You’re all bad … because you think you are good.
Nobody knows how bad it is. You have to see how bad it is before you can see how good it is. Until you know that everyone is insane, you can’t find sanity. You have never had anything but a mad mind, a mad spirit, tricky motives, lies and hell.
Exercise: Know the next time you think something bad. Know the next person you hurt. If you don’t do that, you won’t be shocked and stunned at how bad you really are, and then you won’t be able to rise above that to something good. If you refuse to go through the shock, the stunning shock of knowing that everybody is insane, you won’t be able to go higher than that to sanity. This is a rule!
Don’t take the world’s future as your future. Can’t you see where they are going? Never again will you accept the troubles of any other human being as your troubles. You do not have to share the destiny of a vicious world if you don’t want to. Say no to the world. See that you are simply weak, lonely.
Understanding Evil
Evil is not a judgment of one human being of another. Evil is nothing more than being in a state of unconsciousness, of being asleep. All wars are the activity of sleeping human beings killing each other. All riots are the activities of sleeping human beings — hoaxed human beings — who think they are awake. This is the madness — or insanity — which doesn’t see itself as that because it says, “We are fighting this war to free our country.” Come back to the simple definition of all evil, all sinfulness, all wickedness being a state of not knowing yourself as you really are. Therefore, you behave — or I behave — mechanically. And I destroy me — and you, with this same psychic sleep that I have in myself.
Don’t Do Anything About It
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 what you are doing, 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.
Drop Thought
So I am going to catch myself without making another mistake of living in time. Thought is always in time. So I can break thought and then there will be a pause in which there is no thought at all and in that pause, I am free. And when you do this for the first time, when you really see that you can be without any thought at all, you’ll want to work on yourself every minute because you have sighted the way out at last. It is only thinking that keeps it in place. It is only thought that keeps it in place.
The task is not to just get it out of place but to throw it out altogether, so that I can see that self-defeating thought 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 an end of thought. Because when there is no thinking anymore, you cease to exist which, thank heaven, is what you were looking for all along.
We are afraid to look at it because of 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 backwards. What we value is ruining us. And what we reject could save us. It is best to reverse our viewpoint.
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