A new Life... Vernon Howard

Inspiring Guides
1. Examining the doubts we have about our present way is a highly intelligent act.
2. Anyone weary of stumbling in the dark has taken the first step toward walking in the light.
3. The one supreme power that will guarantee personal happiness is personal right thinking.
4. Inner light shows you what to do with yourself all day long, making everything comfortable.
5. Acquired beliefs and cosmic facts are as different as pebbles and diamonds.
6. Please people and you achieve nothing, but please your real self and you start a miracle.
7. Feel the need for something different, then let it grow by having affection for it.
8. Cosmic wisdom reveals why unhappy events happen, after which they cease to happen.
9. You are not required to listen to anyone, who demands, “What are you doing about my problems?”
10. Even if all your friends and relatives do not know how to live rightly, you can surely know.
11. No one is more qualified than you to discover the true treasures of your inner kingdom.
12. The very nature of your essence is confidence, so why seek this virtue outside of essence?
13. Freedom from painful decisions is a happy result of discovering who you really are.
14. Truth has its reasons for acting as it does, and every one of them is for your benefit.
15. Calm command can replace agitation as surely as sunshine can replace a storm.
16. All good things come to anyone who refuses to be intimidated by his own despair.
17. By eliminating the sheep in himself, a man gives psychic wolves nothing to prey upon.
18. Welcome higher facts without understanding them and in time you will understand.
19. Truth does not hurt, rather, it is our resistance to its message that causes pain.
20. When a frantic world tries to carry you away, remind yourself that you need not go.
21. Self-knowledge creates an inner state in which you are valuable to yourself in a new way.
22. The feeling of being in danger from oneself fades with the application of higher facts.
23. Be aware of how people insist upon draining your energy, then quietly refuse it.
24. Heartache can be conquered because a higher part of you is free and apart from heartache.
25. It is a bright day when we see that cosmic facts are as practical as a recipe for baking bread.
26. Reflect often on the interesting idea of getting out of your own way.
27. We attract events which correspond to our nature, so a higher nature will attract higher events.
28. One thing that is always right is your eagerness for something higher than yourself.
29. Most people merely rearrange their problems, but with self-insight you can end them.
30. By seeing what we fear to see we shatter one of the pillars supporting the haunted house.
31. Wrong action in the past is corrected perfectly by right action in the present.
32. Self-concern is caused by living from mere ideas, which is cured by living from essence.
33. Real courage consists of departing from the false while not yet knowing what is true.
34. We learn to love the light by seeing clearly what the darkness does to us.
35. One day you will look calmly at a fear and say to it, “You have shaken me for the last time.”
36. We can either hear what we want to hear or we can hear the rescuing truths.
37. Starting now, never again permit hard or disapproving facial expressions to intimidate you.
38. A quiet mind knows the answer, which means we must cease to fight anxiously for the answer.
39. Living from your real nature is the same as doing something worthwhile with your life.
40. If you are now reading this line, you have a rich opportunity to make everything new. (from Vernon Howard)
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# Permitting your life to be taken over by another person is like letting the waiter eat your dinner.
# Find yourself, for courage and confidence are as easy as breathing to the person who really knows who he is.
# Some people prolong their unhappiness by dramatizing it, which is like expecting applause for having a headache.
# Growing up into the fullness of inner strength is as exciting as seeking gold and as rewarding as finding it.
# A warring world has no power to injure your real nature any more than darkness can shake a tree.
# We are rewarded according to personal effort, like a man who is given as much land as he can walk over during a day.
# Talking about love does not make a man loving any more than talking about sugar makes him a slice of cake.
# Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise.
# Danger recognized as danger is not hazardous, as with a sailor who sights and steers away from rocks in the sea.
# A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.
# Remove the dark cloud of negative thought, and the guiding star of under- standing brightly appears.
# People worry over the absence of worry, which is like thinking that the end of the storm means the end of the sky.
# Man is like a lost tourist who has forgotten he has a map in his pocket which can direct him to his hotel.
# If you can talk a monkey out of a banana you can talk logic with someone whose self-interest rejects logic.
# Inner liberty can be judged by how often a person feels offended, for you can no more insult a mature man than you can paint the air.
# Thinking that stubborn beliefs can give us a new life is like watching a stone statue, hoping it will move.
# Life is never too tough for your higher self, any more than a rock is too much for a river.
# Talking to the average man about something higher than sex and money is like talking to a rabbit about a rainbow.
# Like an army doctor treating enemy soldiers, truth is patient and kindly toward the parts of us which resist correction.
# When sad, we need only realize that we are in the wrong place internally, like a lark that belongs in the sky, not in a cage.
# Just as a single wave is powered by the entire ocean, a sincere mind has vast resources at its command.
# You can refuse entrance to unhappy moods, but you must be alert, just as you might close a window at the first sign of rain.
# We can no more enjoy life by hoping for a future result than we can enjoy music by waiting for the final note.
# It is as possible to be pleasantly alone with yourself while surrounded by a crowd as it is to walk alone in the peaceful woods.
# The truly happy man is one who feels no different when the party ends than he did while it was going on.
# Inner guidance is heard like soft music in the night by those who have learned to listen.
# Men who fall from a canoe while standing up to attract attention always claim someone pushed them.
# Like helpful librarians who aid your search for books, higher powers do for you what you cannot do for yourself.
# Your life makes sense when you don’t need other people to confirm that it does, which is the true independence of a soaring eagle.
# The difference between living under your own power and under the power of social influence is the difference between songs and tears.
# Just as a piano responds to the touch of a musician, a sincere request for solutions will always be answered from a higher source.
# Right daily decisions are as simple as smiling, once you see the difference between natural and artificial needs.
# The more you let other people tell you how to sail your boat, the less the boat belongs to you.
# Loneliness is an impostor who makes you feel far apart from life, but you can see beyond it to happily find yourself approaching home.
# Just as there are millions of unseen stars, there are endless inner riches for you to discover.
# Foolishness is simply the nervous preference for wrong ideas, like a sailor anxiously hugging a broken compass.
# It is no more necessary to live at the mercy of mental howls than it is needful to live next door to a zoo.
# Inner correction guarantees outer correction, just as a repaired clock makes its hands go right.
# Your true nature never needs to anxiously prove itself to others, but lives in calm command, like a popular king.
# Healing finally comes to the sincere seeker, like a sick man who awakens in the morning to find himself cured.
1. The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist. Because it does not exist as a reality, because it is illusory, it has only illusory and worthless rewards for you. While employment and geography and people exist for your physical self and your social self, and are good for them, they cannot give benefits to your real spiritual nature which is complete in itself. It always has been complete and always will be, for it lives not in time but in eternity. In reality there is no individual who can win a thrill or a sense of worthiness from the everyday world. In a lost person, rewards or punishments from the world fall on the self-glorified self and cause it to vibrate. This vibration serves as a shaky idol which we eagerly worship for as long as the thrill lasts. But since the worshipper and his idol are the same thing—the same set of vibrations—the ending of the thrill of worshipping the idol causes self-panic; we feel as if we are fading away, that we will not be ourselves any more. The fear of the extinction of the invented self prevents us from seeing that the false self must fade away in order to experience true spiritual birth. Your work in all this is to notice the deceptive nature of your fear of not existing. And one way to do this is to notice how friends, news stories, rumors of doom, how they all try to plant fearful thoughts and feelings into your system. Here is what these people are doing: In order to give themselves a false sense of aliveness by making gloomy remarks, they have no conscience in making others feel the same false sense of doom. They are like mad musicians who demand that you dance to their insane music. Everything in this paragraph connects with the opening sentence, which is: The world has nothing of real value to give you because it does not exist.

2. You need not idolize or yearn for anyone. But you must see very deeply into this in order to discover your basic error. You really do not admire that man or love that woman. Unknowingly you admire and love your own thoughts and feelings about them. Having imitation strength and beauty inside yourself you project them outwardly and then deceive yourself into thinking that they reside inside that man or woman. You will get an endless series of pains and disappointment as long as you unconsciously approve of this kind of self-trickery. You feel the need for something—which in itself is right—but then wreck the solution by trying to get an answer from the same unintelligent mind that asked the original question. You can not and must not answer your own questions. You fail to see that you are doing this when you look outside yourself for wisdom or strength or guidance. You are like the king of a castle who falls off his horse while riding in the woods. In his dazed state he wanders into a cave, thinking it is his home, even while suffering from the cave's discomfort. As his head gradually clears, he remembers where he truly belongs. Then his action-in-understanding guides him back to the castle with its true security and comfort. You have forgotten who you really are. Truth itself will help you to remember.

3. Regarding acceptance and rejection, the day will come when neither word has any meaning to you. Such opposite states have meaning, false meaning, only to a divided mind, a mind looking to itself for a wholeness it will never be able to locate. Wholeness does not reside in thinking about wholeness, but in the lack of a need to think about wholeness. The king who has returned to his castle thinks neither about the castle nor the woods. To go a bit deeper into this, the spiritual castle has no geographical location on this earth. It does not exist in the woods or outside the woods—it exists above both, in a new and lofty world. This becomes clear when you see that a word is a word and nothing more. You need have no concern about being in a good light in the eyes of others. Only the thought—created self has such ambitions and the resulting anxieties. You cannot have either good light or bad light, for there is no individual self to receive it. Try handing either a bouquet of roses or of weeds to an imaginary person. It cannot be done. Only your unself can be truly Good, and that Goodness comes from God, Truth, Reality.
Make a decision to wake up.
Straighten yourself up.
Look around you—see what’s there.
See those people or that person.
Walk alertly and awakedly.
DON’T DREAM.
DON’T DOZE.
DON’T WANDER AROUND.
DON’T RUSH.
This will make you rise above your fears.
It is your duty as a spiritual student to
stop taking orders from low places.
There is a way out of human suffering, and any earnest person can find it.
In this exclusive interview, he explains that the answer lies in a different direction than we normally take.

Q: As the author of self-help books, with some 7 million readers, you must enjoy riding the high wave of success.
A: Success in terms of inner-development is measured by whether people change the way they think, and therefore the way they live. I would consider it a success if one reader in a hundred took the first step toward a higher level of being.

Q: What do you mean by a higher level of being?
A: To understand the higher, you must first understand the lower. You must see that life as you presently live it is a thinly-disguised chamber of horrors. Anger, envy, loneliness, fear, guilt and the other demons that inhabit our minds must be exposed for what they really are…phony phantoms! Having emptied ourselves of wrong ideas about ourselves, there is room for Something Higher to enter.

Q: How does one attain this higher state?
A: Begin with self-honesty. Face your life as it actually is. See yourself as you really are. Without ruthless self-honesty, nothing can be done. With it, everything is possible.

Q: Isn’t this ruthless self-honesty a harsh remedy for a person who is suffering?
A: Not if it is used impersonally. We must study ourselves as a scientist studies a problem, objectively. Honest self-inquiry should not include self-blame or any kind of self-reference. This is what is known as non-identification. We are on the way to solving our problems when we learn to see them without calling them I.

Q: How about such commonplace human problems as anxiety, stress, depression, loneliness, sex, marital strife or addiction to drugs?
A: If we are the victims of bad experience, bad habits or bad treatment by others, it is not because something is wrong out there, but because something is out of order within us. I’m not condemning anyone. I am stating a fact. You can change jobs, or change mates, or change locations. But nothing will change, really, until you change yourself. I am talking about changing your actual nature. You can, through correct inner work, rise above all such problems, and they will trouble you no more. I promise you that.

Q: Can anyone learn to do this?
A: Each of us has the capacity to gain this new Understanding. But most of us are too comfortable in our suffering. We don’t know anything else. Even when someone tells us we can rise above our problems, we don’t believe it. Nevertheless, there is a way out, and anyone who honestly wants to can find it.
# Realize that using the word love does not make you loving any more than calling yourself a lump of sugar makes you one.
# Talking is a thousand times easier than pondering, which is why the talkers overwhelm the earth.
# Free yourself of the tyranny of believing in mere words.
# There is nothing wrong with nothing happening in your life. See this and something worthwhile will happen.
# You are definitely worried about something when it returns repeatedly to your mind.
# Knowing that you are lost is exactly the same thing as sensing the way back home.
# Lose something before you get it and you will not fear losing it.
# Uncertainty is unsafe. Certainty is safe. Safe certainty is spiritual and invisible and is waiting for you to request it to take charge of your life.
# Show me what you boast about and I will show you what you hate.
# The most common person on earth is the one who causes trouble to other people in order to prop up his shaky and false existence. A rare and sane mind could never commit such evil.
# Spiritual facts always sound harmonious. You just have untuned ears.
# Only a clear understanding of time-thinking can free you from its folly. For example, an ambitious man can think about acquiring earthly power but he cannot think about finally losing it.
# Count the number of enemies you have outside and that is the same number of enemies you have inside.
# In a true man, spirit is the king and thought is the obedient servant. In a false man, thought is the king and the spirit is considered an enemy.
# The higher power does not need your aid. End your vanity. The higher power seeks to tell you to stop trying to help both it and yourself, for this enables it to help you.
# THINKING produces noisy and wrong action. SEEING allows silent and right action.
# Did it ever occur to you that your inner kingdom is a sacred place? Now, what is the right attitude to have toward a sacred place?
# You must establish a steadfast program for losing confidence in your very own words that you speak so abundantly and so smugly. Your abundant words have no real confidence in them at all—they are scared words.
# When faced, a harmful fact can be changed, but you can do nothing with a suppressed delusion but suffer from it.
# Interpretation blocks reception while masquerading as reception. Rightness does not need interpretation; it requires simple acceptance and nothing else.
# The stupidest reason for accepting something as being right is because you have always accepted it.
# As incredible as it sounds, an unhappy man does not realize that happiness is better than unhappiness. Knowing only his own concealed anguish, he worships it, which is the same as self-worship.
# Think how your life would be wondrously superior if you realized that truth is never absent from you.
# Resurrection is a definite spiritual experience. It is something that HAPPENS to you. It happens when you no longer try to make things happen.