No Self To Be Saved!

Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
- The Upanishads

* my favorite sage from US (yes..there were sages there..I mean grown there,born there,not coming from India) talks about ,,no self to be saved,,.
-added by danny-
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No Self To Be Saved
A talk by Vernon Howard given on 11-28-85
You are saved by realizing that there is no self to be saved. Now there it is. You
are saved by realizing that there is no self needing to be saved. Now look at what
you can cut out of your life – every action, every frantic thought, every chasing
around to try to make yourself feel good. You can cut that out altogether because
they are the wrong things to do. Each time you try to save yourself from boredom
or loneliness or envy, you keep yourself convinced that there is someone there to
be saved!

Cut the whole business off! Start your spiritual and mental – your whole life all
over right now. Throw everything out, all the trash, all the beliefs, all the
anxieties, all the little needs to impress. Toss them out and dare to take one boat
only for the journey across the ocean to the bright land over there.
That boat being the true idea that you don't have anything at all needing to be
saved. You just think so. So why are you going to try to save a rambling wreck
anymore? – from any college. (Laughter) Because you are quite sure in your
delusion that you have to save yourself.

Now I want you – I want you to think as you've never thought and pondered
before, this opening sentence I gave you. I am not going to let you get away with
shoving it off into a corner for later consideration. You will do it now and later.
Lets start all over. You are quite convinced in your emotional life and in your false
intellectual ramblings, you are quite sure that there is something that you have to
accomplish, there is something you have to do, to attain, to prove, to increase a
value. This is wrong! You don't have to do anything but realize that you're doing
something useless.

You are not going to yield easily to what I told you, and that's a part of the help
you are getting to realize that you don't want to realize. 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
you, your anxieties, your rambling is all there is. I tell you that it is not all there
is. I am telling you that with the boating of self-discovery on that ocean voyage, I
tell you that there is another land over there. Now I know this as a personal fact.
Me knowing it as a personal fact, 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 is 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? I want you to start right now. I want you all, while I'm talking,
to describe yourself to yourself as you are at this very moment. You can do it. You
can do it and still listen to me. I want you to do it. 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 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.

And that's part of the voyage. And that means that you can keep going. You can
go as fast as you want, by the way. Want to go faster than you are? All you have
to do is perform the exercise I just gave you. Perform it say fifty times a day at a
minimum.

I am going to describe myself to myself right now as I am cooking and I'm
cleaning the house or I'm doing that bit of yard work out there. I'm going to
describe myself to myself until I see that I've never ever had any selfacquaintance
at all – not really! Because I was too close to myself to be able to
see myself. I was it! I was the whole business. There was no student, no spiritual
student there examining what was going on inside. I was the whole business.
And oh, how the blabbermouthery can go on. How easy to criticize, how easy to
become a big phony and be impressive to other people and explain other things
to them.

I told you yesterday and I'll tell you again because it's another valuable exercise
you should be working on all day long and all night long too. I want you to put a
special place in the corner of your mind for this. When you're talking with anyone
and you don't have to be giving a speech before ten million people, you can be
just talking to your spouse, talking with fellow workers, strangers. I want you to
practice the first exercise of describing yourself to yourself while you're talking,
until you suddenly slow down in your speech because you actually saw that you
were lying.

I am not saying necessarily lying about the facts of a particular situation. I am
talking about you lying by pretending to be someone who was an authority,
someone who knew what he was talking about, someone who let loose with the
mechanical flow of blabbermouthery simply because it's the easy thing to do –
maybe to say something and thereby get rid of the other person.
You're always seeking the easy way out which is what mechanicalness really is.
Your mechanical life never demands anything from you – not a thing – that's why
you love it. You can just sit back and never notice how deceitful you are, how you
are so compelled to go up and talk with someone because you don't know what to
do with yourself. And so you extend your inner boredom onto them, and he or
she passes it back to you.

Now this is what you have to see. You have to see that you believe in yourself –
falsely – but have no insight into the fact that you believe in yourself falsely,
therefore nothing can jolt you into shutting up, shutting up your feelings, your
moods!

An exploding volcano doesn't know that it's an exploding volcano. As it destroys
itself and destroys everyone in the villages around it, it destroys without knowing
its self-destruction or other destruction. You don't know you're destroying yourself
because you believe in yourself.

You believe that it is necessary for you to take natural energy, the energy of the
cosmic whole, you believe that you have to take this energy that has been given
to you and that you can call up, you believe you have to take it to construct
something. So you construct a junkyard, and a shack in the middle of that
junkyard.

Now I want you to substitute something. Instead of construction, which is really
destruction, because you're constructing a greater junkyard – instead of
construction, think of realization. The energy can be re-channeled.
Your mind has certain mental powers, doesn't it? The power to understand certain
things, to ponder. Your mind has certain energies – all squandered. All
squandered in worrying about yourself.

And that worry has become a fixed habit,
and you won't let that be taken away from you. But you worry about yourself so
that you can then add a thought, after the worry, in saying, "See, I am active in
being concerned for my welfare." And that gives you false support and it gives
you false confidence and it also gives you time to think of the next squandering of
your energy, so that all you really do are things pointless and useless.

You have nothing to do about yourself, you really need to do nothing about
yourself except to realize that there is no self that you have to work on, that you
have to improve. "I've got to find a way to make a better impression on people.
I've got to find a way to feel more secure. Maybe religion will do it or maybe the
alcohol will to it or maybe getting a higher education will do it." And you'll get
your long list of it and you never ever, unfortunately, come to an end to the quest
because you never come to an end of the self.

You can't – you can't achieve success in any way for yourself. There is no way you
can ever find God. It's impossible for you to have security, to have peace of mind,
to have power, to be at rest. It is impossible for you to have anything good at all,
because there is no one there to experience God and morality and happiness. You
can't experience happiness. All you can do is feel the blows and the hurts of false
happiness which comes in the retention of the belief in you.

The finding of God, of reaching the other land is a state. Finding happiness is a
state that doesn't know you at all as you falsely know yourself. Now you'd better
think about that. God himself, who is the only source of wisdom, real power, of
contentment, of living outside of time, God does not at all know you as you know
yourself.

Why don't you adopt God's viewpoint and abandon your own? Why don't you go
to work to see the pointlessness of you going the way you are going to get
whatever you think you have to get? You – you can't get anything because there
is no grabber there – not really! You don't have a basket at all to carry around, to
fill it with what you call good things which are the objects of your neurotic desire.
You don't have a basket to carry around because there is no basket-carrier! But
you insist there is. You create you. You create the basket, you create the good
things you are going to get and nothing happens, nothing changes.

The only thing that continues is the frantic search, the weary search which
includes looking out suspiciously, neurotically around at other people, and
hopefully and also with great fear – hope and fear go together – looking out at
the other person or the situation and saying, "Maybe that will do it."

Please stop talking. Please stop making self-deceitful statements like that. "Maybe
that will do it." Go and be empty of everything that refers to you! Do that by
realizing that there is no you there, therefore nothing to get, no action to take.
You can relax right now if you want and let yourself go. And when you let yourself
go, God will catch you, and not until then.

You know there is only one God, one real God, and there are a million false gods,
and that's what you're chasing. And all the time you're doing this, you have a
certain doubt, of course you do, a certain fearful doubt about the efficacy of what
you're doing. You feel – you feel, "I've got to go somewhere but I don't know
where. I've got to grab something, but I don't know what it is. I've got to hang on
to something, but I don't know what it is to hang on to."

I want you to give an enormous shock to the satanic forces that are speaking in
your name when you say things like that – that you have to get something. I
want you to go psychologically and even physically when you're at home, just sit
down on the couch and go limp and never again try to save yourself.
Here is a boy, just a little young boy, maybe eight or ten – something like that.
And it's Saturday morning and he doesn't know what to do with himself. So he
looks around for a game to play or something to keep him amused and he doesn't
see any game or any plaything that he wants to play with, any toy, so he decides
to invent his own game.

So he thinks about it a little bit and he is a little bit creative in the mechanical
world, so he gets a bunch of boxes and puts them out on the ground and gets a
handful of marbles, and he invents his own game of throwing the marbles to see
if he can get them into the boxes on the ground. The further the box away, the
more points he gets, right? One point for a close box, three for the next one, five
points. Fun. He had fun with himself. It's his game so far, right? He created it.
Fine. It's his game. He made the rules out of himself. Then something happens. I
know you are following.

Some boyfriends come along. Oh, some girls too. (Laughter) Women, you want to
get in it? You're in it now.

I read something kind of interesting the other day. Let's see, what was it? It said
that women now demand that God be female too, but you don't hear one peep
out of them in saying that Satan is female too. (Laughter) Pretty good. (Laughter)
Okay, the bullies come along. They're a little taller, a little older. And isn't it
interesting that even as children, if you're a little bit bigger already you've got
power – bully power. And you bully your little brother, little sister. And so the socalled
friends came along and they wanted to get in on the game. They thought
that was kind of fun throwing the marbles. "Hey, I got five points! Hey, I got three
points. Oh, I missed altogether."

It's all right. No matter what you say, as long as you're talking about yourself
you're having fun. No fun. And they took over the game. They changed the rules.
They said, "Well, we don't like it that way. We want to have six boxes out there,
not four. You change that."

So because he was weak and they were three inches taller than him and two
years older, he let them change the game. Pretty soon it wasn't fun for him
anymore, was it? They were making the rules. They were telling him what to do.
What's the point?

Oh, don't you know, don't you know – oh, I'll change the word. Don't you suspect
that you're not playing your game anymore, that someone, something has taken
it over? Of course.

Well, the evidence is right there. It's no fun anymore. Never was, as a matter of
fact. You just – you just thought that it was going to be fun when you scored a
hundred points and beat everyone else in the game, then you thought that that
would give you the thrillism, then you'd feel like somebody. "I won the game."
Wherever there is an "I" there is a game, and you lose every time. You increase
that hidden self-doubt that you have about yourself. You increase it a hundred
percent so that you understand that the doubt is your present condition. Instead
of phony beliefs in conquest, instead believing that those other boys are your
friends. They not your – no other human being can be your friend. They want to
take over. They want to dominate you.

How about that. Now I am not talking about the domination of the boss over you
where you work. That's a different matter. That's purely intellectual. It's the boss
– he tells you what to do because he's the boss. I am not talking about that. At
the same time the boss might have false psychological bossiness over you, taking
your game away from you because you're a weakling, because you're not strong
all the time.

Oh, let me tell you something. Let's think of the worst possible condition we can
describe, okay? The kingdom of hell with all its tyranny, with all the brutes and
the thugs down there whipping other people, forcing them to throw coals on the
fire, working without coffee breaks – hot coffee breaks. (Laughter) And you are a
visitor to hell, not a permanent resident – not anymore. You escaped. And you go
down there and they try to dominate you. They don't know that you are an
escapee. You look just like any other resident down there. And they start to
dominate you and thrash you with the whips and poke you with the pitchforks and
put you to work.

How would you like to be a happy human being? I'll tell you what happiness
consists of – ignoring the hell that thinks it knows you and can dominate you.
When God – when you allow God to know you, then you know yourself, and this
knowledge of yourself allows you to work for the boss, to be in that family
situation, to be a part of society and be marvelously and one hundred percent at
liberty from their attempts to take your life away from you.

You're at liberty because you understood and worked on what I started the talk
with – that you don't need to save yourself. You don't need to gain anything, you
just need to lose something, which was just the delusion that there is a person
there who needs to be saved through acquisition.

When the mind operates properly it does not invent you, therefore it does not
invent stupid and foolish things for you to run around to try to accomplish. Truth
is a total, final, lasting accomplishment. It's all done! That's why you can walk
around the hell of this world and see the fires, see those human devils which are
packed out there, aren't they? Wow.

You can see them, but you escaped your delusion of being a self who had to fight
devils, so you don't fight. There is no fighter, there is no one to be offended,
insulted. There is no one who has to defend himself. There is no one who has to
go into worry and anxiety over anything that anyone else can do against you.
There is a big field, and surrounding on the circle of this big field are human
monsters with rocks and swords and clubs and arrows and guns. And they're all –
in their hatred and violence and their trickiness and especially their deceit – they
are all your so-called friends around there. All your friends are out there. Five
hundred of them. They've got all these weapons and they are firing toward the
center of the field. "Blast, bang, zow, zappy." (Laughter) The thunder of the
blunderbusses. That's an old-fashioned gun, I think. A rifle, isn't it? "Crash,
boom, bang!" toward the center of the field.

You're ten miles off on top of a mountain with binoculars looking at them stupidly
firing at the center of the field. They in their delusion think that you are there, but
you in your non-illusion are not there at all, so they can't hit you and hurt you –
you're up there.

Oh, don't be lonely for your enemies – because you are! In and out, you're lonely.
You know what puts people in the center of the circular firing squad? I am telling
you. This is a fact. A man or a woman puts himself in there and he looks around
at the circle of guns and swords ready to blast him. Oh, he is so excited, so
happy. "How marvelous! I am the center of the world.

Oh, so they got some new Colts, rifles, handguns to shoot at me. Ah! I can be
afraid of those guns and those scowling people. Oh, I'm so grateful that I can be
terrorized. Because I am in the center of this storm of artillery – I am in the
center of it and I exist! Go ahead, blast me all you want! I don't care. I'm real. I
exist!" And they blast! And he loses the opportunity to see that he wasn't who he
thought he was.

He loses the opportunity by staying there. He loses the opportunity he could have
had to escape that hell. He loses the opportunity that God was offering to him all
along to get outside of that circle and be on top of the mountain looking down at
the madness instead of being a part of it.

Now I want you to know that you – you love being in the center of that awful
circle of murderess guns. Yes you do, because you believe in yourself. When you
no longer believe in yourself according to your delusory concepts, when you
disappear from yourself as a separate person, when you disappear to yourself,
that's what puts you on the mountain. And that's what it means to have the
protection of God.

Now there are lots of spiritual books that talk about how nothing shall harm you
anymore and how free and happy you'll be. Nothing shall dismay you. That's what
it's talking about in its higher sense. If you're not there, the whole world can blast
you, but you're not there to get blasted.

You don't need to save yourself from yourself, you need only see that there is no
self for you to save at all. It has no existence. Your seeing – your seeing of the
non-existence of yourself is your salvation. When the ego-self disappears, your
spiritual self appears, and that's who you really are...