Vernon Howard:
“Well, let’s just relax and want to hear. Now you may think that it’s easy to want to hear, but it becomes very difficult when that hearing requires you to set your entire past aside.
Now, you of your usual, habitual nature, you do not want to set your past aside, you want to think about it, you want to roll in it, get excited about it. You want to recall past experiences, miserable or happy, because they seem to confirm that you are a continuous self.
This is only the repetition of thought, not the repetition of you. And if you understood that one thought from this talk it would be worth driving ten thousand miles to come to hear just that one thought and understand it.
There is a way to be happy, it actually exists. You haven’t found it, you’ve found thrills and achievements and you found ego-victories and you found a few relationships that seem to satisfy you, but you’ve never found happiness, you don’t even know the meaning of the word in the true meaning of it.
And I can prove it to you, and I want you to do better than that, I want you to prove it to yourself as a part of your intensive listening tonight. I want you to prove to yourself that you have no idea what authentic happiness and contentment is.”
– from a talk given 1/6/1988, Vernon Howard’s Higher World, talk 412
Svaha 