Tag: Vernon Howard

People really do not want answers to their questions

“People really do not want answers to their questions. What they want is the attention they get by asking questions. You ask a question of someone, you have their attention and they give it back to you – and I want you to apply this to your spiritual life.

I want you to see how sincere or how insincere you are with the questions you ask about the spiritual life. And you will find, shockingly and nicely at the same time, that there’s a certain very wild untamed part of you that likes to pretend to want the answers, that likes to put on the appearance before others and yourself of being a sincere inquirer and all the time what is important to you is the asking of the question.

Now let’s exaggerate that a little bit. What is hysterical, frantic behavior? It is frantically and hysterically asking, ‘Well, what’s this all about, why did this happen to me, who did this to me, is it going to continue?’ Think of someone you know, maybe very close to you, maybe yourself, who has done this, someone who has simply broken down: ‘Why, why am I persecuted? That’s not asking a sincere, honest, question – that’s loving to ask it.

See, you don’t want the answer, you want to ask it, so that you’re involved with yourself. Something is going on inside of you and you’re afraid to let yourself go silent by not asking the question. Think about that a little bit. Think and make clear to yourself right now how afraid you would be if you didn’t ask all these wild, self-centered questions any more.

Think of what you would lose if you didn’t frantically cry out, ‘Why did he do that to me after all these years? Why did she betray me, why after all my efforts…all I ask is a little corner of a world of success, that’s all I ask, and I didn’t even get that. Why not?’

Those questions, which few ever finally understand, are nothing but another form of self-destruction. They are a form of substituting ignorance for intelligence.

Now I have you all cornered and you should be very grateful. Don’t try to escape the corner that I’ve got you in, but stay there and I’ll explain more about that a little later in the talk. But I want you to stay cornered, knowing that you do exactly what I have said you do. That it has become a habit, a pernicious habit for you to be asking all the time, ‘Why, why, why?’

Oh, what a mountain of heavy and dreary egotism you are building when you do that; and if you keep building that mountain, the time will come when it is going to overflow with its own weight and cover you up and you will be gone – yes you will. In the space of this talk, this morning, pull a figure out of the air, in the space of just the forty-five minutes of this talk, tens of thousands of human beings all over the globe have piled the trash of their vanity and conceit and ignorance so high that it overflows and engulfs them and they are gone and seen no more.

Now stay cornered by that fact so that you can begin to see the fact and not like being where you are.”

~ Vernon Howard, from a talk given 8/23/1987, Vernon Howard’s Higher World

You cannot deceive a True Teacher

THE SWAMP

“Fake religious teachers and false religious followers love each other…Each silently demands and gets soothing lies from the other, after which they all smilingly wander together down to the swamp. A sign of a truly unfolding spiritual life is to see through this devilish conspiracy. You cannot deceive a True Teacher. Be grateful for that.”

– Vernon Howard, SOLVED The Mystery of Life

Valuing your life

“Please understand this: When you value your position in life, when you value your life situations, that is not the same thing as valuing your life. Your varied conditions where you live, how you live, the large or small size of your bank account, the number of friends, acquaintances, activities  all these are not your life.

They are happenings that are so numerous and so overwhelming and so demanding that unknown to yourself you have a conversation with yourself, and you carelessly  without realizing what you are doing or saying, you tell yourself statements such as the following: ‘My life has had nothing but ill fortune; my life is bumpy; it’s going the wrong way; my life is not turning out the way I hoped it would; in spite of all my efforts, my life is just dull, boring, defeating, and sad.’

I want you to be far more careful with your vocabulary, with your use of words. You can give yourself a great shaft of light that will explain everything to you simply by knowing how you carelessly misuse words, terms, ideas. Now, you have just learned that what you do is not your life. So stop calling it your life. It’s an action. It’s a tragedy. It’s a misfortune. It’s a blow. It’s a sudden in-crease in your financial stature. It is not you. It is not your life.”

– from a talk given 12/28/1988 Vernon Howard’s Higher World

Straight talk from Vernon Howard

“What is there to be concerned about? There’s nothing to be concerned about because there’s no one to be concerned over.”

– Vernon Howard

Doubting our believing

“Certainty is above both believing and doubting, and is attained
by doubting our believing.”

–Vernon Howard, Cosmic Command # 2210

Who am I?

“You will know who you are when your memory

no longer describes you.”

–Vernon Howard  1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle # 1354

In spite of it all

“People are so used to having their own way, they get stunned
and they get distressed when something higher than themselves
tries to have its way with them. And that, by the way, is what
Truth, Reality is always trying to do, which is to dislodge
you from your own life so that it can give you what it has
prepared for you.

But human beings being what they are always insist, in
spite of all the evidence, in spite of all the grief they
suffer, they always insist that they are right.”

from a talk given 3/6/1987
Vernon Howard‘s Higher World – MP3 CD Volume 10, talk 233

Shock

“Authentic growth toward happiness comes by _taking shocks
with awareness_. Let’s see what this means.

When we are faced with an unwanted truth, we are shocked.
If we resist the blow by repressing it or denying it, we
cannot learn from it, in fact, we are worse off than before.
But if we are aware of the blow, we can see its cause in
the clash between what is true and what we falsely claim
is true. Our willing exposure of our falseness wins release
from its pain.”

~Vernon Howard, Pathways to Perfect Living, p. 97

“There are many fierce moments in any one life span: times of turmoil, upheaval, challenge, and change. These fierce moments of grace are in many ways the most spiritually important moments of our lives.”

~ Adyashanti, FIERCE GRACE, Awakening in the Midst of Turmoil

Courage

 

“Real courage consists of repeatedly leaping beyond surface personality even while fearing to do so, until all fear vanishes.”

– Vernon Howard. 1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle, # 484

Notes to self

Things to keep in mind, from Vernon Howard:

“You need only one prayer to cover every difficulty in life.
That prayer is, ‘I pray to see more.’”

-A Treasury of Trueness, # 1338

“Healing fails to occur simply because it is much easier to
injure others than to heal oneself.”

-1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle, # 820

“The questioning of presently-held viewpoints is an absolute
necessity for self-transformation. It means that you must go
against your old and familiar ways of thinking.”

-The Power Of Your Supermind, p. 115

“Turn away from society’s artificial wisdom to the real
intelligence of your recovered essence.”

-1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle, # 907

“Don’t give neurotic people a reward. When you permit them to
upset you, you are giving them a reward.”

-A Treasury of Trueness, # 1073

Stargazing

“In order to illustrate a basic truth about life, ancient philosophers told a story about the astronomer and the stars. The astronomer habitually took an evening stroll outside the city to gaze at the starry heavens. While lost in stargazing, he fell into a well. His cries for help brought rescuers on the run. One of them advised, ‘It is better to see your very next step than to lose yourself in skies you do not as yet understand.”

– Vernon Howard, The Esoteric Path to a New Life, p. 46

What is social activism?


James Wood:

Social activism is a form of love in action. If you base your activism in a value judgment – e.g., that the world is “messed up” – you will only create more pain in the world.

As far as social activism is concerned, just liberate yourself and trust what happens. Human rights arise from the true heart of all morality, the conscious human being. The more awake you are in the world, the more just, righteous, and fair your actions are. Anger does not produce positive social change. Liberation does. Anger just makes you harder, meaner and more afraid. Negativity in any form is not necessary for vigorous action that, in its own way, subverts an unjust social order.

– The Path of Awakening (2007) p. 110

Vernon Howard:

If you straighten yourself out, if you are no longer putting out hostility or deception, then you are putting out something that is helpful, therefore that is the only thing you can do to help society… Your anger is the cause of war.

-The Esoteric Path to a New Life MP3 CD, “A revealing interview with Vernon Howard”

Byron Katie:

Just as we use stress and fear to motivate ourselves to make money, we often rely on anger and frustration to move us to social activism. If I want to act sanely and effectively while I clean up the earth’s environment, let me begin by cleaning up my own environment. All the trash and pollution in my thinking- let me clean that up, by meeting it with love and understanding. Then my action can become truly effective. It takes just one person to help the planet. That one is you.

-Loving What Is (2003) p. 107-108 and here is an additional excerpt on activism from A Thousand Names for Joy (2007)

Franklin Merrell-Wolff:

This view is not merely altruism in the usual meaning of the word, for in the latter sense, altruism involves a difference between one’s own self and others… I Recognize more in every man’s Recognition. I am delayed by every man’s failure. Every new facet opened by another individual man breaking through is a new facet awakened in My understanding. Thus, from this standpoint, the duality of selfishness and altruism is destroyed.

-Experience and Philosophy (1994) p.91

 

More straight talk from Vernon Howard

“Everything works to your advantage as you do what must be done. You may not see this at first, in fact, you may feel that you are losing instead of gaining. __This loss is your gain.__ See this! Your present life goes the way it does because you have certain ideas about it. Well, honestly, what kind of life is it?  If the life is wrong, the ideas in back of it are also wrong, so they must go. It is the loss of the harmful familiar that you feel. Don’t love the familiar just because it seems comfortable. Love whatever is beyond the familiar, which is true love.”

–Vernon Howard, Esoteric Mind Power, p. 153

Psycho-Pictography

Sooner or later, all of us must see that negative feelings
toward another person is like tossing dust at him while the
wind blows against us. It all comes back. This is not merely
a moralistic teaching or Sunday school lesson; it is a basic
and inescapable Law of Life.

–Vernon Howard, Psycho-Pictography, p. 168

Happy Halloween!


“You know, most haunted houses aren’t haunted until someone walks inside it. (Laughter)  We do the haunting ourselves and don’t know it. You’d better remember that little figure of speech so you won’t make the same mistake again.”

– Vernon Howard‘s Higher World – MP3 CD Volume 33, talk 823

 

Part Three: truth and Truth

Part One of this 3 part series was a look at the question: Do you suffer? using the First Noble Truth from Buddhism: Life is suffering, or dissatisfaction.  Part Two was an exploration of the question: Can suffering/dissatisfaction end completely?  Part Two and a Half had to be written, and it briefly addressed the idea that the end of suffering = the end of the mind, which is a highly problematic view, in my view.  (For more on that, please see ‘Sanity’ by James Wood.)

I don’t claim to know anything.  I’m happy to debate, respectfully.  What I offer in this blog is the understanding of The Teaching on freedom from suffering that I have arrived at by asking my primary Teacher lots of questions and studying my secondary Teachers.

That brings us to Part Three: truth and Truth.  It is useful to be able to discriminate between relative truth and Absolute Truth.

For example, if someone is thirsty and he asks me for water, I do not say, ‘oh, nah, you’re confused, ‘water’ is just a word.’  Yes, ‘water’ is just a word, in an Absolute sense, but it refers to something in the world of relative experience that can help the person who is thirsty.  I know what ‘water’ refers to.  I don’t know what it ultimately is.

This gets a bit trickier when we talk about ‘spiritual’ stuff.  ‘Truth’ is just a word, but it refers to something that helps.  Awake teachers encourage us to find and express what is true in our relative experience, (are you dissatisfied?) while pointing us to the Absolute Truth of freedom that is beyond what words can capture.

Absolute Truths are statements made from the perspective of awakened (enlightened) consciousness about the nature of Reality – statements like ‘Truth is all there is’ or ‘the world is an illusion’.  Liberated individuals speak like this because they are firmly planted in the awake state, out of the nightmare of dissatisfaction.  Absolute Truths are helpful because they lead us somewhere.  (The map is not the destination.)

True Teachers are able to switch between speaking from the perspective of Absolute Truth (it’s just a dream you’re having) and the perspective of relative truth (are you thirsty? would you like a glass of water?

Absolute Truths are used dishonestly quite often.

What I mean by that is – if I were to use statements of Absolute Truth it would be dishonest because I am not spiritually awake.

[I can say, honestly, that I have a strong intuition and I accept, intellectually, that the end of all dissatisfaction is possible.  I can repeat what True Teachers say or discuss my interpretation of what they say.]

When I am angry, for instance, that is the (relative) truth, in that moment.  It would be dishonest for me to react to the anger with an Absolute Truth like ‘Truth is what I am’ or ugh, ‘This anger is the truth.  I am already free’.

No. For me, anger is an (level of the nightmare) issue, so I employ relative truth.  I find the source of the anger – thoughts about what I want that I’m not getting, usually.

Then, I recall the Teaching – anger is fueled by attachment to ‘what I want’ and then, deeper, attachment to thoughts like ‘I shouldn’t feel angry.  I don’t want to feel angry now or ever again.’

Until judgment of What Is does not drive me, I’m not free and I cannot speak as if I am.

3 Part series summary:

  • It’s useful to notice if you are dissatisfied.
  • Dissatisfaction is unnecessary – it can end it, completely.
  • Absolute Truths are statements made from the perspective of Awakened consciousness and are sometimes mistakenly used to deny what is true in relative experience.

When a seeking mind finds what it seeks, it feels its reward.  This means that if you have a seeking spirit you want to find something other than your present level.  That very right sincere wish will lead you to the recognition of that higher state when it appears and presents itself to you.  Because there is a matching of your wish and the fulfillment of that wish, there is what we commonly call an inspiring feeling.  Just like when you’re thirsty and have a drink of water there’s a certain satisfaction there.  You wanted the water.  you had the water and there is the reward.  However, when you have this experience of feeling good when having met a truth, you also feel that it’s not enough.  Let’s go very carefully into this now because the point is enormous.”

from a talk given 6/22/1988    Vernon Howard’s Higher World – Volume 21, talk 507