(from Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge
by Vernon Howard)
“A teacher said to his audience, ‘We have been studying together for six months. By this time our intended accomplishments should be clear. Please give them to me in single sentences.’ The students responded:
‘We are seeing that esoteric principles are the very essence of a whole and sane mind.’
‘We are passing beyond the limits of our present nature.’
‘We intend to change what happens to us by replacing unconscious behavior with conscious action.’
‘We are aware of how we have confined our own minds, and so now intend to give them room to roam.’
‘We seek to make the inner government supreme.’
‘We wish to see quite deeply that chatter about social reform is just an evasion of personal transformation.’
‘We are making ourselves willing to take what the truth has to offer.'”
***
Inner Life Exercise
Write out Truths that you have learned along the Esoteric path in short, concise sentences. This will make the mind work in a practical and logical manner. Follow this guideline: ‘One good reward leads to another.’
For example:
- When I put Rightness first and foremost in my thoughts, my actions become Right.
- When my actions are Right, I stay out of the ditch.
- When I stay out of the ditch, I have time to organize my time.
- When my time is organized, anxiety vanishes.
- When anxiety vanishes, fear vanishes.
I arise each day, alone and untouched. There is no thought for tomorrow. What will be provided today, cannot be known. But the questions begin with their anxiety, fear, hope, ambition. The day becomes a battle, trying to find ‘my way’. No longer alone, the thoughts claim refuge. Forgotten is the promise of another land, complete in its majesty. Pray for a return to the unknown from whence it all began. A lighted torch is provided. Clarity awaits one who lifts it high and trudges through.
I need not appear to be important to anyone. When I try to be important there is pain. This pain keeps me a slave to others opinion of me. When I react from this place, I cannot be a sincere friend to anyone. When I see the futility of this, it naturally stops.
When we come to realize our realness, when our fragmentation has fallen away,
then knowing the truth and being the truth becomes inseparable.
The point of Grace that we must face by declaring ‘all or nothing’ has already been
chosen by the serious student, for that point of grace is a built-in component of our self-
transformation.
The transforming takes over and consumes our falseness, giving rise to our wholeness.
We start living from this inborn clarity, where it becomes natural for us to know what we are
doing while we are doing it. In our new-found wholeness, everything that Vernon taught us
we must learn to do becomes instinctive.
Our true nature can’t help being itself, just as our false nature couldn’t help being itself.
Our wrong use of thought is rapidly being replaced by clarity’s instinctive understanding.
Our wrong issues are being transformed into non-issues, since wholeness has no need of
them.
Our inevitable collapse and rescue merge seamlessly as one movement. The collapse
from our limited thought transitions into the rescue of our new expanding consciousness,
where all truth is understood naturally.
We know we must keep letting this life-giving transformation take root from within us with
every ounce of our being.
This is why we exist.
This is our real inheritance.
This is Joy itself.