This morning I was very inspired by Vernon Howard’s book,   Esoteric Encyclopedia of Eternal Knowledge.  What an amazing collection of personal guides for anyone interested in a truly meaningful and happy life.  Here is an excerpt that gave me special direction today.

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FOCUS ON REALITY

Suppose you are standing on a high hill with a friend.  Below you is a small village with attractive homes and colorful fields.  While looking through binoculars your friend says he can see his home quite clearly.  You ask to have a look, so he hands over the binoculars with the instructions to aim towards the centre of town.  Peering into the binoculars you see nothing but a blur.  You realize what has happened.  When taking the binoculars your fingers touched the focusing wheel, turning it away from the right position.  When corrected, the binoculars reveal the home below.
We are out of focus with reality, which explains the blurs in our days.  That is the explanation of human distress offered by every teacher of all ages and lands.
We possess the talent for correcting whatever prevents a clear view of ourselves and our actions.  That is the encouraging solution offered by those who know.

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Inner Life Exercise
(from Vernon Howard’s Practical Exercises for Inner Harmony)

Exercise 16

YOU ARE NEW EVERY MOMENT

Picture in your mind an old haunted house in a windy forest.  Now, if workmen do not come along and prop it up with wood and cement it will finally collapse and be blown away.  On the clear land a new mansion can be built.

The haunted house is a man’s old and usual and faulty nature.  If a man will stop trying to repair his mental haunted house with repetitious thoughts it will eventually cease to exist.  In its place will appear a spiritual mansion, a new nature.

Your exercise is to study these ideas until understanding them completely, for out of that understanding will arise corrective action.  Here is what you must see:  You become inwardly new each moment that you do not repair your imaginary personality, your false self, by allowing wrong and self-centered thoughts to repeat themselves in your mind.  The very absence of the old makes room for the new.

You can become a new kind of human being in any moment you remember and practice this exercise.  Even if you fail a thousand times, these failures are already in the past, so you can go into new and liberating action right now.

This exercise contains the great secret of eternal life.

SPECIAL TRUTH TO REMEMBER:
The more you love Truth the more you will see the miracle of a new life.

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