Vernon Howard, The Power of Your Supermind
Be authentic and you will be almighty. Only an eagle can perch safely on top of the cliff.
We must see the difference between temporary relief from emotional distress and healthy insight into it. A fisherman in a leaky boat would not be content with bailing out the water day after day. He would search out and repair the cause of the trouble. So must we look at causes, not effects. A businessman is hurt and angry over a financial venture that falls through. By shaking his head to the suggestion that it has power to disturb, he retains self-command. A woman worries that life is passing her by. By living from her central self, not her conditioned mind, she is fulfilled every day.
Let neither circumstance nor person tell you how to feel. Tell yourself.
Don’t slap labels on your feelings. Don’t mechanically call one feeling good and another bad, don’t name one emotion as happy and another as depressing. The very act of labeling throws your feelings into a whirlpool of confusion, like clothes in a swirling washing machine. Instead, be silently aware of the feeling. Don’t call it anything at all. This keeps you out of the whirlpool. It retains quietness in your Inner World, regardless of events in the Outer World.
Feelings function normally when you live from the principles of the Supermind. Take the idea of winning good things for yourself as an example. Never assume what your added good will be. Never assume how and when it will come. Assumptions are projections of your own desires, which produce nothing new. Your added good is always different from your preconceived imaginations. It is an item on a higher shelf previously reached. The new cannot be assumed. To assume what it is, means you already know what it is. It is like sending a present to yourself and pretending surprise.
Life wants to give you new and good things. But you must chase nothing. You need only be receptive to whatever chases you. Live from the Supermind. Then, a new world has no choice but to offer itself to you.
Like draws to like, and the goods which belong to you gravitate to you. (Emerson)
It’s always nice to be reminded that there’s nothing for us to do, only something to not do. Everything is already prepared for us, we just have to let it come in and show us how to live our lives!