Start Life All Over by Vernon Howard

Start Life All Over

Now we have the greatest story ever told to humanity because it’s a story
about you as an individual, as a man or woman here on earth. If you don’t
like the chapters in your personal novel, you can toss it all out, leave it
back where it belongs in ancient history, and get a fresh pen, and start
your life story all over. You must not allow the subtle and cunning power
of past history in your personal life to interfere with your thinking, with
your receptivity that is going on right now.

Ah, you’ll say, “I thought that I was trapped by my past thinking, past
experiences. I thought it was needful for me to suffer today about
something that happened twenty years ago. I so believed in the need of
recurring pressure and pain that I invited them, thinking it was a good
thing to feel today again the humiliation and the disgrace and the
disappointments that I felt yesterday and twenty years ago. And as a matter
of fact, I must hasten the moment to have the courage to go to that closet
that I’ve been visiting every day and taking out the old scripts, and throw
them out.”

I tell you, you will get a new, true, exalted feeling of authentic
spirituality, of liberty, of happiness, each time you rip out the old page,
and there’s the fresh one right in front of you. And listen to this. Say
this to yourself. “I am not trapped by all those years in the past. If I
make a mistake now even, I can rip the whole page out and there’s another
fresh page.”

When you make a mistake, any kind of a mistake that you know is wrong,
don’t continue to think that you’re compelled to read the first mistaken
line and are compelled to continue with the next wrong move. Dare to toss
it in the wastebasket and start again.

Now, you can add a second true fact – encouragement. Remember, you’re
writing the book all day long in your own mind. You can add a second one, a
third one, and a fourth one, all the time building up what can be called
heavenly momentum so that you’re shifting your central self from acting
mechanically to flowing consciously.

You say and think that it is needful for you to live with the
manuscript-self of that terrible, shocking, experience when you were ten
years old, and you even want to blot it out of your mind. You must never,
never, never blot it out of your mind; that’s called repression. Repression
causes pressure. That’s called avoiding reality. It happened when you were
a ten-year old boy or girl, didn’t it?

Unpleasant Behavior Is Sick Behavior

Unpleasant behavior is sick behavior. Few people want to think about this
fact, but you will do so. From now on you will see that unpleasant people
are sick people. You know the thousand varieties of unpleasantness,
including sarcastic accusations, delirious demands, repulsive self-worship,
a cold and hostile face. If your behavior is unpleasant, you must see that
you have chosen midnight over noon and see that you will stumble and fall
in your own darkness. If another person is unpleasant, realize that your
wish for sunlight must have nothing to do with his darkness.

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