”You don’t have to suffer! You must not suffer!”

We live in a mental fog. Our minds are crammed with tons of ideas and information. Most human beings have driven in or have experienced being in an actual fog. Sometimes it’s so thick you can’t continue to drive in it. You can’t see anything, which of course would make the drive dangerous. It’s exactly the same with our minds. Evil counts on us to do nothing but think so then it can fool us, torment us, hurt us, make us sick, keep us miserable, etc. Even if you try to think so-called “positive thoughts” it will always flip over to the opposite because its nature is earthly.

Only when the fog lifts does the sun shine through. The sun will even burn off the haze. So too will the spiritual light dawning within us clear up all the confusion and other negative states. It’s not natural for us to be afraid, or worry, or be anxious, or get angry. These are all unnatural mental and emotional states. We have mechanically and unconsciously picked up all of these reactions from other lost human beings over the years and we suffer terribly by living from them.

All negative states live in our habitual thoughts and emotions. We have either never observed this or we flatly refuse to see it. These ideas, opinions, beliefs and conditionings presently run our lives instead of something higher in us being in charge. Thoughts, not Truth, are at the top of the pyramid. Truth is supposed to rule the kingdom within (our essence), not our mental, emotional, physical and sex centers. Vernon told us on numerous occasions there’s something higher than food, sex and money.

Recently I had to hire a plumber to fix a leak we had in a drainpipe. It had to be accessed from an outside wall off the back deck. In fact part of the deck, which had recently been stained, had to be removed. I needed to be there to help as it was a difficult job for one person to do.
At a certain point the plumber had all his tools laid out on the deck along with the parts and glue needed to repair the problem. As he was trying to do something he accidentally knocked over the purple primer onto one of the deck boards. There was a split second before he reacted the way he had learned to react over the years. He got upset and went into self-condemnation. I didn’t respond the way I would have at one time. Though the deck had just been stained, I didn’t get all bent out of shape and angry that he had made a mess. It was very interesting to watch the whole scenario unfold.

In fact, I told him to let it go. It wasn’t a problem, and it wasn’t. It was refreshing because I was watching myself and didn’t go into the usual negative reaction. Something else handled it for me. All the years of coming to class and trying to put into practice higher instructions came into fruition. The Truth will do the work for us if we love it more than we love being in an agitated state.

But the plumber didn’t want to let it go. He was getting a false thrill out of being a blundering and unaware human being. He was wrongly vibrating over the incident. He didn’t have anything higher to draw upon to help him in that situation. On a practical level it occurred to me to go get a rag and wipe it up, which I did and amazingly almost all of it came up.

Yes, it wasted time, energy and money and could have been avoided, but why use up a bunch of extra time and energy on calling yourself an idiot and getting a false identity out of being a careless human being?

I recently listened to a great talk from June 6, 1992.* In it we are told “It is never necessary to follow one stupid blunder with another stupid blunder.” And Vernon Howard exclaimed, “You don’t have to suffer! You must not suffer!”

You see, by being aware and staying in the present moment, we can avoid situations like this in which accidents and problems can and do happen. We can begin to change and rise above the level of thought by refusing to remain in a mental fog. We simply don’t see things as they are in reality. We are not aware that we can live a completely different kind of life. When we follow heavenly instructions, we no longer behave mechanically but begin to flow consciously.

In a recent Secrets of Life quote from The Mystic Path to Cosmic Power it is stated, “It is a heroic business to personally experience a reality as a reality.” We begin by caring for what Truth is telling us more than we want to protect the conflicted and divided nature that continually must be propped up by an array of negative reactions.

If we watch carefully, we’ll notice that even while sleeping, the mind never shuts up. That’s the main reason we don’t experience restful sleep and wake up refreshed. We’re always being barraged by imaginary scenarios, many of which have a bleak outcome. What we also don’t see is that we’re allowing ourselves to be in a constant state of agitation. We actually think this is the only way to get things done.

What does the news do all the time? It stirs the pot. Once upon a time, only a handful of stations broadcast the 5 o’clock or 6 o’clock news. Now it’s 24/7 news on the Internet or TV or podcasts or radio or satellite radio. We’re bombarded by it. It’s nonstop if one so chooses to watch and listen. If you choose to notice, to see clearly, the news is almost always focused on some sort of a tragedy, fateful event, a war, a riot, a shooting, climate change, a ‘new’ devastating disease, a friction between this person and that person or this group of people and that group of people.

It reminds me of the old Chicken Little story depicted by Walt Disney in a short film in 1943. Through the cunning of a sly fox, Chicken Little has been led to believe the sky is falling. The fox plays on the gullibility and stupidity of the avian community tricking them into believing outrageous schemes by which the world is coming to an end. The point of the film was to expose the evils of mass hysteria and to see how easily fooled we are.

Something that we need to start catching in ourselves is this constant overreaction to events. We tend to jump to conclusions because of this. I don’t know how many times I have caught this mechanical nature doing just that. It paints the worst-case scenario just like in the story above. You make a mountain out of a molehill. The world wants you to vibrate insanely about all these happenings. They can be small things that occur between just two people or something on a bigger scale within the state or country you live in. Or maybe it’s only in your mind. The outcome is to set you off and to drain away your energy.

Malicious, destructive forces want to keep us in a continuous state of turmoil so we’re always in pain, always suffering. They also want to keep us distracted with frivolous, absurd things, so we don’t explore the possibility that there actually, factually is a way out. Evil wants us to have our attention exclusively focused on earthly matters, to try and convince us they are more important than cosmic matters. We must remember this is a spiritual battle between good and evil. And even though we have been assured that God has already won the battle, much inner work must be done to make this a personal certainty.

I mentioned something earlier in this article about carelessness. Vernon Howard wrote a short essay on Carelessness, which you can read in his book Your Power of Natural Knowing. He said, “You have been careless in acquiring and possessing energy: spiritual energy, energy about your mind, energy about human nature, energy about the incredible evil that rules this world.” We spend much of our time thinking about and vibrating over nonsensical matters. If we want a real life, we have no business habitually reaching out for these kinds of thrills to fill up the empty space inside.

Human beings love to make up problems where there are none and then believe this is living. We can learn something entirely different where we always live in the bright sunlight above the utter madness and chaos of this world we inhabit.

Because this is the answer to all of life’s mysteries, you wish you could tell the whole world about it, though you know most will refuse to listen. But you’ve begun to understand that nothing and no one can ever hurt you again. Once you get a glimpse of another way to handle things, nothing and no one can dissuade you from discovering and living the higher life. In “The Mystery of the Secret World”, Vernon Howard puts it this way, “Your Secret World has total power over the false world. Know this!”

* From Vernon Howard’s Higher World MP3 CD — Dated talk series Volume 34, Track 20