"Taking full responsibility is an excellent means of growing, because you will get to see your mastership. You will get to see that whatever is happening to you, you created."

"Q. I cannot go within sufficiently deeply.


M.  It is wrong to say that.  Where are you now if not in the Self?  Where can you go? All that is necessary is the stern belief that you are the Self.  It is better to say that the other activities throw a veil over you."

"M. Once you say, 'I want to find Truth,' all your life will be deeply affected by it. All your mental and physical habits, feelings and emotions, desires and fears, plans and decisions will undergo a most radical transformation.


Q. Once I have made up my mind to find The Reality, what do I do next? 
M. It depends on your temperament. If you are earnest, whatever way you choose will take you to your goal.  It is the earnestness that is the decisive factor. 


Q. What is the source of earnestness?
M. It is the homing instinct, which makes the bird return to its nest and the fish to the mountain stream where it was born. The seed returns to earth, when the fruit is ripe. Ripeness is all.


Q. And what will ripen me? Do I need experience?
M. You already have all the experience you need, otherwise you would not have come here. You need not gather any more. Rather you must go beyond experience. Whatever effort you make, whatever method you follow, will merely generate more experience, but will not make you go beyond. Nor will reading books help you. They will enrich your mind, but the person you are will remain intact. If you expect any benefits from your search, material, mental, spiritual, you have missed the point. Truth gives no advantage. It gives you no higher status, no power over others; all you get is Truth and Freedom from the false.


Q. Surely truth gives you the power to help others.
M. This is mere imagination, however noble! In truth you do not help others, because there are no others. You divide people into noble and ignoble and you ask the noble to help the ignoble. You separate. You evaluate. You judge and condemn---in the name of Truth you destroy it. Your very desire to formulate Truth denies it, because it cannot be contained in words. Truth can be expressed only by the denial of false---in action.  For this you must see the false as false and reject it. Renunciation of the false is liberating and energizing.  It lays open the road to perfection. 


Q. When do I know I have discovered Truth?
M. When the idea 'this is true, that is true' does not arise. Truth does not assert itself, it is in the seeing of the false as false and rejecting it. It is useless to search for Truth when the mind is blind to the false.  It must be purged of the false completely before Truth can dawn on it.

"What is asked of human beings except to come to their senses

and live from their natural intelligence. Now that’s not asking

too much, is it?

What is asked of you is to abandon your present ways of thinking

and deciding, abandon them to see what will take their place.

You know, the world who is not here today, likes short term gains

and long term losses. Short term gains and long term losses. That

little fact is to be considered by you until you see it in greater

revelation than you see it now."

 from a talk given 6/28/1992

Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 35, talk 857, track 3

"Books are infinite in number and time is short. The secret of knowledge is to take what is essential. Take that and try to live up to it."

"True responsibility is to allow yourself to see higher inner

worlds that you now resist seeing. The limit of your view of the

universe is not the limit of the universe. Self-newness is reve-

lation, not creation. So make inner progress. Real progress is

when you learn something you thought you already knew."

                Your Power of Natural Knowing, p. 60

"As long as there are causes, there must also be results. As long as people are bent on dividing and separating, as long as they are selfish and aggressive, such things will happen. If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds. Such change cannot be imposed. It must come from within. Those that abhor war must get war out of their system. Without peaceful people, how can you have peace in the world? As long as people are as they are, the world must be as it is. I am doing my part in trying to help people to know themselves as the only cause of their own misery."

"If you wrongly think you possess a self which is apart from the whole

of nature, and which must therefore compete and fight with other

people and events, you have destructive self-interest. And it is an

exhausting fight which you cannot win, for there is no such self

which exists apart from the whole. It is like fighting an imaginary

ghost."

                    Secrets for Higher Success, p. 177

"Anything but the Self is wholly imagination. The ego is only an apparent actor in the imaginary story script you wrote.  Thou art That, here and now. Do not delude yourself. Drop your illusory limitation."

"As soon as you know the voice and understand what it is, the whole scene changes. The same world  which was a ghastly battlefield of Maya is now changed into something good and beautiful."

"As long as we believe ourselves to be separate from God, fear remains with us. But when we know ourselves to be the One, fear goes. Of what can we be afraid?"

"All we need is a decision to seek the light.  When that is done, all else is done for us."

"All power is within you. You can do anything and everything.  Believe in that. Do not believe that you are weak. Do not believe that you are half crazy lunatics as most of us do nowadays. Stand up and express the divinity in you. "

"We are here and now fully a realized being telling ourselves that we are not by saying, 'I need this, I need that, I am limited by this, I am limited by that.' All we need to do is to stop feeling that we are limited and start being the unlimited being that we really are."

" A tremendous stream is flowing toward the ocean carrying us all with it. And like straws and scraps of paper we may at times float aimlessly about, in the long run we are sure to join the ocean of bliss." 

"...a brilliant creation to be in absolute awe of at every moment."

"I do not know. I do not know how the perfect being, the soul, came to think of itself as imperfect, as joined to and conditioned by matter"

"These are all ideas, concepts. A grand idea that you were born and you have come this way, that way.  There are people who told you this. So I want you to go back to the source from where you seem to have come. Stop there and find out. Look back and see what is happening there. Don't go with the current and then see what is what. You will never be able to find out because your travel in the stream is only conditioned...with concepts. You have heard about things from people, you have read about it in books. That is why you are passing along the stream, is it not? Go back. Go to its source and find out whether there is anything. "

"...from the moment you were born, you began hiding your tremendous power, wisdom and abundance from yourself and convincing yourself you were the complete opposite of who you really are."

"Until we discover the reality of the body and the world, we are looking at the illusion as real. Discover the real you, your Beingness, and only then can you know the reality of the body and the world."


"...you must discover the real you in order to discover the apparency of the world." 

"...now see the urgent need of being free of this unnecessary 

self-identification with a bundle of memories and habits."

"Treating everything as a dream liberates. As long as you give reality to dreams, you are their slave. By imagining that you are born as so and so, you become slave to the so and so."

"Without imagination there is no world."

"Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way by which you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are, and now you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are."


"When you shall begin to question your dream, awakening will not be far away."

"People can't see that what truth asks of them is for their own good.

They are simply unable to comprehend that they do indeed have a

friend, the truth, which is altogether loyal, helpful, kindly,

gentle, because people have not reached the point where they can

understand truth even in a small way.

They become frightened when truth says, "This is the way, walk in it.'

They reject the all loving invitations of truth because they believe

that the only thing that exists for guidance, is their own mind.

Now look how ridiculous and illogical that is at the start. Every

one gets into trouble dozens of ways, every day every one is

stumbling in the dark. And unfortunately no one practically, no

one says, 'Maybe the reason for my grief is that I don’t under-

stand myself and my mind.'"

   from a talk given 8/25/1991

 Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 32, talk 783, track 3

"Q: I don't know where these truths are taking me.

A: Great! Remain in that state. Don't ask why. Just remain in

that state. You will see!"

               Treasury of Positive Answers, # 610

"The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real because you think of it all the time. Cease thinking of and it will dissolve into thin mist."

"I have not read anything. All my learning is limited to what I learned before my fourteenth year. Since then, I have had no inclination to read or learn. People wonder how I speak of Bhagavad Gita, etc. It is due to hearsay. I have not read the Gita nor waded through commentaries for its meaning.  When I hear a verse, I think its meaning is clear and I say it. That is all and nothing more. Similarly with my other quotations. They come out naturally.  I realize that the Truth is beyond speech and intellect. Why then should I project the mind to read, understand and repeat stanzas, etc.?  Their purpose is to know the Truth. The purpose having been gained, there is no further use engaging in studies."

"Your present doubt is due to the false identity."

"Giving attention to attention, aware of being aware. Affectionate awareness is the crucial factor that brings reality into focus." 

""...the stability of one's peace is the best measuring stick for one's growth; peace under circumstances not ideal.  Peace under circumstances in which the individual is being tried. If you maintain your peace while everything out there is going against you, then you really have it. This peace I'm talking about is the real happiness and can be measured by its imperturbability. If a person cannot be disturbed in their peace, he's got it!"

"Spiritual resurrection is yours when you personally make right

effort, effort toward becoming part of the universal foreverness.

You must participate in your own resurrection. That means that

effort must go on all the time - you, individually, day and night,

jolting yourself out of the mental sleep that you don't even know

has captured you and that you are immersed in."

"What prevents you from knowing yourself as all and beyond all is the mind based on memory. It has power over you as long as you trust it. Don't struggle with it.  Just disregard it. Deprived of attention, it will slow down and reveal the mechanism of its working. Once you know its nature and purpose, you will not allow it to create imaginary problems."