From Vernon Howard

((from Esoteric Mind Power, my comments added in parenthesis.))

• Relieve from all useless and tiring errands in life.
• Be willing to be a beginner every single morning. Meister Eckhart
• Simplicity is your guiding star.
• See the link between mind and experiences
• Observe your thoughts and words and act "impartially."
• No action is more fascinating than the action of self-transformation.
• Self war explodes into international war.
• To realize personal helplessness is the beginning of both true wisdom and new life. Yet, there must be feeling of hope.
• There is nothing at all wrong with being a failure in human standards of success and failure.
• Man living by artificially, can neither understand or accept the genuine.
• There is no treasure like treasure of tossing out useless toys. ((you will be free-er))
• See how a man has pasted dozens of labels onto himself and then called these labels myself which brings up fictitious self, self-concern, self-confusion, self-guilt.
• Man rarely seeks out psychic junk unless forced to do so, and even then he carelessly mistakes it as valuable cargo.
• To discover the truth, see the false as false.
• Remain right where you are, not fighting the emptiness, not seeking relief from anxiety. ((Hishiryo, resign, surrender, If not, memory will be re-enforced))
• When you are undivided, when you are one with yourself and one with everything else, there is no separation between you and whatever comes your way. In this state, your terms and the terms of reality are the very same, making conflict impossible and peace permanent. ((Then, you are not searching, trying to accomplish anything, let the will of X, truth, God to express.))
• == chap 2
• Be aware that battling self cannot create a peaceful self.
• Wish that you want something "different" and better than you now have. Maintain this wish. ((But, need to remember/realize dualism = wish=suffering. So, no seeking. - Daruma))
• Remain dissatisfied with where you are, but never fight. ((Have the problem consciousness))
• Study your dissatisfaction carefully. Progress is an increasing understanding of your self and your life. ((See how karma functions in us))
• We find the new way by getting so tired of the old way that we are willing to give it up.
• Observe yourself as you really are. You permit the revelations to do their own good work of dissolving his imaginary self, which makes room for something entirely new and creative. ((Which means give time, in letting go of self, Hishiryo))
• It is not a disaster to discover that you are not the person you assume you are. To the contrary, it is the beginning of the end of disaster.
• Can you conceive a way of life in which dualistic view of good or bad, wise or stupid, confident or fearful, etc. do not exist? There is such a way and it is the way of true life. (28)
• Abandon false sense of goodness to invite what is truly good for you.
• Solve problems by realizing that they exist because of your own false belief.
• Refuse to waste your energies in negative emotion.
• The outer world is a reproduction of our inner world.
• When the change starts to take place, you see the change in speaking habits. It becomes less impulsively and more consciously.
• You are aware what you say as you say it. You do not waste energy in useless talk. You are not afraid to remain silent in certain situations. Quality of speech will rise, too.
• The truth is like a voice you cannot identify at first. If so, suspend judgment.
• We are not confined to the habitual path. ((Be alert! We are changing, and everything else, too))
• Never try to relieve the pressure of an embarrassment ((Or any negative emotion)). Do not explain or plead or apologize. It is destroyed by watchfully enduring it.
• If you feel blocked in making a better life, look for a missing ingredient.
• You cannot make a man understand something when his bank account or sex impulse feels better by not understanding it. ((A view on H-values))
• When you begin to see what conflict does to you, self-awakening is near. No awakened man punishes himself.
• Nothing beneficial can happen to you until you see something about yourself you never saw before.
• The great terror is inability to understand what is happening to you.
• Start to distinguish between the true and false.
• There is no supply of love and gentleness and conscience outside of our real home. We seek in vain if we think so.
• If you really mean to study yourself, nice things will happen.
• Watch what takes place when you set aside your habitual ideas to listen to the new.
• Watch your mind’s operation with quiet interest.
• Watch what happens by placing naturalness before an invented identity.
• You need only receive what is freely offered. To receive is to understand, and vice versa.
• Dwell in harmony with nature. Love the truth. Remain steadfast in rightness. Avoid doing good for the public applause. Distinguish truth from superstition. Observe the wrong-ness of envy. Live in self-government. – Marcus Aurelius
• The truth comes with the single purpose of helping us.
• The truth inspires because it connects what is real in you with what is real in the universe.
• Go forward without setting up requirements.
• Only a total transformation of your deeper and secret nature can make you new.
• The point of turn around is reached when your suffering becomes unbearable, when run out of hiding place.
• Place yourself near the source of rightness, the power of rightness will do the rest.
• Be aware of illusions, observe yourself carefully, be humbly honest, and want a new life more than present life.
• Travel in the right spiritual direction, there is so much nonsense you can ignore. ((including your own. Go over the hurdles))
• To see that we do not know is the beginning of knowing.
• Live in naturalness and simplicity.
• Dare to disassociate yourself from those who would delay your inner journey.
• Practice at placing the spiritual before the material.
• Speak with self-awareness, not to persuade others.
• The only important thing you have to do with your life is make it a right life.
• Love truth more than illusion.
• Nothing you really need is out of your reach. ((.. reaching out may be a false belief.)) You may not realize your own present self-completion. You are never divided from what you really need.
• Be aware of your reaching. Be aware of how it never reaches anywhere, but is always dissatisfied.
• You must clear the mind of its habitual obstacles.
• Be rewarded by having an intense interest in these ideas.

==

chap 3

• Place a rose over a wound and you still have wound.
• When you are an expert on yourself, you are an expert on everything else.
• Know yourself as you are, and you will know others as they are.
• Self-awakening is speeded up by clearly observing the human scene in all its chaos and heart-ache. ((confirm to refuse to live like that))
• It is not wrong to detect falseness in others as long as we look with equal vigor at ourselves. ((We see in others what we see in us.))
• If you fight against the established system, you are part of the established system. Stop fighting the system and start fighting for yourself.
• Systems are avoidance of immediate sanity. Sanity is now, not tomorrow.
• The only thing on earth, which protects a man from the wrongness of others, is freedom from his own wrongness.
• Self-melting and self-recovery are the same process.
• You see yourself only by contrast to someone else. This identification on yourself as an opposite to others is false from the very start, for only oneness is real. ((I create myself as I create you as you))
• Abandonment of a false self establishes the true relationship between people. ((Let mind flow freely, watch what is happening.))
• Illusionary thinking makes you believe that you possess a separate and individual ego which must be expanded and protected.
• When you realize your Oneness, your personal conflict ends completely and forever.
• You like in others what you like in yourself. You reject in others what you reject in yourself. You are therefore attracted or repelled only by your own alternating self-images, while mistakenly believing that others cause your feeling. ((Mirror analogy))
• When you are in charge of yourself you are also in charge of everyone you meet. You are placed in charge by not needing to have charge over anyone. ((Master and tools, Joshu, Hakuin and him adopting a son))
• Achieve the "Obedience to the nature of things."
• Nervousness is caused by permitting past experiences to impose themselves upon the present moment. The claim of the past upon the present is illegal, which you must detect as illegal. ((River flows, every moment it is new while the name of river may be the same, Dogen boat analogy, Zengo saidan- not to think burning wood become ash, spring to summer))
• Understand the illness, you also understand the cure. But the patient must want to get well. ((Tied to conscious efforts – to let the nature to take over…..issue of initiative!!!))
• Be an independent nation, which refuses to trade with treacherous countries. ..Begin at once to see a feeling of guilt as just another psychic tyrant you must overthrow.
• If someone behaves badly toward you why disturbed? ((someone -- including yourself)) People have such false guilt about everything that they actually feel obliged to get upset over another man’s upset. Your duty is to save yourself. Wisdom saves, not sentimentality. ((Re: A story of Nishimura roshi on compassion))
• A false sense of self adds the load of a false sense of responsibility, which then adds guilt that one is not living up to his "moral standards."