Let The World Hurt You All It Wants

An excerpt from a talk by Vernon Howard given on 04-21-78, Side 2, at 0 minutes.

Let the world hurt you all it wants. There is your deliverance from all hurt. You're not living that way are you? Well, how about a little experiment? Why don't you just let the world hurt you all it wants as an experiment to see that maybe the final result will be different from the results you're getting now by fighting the world that tries to hurt you. You are you know.

All your energy, all your strength, all your intelligence is used to fight the world in one way or another. To try to outwit it, out guess it, to be competitive with it. All in an attempt to prevent the world from hurting you. And I can't begin to show to you the incredible mistake you are making.

Still only having an ordinary intellect which divides itself into inner and outer, you still think that the outer world is out to get you. Therefore, the self in you must protect itself from the world out there.

You don't see, I am telling you, you don't understand that the only enemy you have is within. You don't see it. This is why you are wasting your time and your energy in a vain battle to try to keep yourself from getting hurt. How come it happens ten times a day? Something is failing. Your technique is very very ineffective.

What would happen if you didn't resist when the world tried to hurt you? Maybe you would discover the secret I've just talked about. To discover that it's your own inner processes that are false, that are resisting the world that is keeping you in a hurt condition.

The next time you're going to lose something why don't you simply say politely good-bye to it instead of trying to hang on to it? The hanging on to it is what is causing the fear, because you are saying, "I must keep this," - listen, listen - "I must hang on to this possession in order to remain as secure as I am."

Your security is nothing but one trembling after another. And you don't have the intelligence enough to see that simple fact. If you did, you would then begin to have the higher intelligence of letting it go. Letting that man go, letting that woman go, letting that power go, letting that advantage go, and indeed, of letting that anxiety go.

Because your anxiety, strange as it seems is giving you a sense of security, because it is giving you something to do so that you won't have to face and see the mistake you're making. Because what if you had to say, "I've been wrong all my life about the way I've been living my life." Whether you're twenty or eighty, pretty shameful to the ego, huh? Why don't you plunge into the dark clouds just to see what happens to you; to let yourself be completely ashamed at what a liar you've been, at what a phony you've been, at how divided you've been, at how you believed in people, how you trusted people.

Let yourself be knocked - you understand? You have to understand - let yourself be knocked around by a vicious world all it wants so that you have a pair of sandals and pants and a shirt on and that's your possessions. When all you've got is a pair of sandals and a little bit of clothes over you, you'll own the world. I'll tell you. I'll teach you in this class how to own the whole world.

You don't own anything now. You crab at the rent. See you don't own your house. You have to pay rent to everybody you meet. You hate them. They take tribute from you and you hate them. Own your own house, own your own life. That is the whole world. Owning your own life is possessing the whole world. Possessing the real world. A world that won't pass away.

Your home up on the hill or down in the valley or your nice big fifty-story casino that you own or hotel that you own or that big property you own in Oregon or Vermont, all that's going to pass away as far as you are concerned.

Why do you fight? You're afraid - you're afraid that someone is going to steal your misery. Your misery is your present world. That's right. Your division, your fear, your split down the middle is your present world and you are fighting to retain it. You're afraid that someone is going to steal your life away from you. You have no real life. You are afraid that someone is going to steal your trash. Begin to let them steal your trash without resistance. Resist not evil. Let them take anything they want. Let them take everything.

You precious, good people here. You good people are so bad. You respectable people are so disrespectable, unrespectable. You interesting people are so boring. You people with hope, you're hopeless. That's why you have hope, because you are hopeless. If you didn't have hope you'd have hopelessness which is freedom.

The man with the sandals and the coat and the shirt and the pants - he has no problems. You with your tuxedos and your ties and your shiny boots, you have problems because now people have to be impressed with you. And maybe the boots will wear out or maybe that woman will find another man with shinier boots.

Get poor. Own nothing. Not as a religious phrase because then you're just a religious hypocrite, but as a reality in your actual life where you're so poor - you are so poor that nobody and nothing can ever ever again take a thing away from you. Now you are rich! As long as something can be stolen from you, you are poor thinking you're rich.

You'll look - having that shirt on your back and the old sandals - you'll look out at the world and you will marvel at your stupidity, your hypnosis, that you ever could have been so stupid as to be jealous of that man who owned that million dollar motel, hotel. You'll wonder at your insanity that you could have ever wanted that marvelously beautiful charming television actress. You'll wonder at your insanity that you wanted that insanity. Insanity does indeed covet insanity.

How poor can you get? Find out. Never mind defining riches because you don't know what it is. You can examine - you can examine what you call riches and let that go. Then you'll know what real riches are without the word, without the description, without the definition.

Then you can sit back and you can have a home if you like, and you can have friends if you like, and you can have a car if you like. Then you can sit back and be unconcerned. Then you can sit back and be content not wanting anything from the world because you are the whole world.