How Do I Pass On My Hurt To Others?

VERNON HOWARD TALK, Transcript. 10/15/86 How Do I Pass On My Hurt To Others?

Therefore, he remains a stranger to himself. He is never able to look and see the same person there all the time. Rather, he looks and like ships passing in the night, he sees something different each time which bewilders him because he can’t decide which of these many people he really is.

Is it this one? Is it the angry man? Is it the person who dreams of great things or is it the one who sees his dream collapse, never to rise again? So he has no fixed solid reference-point to himself. And his mistake is in thinking that he does have to have one. That’s your mistake. Now that’s a revelation to you and you get it clear.

You think that you should be able to see yourself, see the same person—and always, of course, a noble type of person. Strong, commanding, able to help others.

And you wonder why you can’t find it? Where is it? You’ve been searching high and low and it never appears.

And, of course, you're worried, frustrated, nervous with the following question in mind, “When am I going to find myself?" Then you add a lot of irrelevant religious thoughts to it, which have no meaning like, “Well, I heard that I have a real self, but which one is it? That's always the question! I see so many forms of my nature. I see myself in so many different roles, but I can't make any of them last beyond a few seconds or maybe a few hours. And I'm constantly worried over the disappearance of that self that for a while seems to have it made."

“Things are going well. But but even while they're going well, no particular challenges to my daily life, I know that every single one of them have finally gone out the window and left me a seeker again. When is the seeking going to end by me finding my real nature? I heard that I have such a thing, but it doesn't appear. And I don't think anyone else has found it either. As far as I'm concerned, it's a word an ideal."

And so you summarize the whole thing by crying out, shrieking out—and louder than you think inwardly—you scream. Yes you do. You scream out, “Where am I?”

Know that you do this, and then know that you don't have to do that. Know that you must not ever do it again. And if you do it a lot of times again, be aware that you're doing it and forget it.

You don't have a self that you have to find, create, develop, cling to, make secure. So why don't you right now, and forever more, drop your crying question, “Where am I? I can't find me?”

When you drop it it will dawn on you that the mistake was not your failure to find yourself, but your attempt to find yourself because you're not there anywhere. You're not anywhere you can define, describe, go after. Your whole life is now simplified because you can stop doing what you have been doing. So stop it.

No more searching, no more getting excited over the event. You see, why are you excited over the event? Because it refers to you in some way. You're going to get the reward. You finally got rid of an enemy, someone who's hurting you. All events—all events, unfortunately, are used by men and women to try to discover their nature and it's an endless weary process, isn't it? It's like a refugee fleeing from one country to the next.

Now you see how well I describe you in the next few minutes. The refugee in a war-torn continent, dozens of countries there. And he runs from one to the next and every new country that he goes into, that is, every new experience that he has, that you have, every new experience gives you the customs, and the manners of that country, of that experience.

And you take them on. You go to a country where they live in a certain way, live in certain kinds of homes. Maybe they don't have airplanes at all. Maybe they have subways or don't have subways and they wear certain kinds of clothes, speak a certain language.

You arrive in that country and you say, “Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I live." And so eagerly you get married. Eagerly you get unmarried. Eagerly you change your physical location where you live. You change your diet. You change everything in that particular country, and then because there's no settling down for you, there's no home for you there, no one comes up and says, “Here, settle down and be happy in this country.” No one does that.

How can they do that when they're all doing the same thing you are? Trying to find their home in that strange alien land. So you have to go on to the next. And you go over the borderline to the next.

Now a new friend, right? A new way of thinking. A new set of books. A new way of spending your leisure time. And always, of course, mainly a new set of thoughts going on in there. The old ones are so boring. They keep forcing themselves on you and because you have nothing real, you take the unreal thoughts and live with them for a while.

Never able to settle down because there never will be any place for you to settle down as long as you're looking for yourself because you're not out there at all. There's is no place for you in any of those countries with all those other people trying to do the same thing you are.

Now look, you have a heavenly home. You are citizen of the spiritual world. There is such a thing as rest. Listen to me. Oh, there is such a thing as you being welcomed back home.

You like that thought, don't you? Isn’t the excruciatingly painful exile weary of the whole thing? Yes. And that's why you like the idea of God welcoming you back into the heavenly gates which can occur right here and now. If you were to allow it.

Why don't you head back home? Let me tell you why, explain to you why. There is so much pleasure, so much painful ridiculous pleasure, false pleasure, in competing in the marketplace with all the other exiles and refugees, competing with them to find a scrap of bread. The fight’s the thing! Sometimes you win the fight, sometimes you get clobbered. Sometimes you get the prize, sometimes it eludes you; someone else gets it.

All the time something is happening inside of you that you have never been able to explain. And that explanation that you haven't had yet could cause you to slow down in your fighting for the crust of bread with all those other people who want a crust of bread too.

As your insight grows stronger you will understand why you fight instead of stopping the fight. Why you continue looking for yourself when you know you’re not going to find it where you're now looking. You never will. NOBODY EVER HAS.

You're afraid to stop. Wrongly concluding that the arguing-self, the scrapping-self, the grabbing-self is the only self there is for you, you want to keep it going. And the smallest suggestion that you stop seeking yourself is met with great fear and trembling. “Don't tell me to do that! Tell me to do anything but that. I don't want to cease to exist and you're telling me to do that.”

Well, I have to tell you again, you don't exist at all anyway. You think you're going to lose life and you don't have life. You really actually, I know, I know that you do not have life, but I know you can have by attending to these matters.

Now let's find out with more detail how this sick-self survives. I given you some clues already.

If we can find its den where it hangs out, so to speak, if we can see how it operates and how it puts one over on us all the time, then we can be smarter than it is, and when we see it continuing with its tricks which always ends up making us miserable and saying, “What's the use of it all,” if we can see through it, then we will be wiser than it is, and we can put it out of business.

By the way, have you ever consciously, knowingly, knowingly—now this is a big difference. Have you ever knowingly ever cried out, “What's the use of it all?” You absolutely must come to that point where you know you say it. You get little glimpses, but then you're afraid to face it.

See, you cry out, you know, you’re fighting all the time, getting a little, losing a little and something comes along that destroys your hopes for the future and you say, “What's the use of it all, what's the use of going on at all?” That is screaming loud inside of you but you've put up some soundproof barriers where you can't hear it. Take them away so you hear it. And then you'll be able—and then you'll be able to intelligently deal with that.

The sick-self survives fundamentally on one process divided into two parts. The neurotic nature in any man or woman survives—falsely, by the way—with agreement or disagreement to itself. Now let's see what that means.

You go out into your world and you do your work or you take care of the home, whatever you do during the day. Because you have not found your spiritual nature, which is what you really are, you are whipped without mercy by a certain unconscious force inside of you whose existence depends upon you obeying its tyrannical shouts and orders and commands.

This tyrannical self, this dark nature, is always telling men or women this false— giving this false order: Find people and events to either agree with you or disagree. Either one. Alternate. And by the way, they will alternate, that's their very nature. There's no such thing as being in disagreement all the time or agreement all the time. There's no such thing as you being depressed all the time, or you being so-called happy all the time. There's the mixture of the two, is there not?

The maniacal force inside you tells you that you will feel yourself by creating, inviting as many favorable or unfavorable experiences as you can find. That's a lie.

I told you before you do not create a real nature that way, rather you create and re-create what is punishing you so badly.

So, you listening to it without insight into what it’s saying to you, you following it, you listening and foolishly obeying it, you follow every instruction it gives you. And I'll prove it to you.

Today and yesterday and the day before that, you did indeed alternate between experiences that agreed with you and others that disagreed. That is, those that made you feel good, accepted, liked. Made you feel pleasant. Agreeable experiences. Those that agreed with your nature and those that disagreed. The rebuff from someone. The feeling that you’re a failure. The idea that you're not making it in any way at all. And when is the pain going to end?

Now if this is clear to you, I can explain more deeply why it operates. I explained earlier in the talk that you have of accepted as a fact something that is not a fact at all. Which is that you believe in your self. This belief in yourself is a belief in something that has no existence at all. You don't exist at all in the way you think you do. In the way you think you have to keep confirmed and supported. You think you have to rally every minute to win your rights, to win the argument, to win your position, to prove how clever you are.

And in this “proving,” quote marks, of yourself you automatically run into agreeable and disagreeable people and conditions.

Now I mean this. Having started with a phony self, you want to keep it alive and thriving, because you're afraid that if it goes away, you'll go away. The dumb you will go away, if it went away. Because that's all it is is dumb.

So you agree to the hideous voice that tells you to feel pleasant when people agree with your position and to feel unpleasant when they don’t. “But whatever you do,” the voice says, “feel something,” and you obey altogether, don't you? Didn't you do that today? Yes. So, you prevented yourself from finding true life.

Your foolish shallow obedience to lying voices is what causes you to repeat over and over the painful experiences and the pleasurable ones which are equally painful because they are false.

Now, it should be clear to you the gigantic mistake that you've made. Your mistake is trying to find yourself in a foreign country. Your error is in thinking that you need to continue to be exiled from one experience to the next, one nation to the next. The mistake is in you thinking that if you persist long enough that one day the heavenly gates will open for you here on earth, if not, up there afterward.

You have convinced yourself, but not really, that the payoff, the payday, the final reward is always just ahead of you in the next country. Which means that you have said, “I'm going to locate who I am, if not tomorrow then the day after tomorrow. If not in January then in February, I am going to find me and all my troubles will be over.”

Religious people say that and they just remain religious. People who make pleasures—what? The pleasures of the dinner, of the theater, of going someplace. They remain as they are. Always saying the next pleasure, the next country— finally something is going to satisfy.

Now I ask you a question. How can anything ever satisfy when the whole process, the whole self-process is built on a lie, on a false premise! A FALSE PREMISE. A shaky foundation. Sand, not solid rock. This is what you must see. This is what you can see. And when you see it, you stop!

Not all at once. The momentum of our neurotic life is going so fast. Even a quick little little flash of Truth can't do more than slow us down just a little bit, but that's a start.

But you have, let's say, a beginning glimpse of the reason that everything goes wrong and always has, is because you started off on the wrong foot. You should be going up but you went down, calling down up. Well, didn't you?

“That inheritance is going to change everything. I've always been short of money. I inherited all that money, things are going to be different now.” They're not different. You are still without God. You've got a million dollars from your wealthy uncle and you don't have God.

But now you're beginning to think right, and when you get up in the morning you're going to remember the explanation to you about your compulsive false need to try to find yourself, and then you remember that there is no self to find, so why should I live today like I did yesterday? I don't have to!

“I don't have to get the agreement with me by someone who takes my position against an enemy. I don’t have to feel good by having a friend.”

Ah, that’s one side, isn’t it? The other side which always goes with it—there’s always the opposites there. “I don’t have to feel bad when someone makes that hurtful remark. Or they looked at me in a certain way. Or I did something foolish. I don't ever again have to feel like a defeated man or winning man anymore.”

“Ah, that's it. Ah, I got it. I don't have to feel either one! And I'm going to notice as part of my inner investigation each time one of those happens, I'm going to notice which one it is. That's good. Oh, this is a fascinating discovery.”

“That is, I'm going to notice every time I feel bad, feel defeated, feel hurt, feel distressed, feel like a wanderer, I'm going to notice that and know that that's wrong.”

Oh, this one is the tougher one, isn't it? Someone tells me how nice-looking I am, how well mannered I am, how kindly I am, well what do you want people to say about you? Say it now and see how quickly you can toss it out as ridiculous.

How many of you are easily flattered? Anything will do as long as it's semi-pleasant. As long as you can grab just a little bit of it and say, “Well, that's better than nothing.”

All right. Well, I'm going to ask you a monumental momentous mighty question at this point. Wow. Tomorrow morning when you get up at 11 o'clock, (Laughter) tomorrow morning when you get up what are you going to do with yourself? This is Wednesday, you can’t do the same thing you did on Tuesday, and on Monday, Sunday. Can't do that anymore. What are you going to do with yourself? That's what worries you.

Oh, I know you're going to burn the toast as usual at breakfast and you're going to have to wake yourself up and it takes—how long does it take for you to wake up? You should be awake the split-second your foot touches the floor. I mean that—really.

No more grabby, droopy eyelids. “Which way is up?” (Laughter.) All instant awakedness!

Now you don't want to do that. You would like—oh, come on. You want the drowsy, sleepy state. You want to extend it as long as you can, don't you? So you won't have to face that wicked world out there. Look in the mirror and you'll see the wicked world. That's it right there.

All right. That was a little side-point. You're to be awake the minute you wake up, altogether, alert. Looking around. No more gradual. Right now. You wake up. You wake up and you’re to stay awake through the day.

All right. Now you have physical things to do, you have a lot of work. You have places to go and money to spend and money to save. Simple, right? No problem there. You’ve got to build a birdhouse— build a birdhouse. How many of you have to build up birdhouse tomorrow? (Laughter) For cuckoos. How many have a lot of cuckoos around your house? Okay.

That's easy. Were talking about something that's going to challenge your strengths. It's going to be really hard for you. Now you stop doing things that are easy for you, and you start doing only things that are difficult for you. That really are. You’ve got to make strength in your muscles by using them. Mental muscles. Not that anyone is a muscle-head. You put the lesson first.

Now I’ll review the lesson for you. The lesson is there is no life in lifelessness. The exhilaration over a complement to the ego-self, that's not life. Listen to me. That’s not life. Never forget that one little simple example.

Your worry over what's going to happen to you in this ambushing world, what's going to happen to you today? You got ambushed yesterday. Who's going to stand in the bushes and jump on you today?

You will refuse that self-reference! And that is exactly why you get ambushed because you're asleep instead of alert. If you are awake they couldn't jump on you from out the side of the road as they do now. That's the reason they are able to get away with it.

You're walking down that road with the high thick dark bushes on both sides, you're walking down it with your head down muttering, head and eyes down muttering. They saw you coming. You're an easy mark. You're a dupe. Nothing is easier for them to do that because you're sound asleep.

All the time thinking that you're thinking intelligent thoughts, and if someone says you're not, you get angry which is another stupid thought.

You have to break it now. You have to break the dull state that you prefer. The doze, the drowsiness. You have to break it. I'm going to tell you how to do that next.

Write down and remember this sentence.

How do I pass on my hurt to others?

That’s it. That’s an enormous self-therapy sentence. How do I pass on my hurt to others?

Let's say the same thing in a different way. How do I relieve my chronic tension by burdening someone else with my mouth? How do I hurt others simply by remaining what I am? A self-divided neurotic and worthless human being.

Now you’re to repeat over and over the basic thought to you, how do I pass on my hurt to others? Now, look. Just first of all, the most elementary lesson, don't you even say in the elementary several parts of your mind that you're supposed to be a good person, a nice person who doesn't hurt others?

Well, you say that but you don't do it! Your manner is a burden to others. They look at you and they know that there's a divided person at war with himself in there. They know, they know there's a desperate seeker in there by what you say, the way you say it, what you do with your day. They know that and that is their burden. Your burden has become theirs. It's their fault, of course, but they don't know any better.

When are you going to know so much better that you never again impose yourself on another? Well, there's only one way you're ever going to do that. One way. When you have no burden of your own to pass on to others.

Now it's pretty rough, isn't it? Lots of tons of bricks on your back. And you've got to get rid of them any way you can by behaving that way toward the man in your life, the woman in your life, the family.

Did it ever occur to you that you could do something different with your pain? And I've been telling you what to do with it. Don't believe in either the painful-pain or the pleasurable-pain, but know that the whole thing is wrong and prevents you from finding yourself.

To not have pain, pressure, burdens to pass on to another person means that one day you stopped in your exile chasing around the country, you stopped and asked yourself why you continue with such a futile way of living. And the answer came. Self-questioning. The answer will come to you. You have to do the self-questioning and the answer will come from something higher that is in you and the answer will be a correct one.

Now here's the big problem with this asking yourself: How do I pass my hurts onto others? I've been talking to you about that for several minutes now and I know that none of you have ever knowingly, consciously asked that question and stuck with it until you saw through yourself. In other words, you don’t know how you hurt others!

That means you don't know how you hurt yourself. See, you know the rules. Start with yourself.

If you knew why you do it, and I explained why you do it, because you're pursuing a false nature thinking you’re compelled to do that and must do it. If you see through yourself and you don't search for yourself anymore, but rather realize yourself, when you do that what badness do you have to give to others? None. Because the Spirit of Truth is living your life for you and that's good. And that's what you give to others.

All right. But back to the point. When you get up and walk out of here tonight in a little bit from now, you are as your practical exercise, ask yourself, how do I pass my pain, my suffering, my discontent, exactly how do I pass it on to others? And then you find out.

Watch those quick little impulsive remarks. Pressure build up a little bit? “If I say something, anything maybe that will relieve the tension.” All it will do is relieve it and then you make a blank space inside for more tension and it's filled up so nothing is really relieved. You have to do it over and over again.

Meanwhile, you have your responsibility for being a cruel man, a cruel woman. Who to hear all that we've talked about? Almost no one.

You want to be someone, do you not? who does not have to suffer anymore from being on the wrong search for something you’re never going to find. You’re not going to find you. You have defined who you are and you're trying to find that, and it started with falsehood, with a wish for self-glory.

You want to find a glorious man or woman, don't you? Someone who's going to be praised and admired for others. And when others don't agree, you get a pleasure out of their rejection of you. Oh, if you knew, I want you to know how far you have to go! I've given you the right direction. In thirty-five minutes or so, I've told you what you have to do. I’ll do it over and over. And you notice the next time and the next time and the next time, you without knowing that you did it at the time passed on your hurt to another in one way or another and you find out how you did it.

That means you listened to and obeyed the wrong voice again as you've always done. So you hurt and your wife hurts, husband hurts, children hurts, friend hurts. You passed it on to them. God is able to give you a nature, your real nature that is free from the repetitious compulsion of shooting out—and that's not a bad phrase. Shooting out and hitting and hurting others. God is able to free you of that with your cooperation with Him, with your wish to do so.

A man phoned me the other day and he asked me where we were, where New Life was located. So I asked him, look around out the window where you're phoning from and tell me where you are. Then I can tell you how to find New Life.

So he did. He looked out and he described a building, a couple shops over there and I knew where he was. So I told him, “Wow. Fine. You’re closer than you think. Go outside the door and go down a block and turn left,” or whatever the direction was. Which he did. And he found what he was looking for at New Life.

Why don't you confess to God where you are? Where you really are. See, the man was lost in a strange place and didn't know how to get out. Didn’t know how to find what he really wanted to find which was in this case a physical location of New Life Foundation.

When he admitted that he didn't know, God is able to tell you the direction to go in, the exact turns, left or right turns to make in order to find what your heart wants. But first you have to confess that you're lost like that man did.

See, you want to agree with yourself. You want to say, “I'm not lost.” And that will give you a thrill. Isn't it an ego thrill? “I'm not lost. Don't you tell me I'm lost. I'm not lost. I found myself I read religious books all day long. I go to church. And I'm good to my neighbor. And I love everybody.”

Oh, I tell you, and I tell you again, the average human being is hopeless.

Now if you feel hopeless, listen to me. Don't use that feeling of hopelessness as part of your search to find yourself because then you'll say, “Well, I will find my identity in being a lost human being.” And then you’ll quickly add, “Maybe God will look down and have mercy on me.” You're always, always tricking yourself, talking about yourself. THERE IS NO SELF THERE to talk about so stop talking. Stop talking and remember the lessons here tonight.

One summary being, you need not try to find yourself in feelings anymore, or in thoughts anymore, or in experiences anymore or in any other people anymore. When you stop that false search then your real nature will appear to you and God Himself will give it to you.

Good night.