A father and his son lived in a chaotic country. The father waited for the right opportunity to teach his son to live properly while in troubled times.

The opportunity came when a band of bandits attacked and looted their village, then disappeared swiftly.

The son wanted to join the enraged crowd in the street, but his father told him, “Stand at the window and look out. See that man with the angry face? Do you want to destroy yourself with anger?”

“No,” said the son.

“Observe that man over there who is actually trembling with fear. Do you want to go through life being afraid?”

The son replied, “I do not.”

“Notice that man who is running around with frantic jerks of his arms,” said the father. “Do you want to be a person with no control over himself?”

“No, I do not want to be out of control,” assured the son.

The young man sensed that his father was trying to tell him something of supreme importance, but could not quite grasp the complete meaning. The next day he asked, “What was behind your words of yesterday?”

His father told him, “Never let mechanical people tell you how to respond to any kind of event. Respond from your own essence, for that is the only healthy response. Then you will not be a helpless leaf tossed about by every passing wind, which is the way most people live-and suffer. Live only from your true nature.”

How to End a Thousand Difficulties

People panic in a crisis because of a wrong reaction. The main wrong reaction is to think the crisis has an exterior cause, when in fact a personal crisis is a personal crisis.

The corrective course in any crisis is to react with the thought, “something is unnecessarily agitating within me.”

Insight into pointless agitation ends it, for no man consciously agitates himself. In this way, you do not find an answer to a crisis; you dissolve the crisis itself.

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One cause of guilt and frustration is the inability to tell the difference between man-made laws and spiritual laws, which are often opposed to each other.

Self-awareness sweeps out this problem once and for all.

The self-illuminated man knows what to do in every situation involving various laws, for spiritual rightness understands and transcends human wrongness.

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Think about the need for right motives.

A motive is the seed which determines the quality of the fruit.

It is a wonderfully right motive to wish to know right and wrong from your own mind, not from what others tell you is right and wrong.

Consider the motives of two kinds of public speakers:

The unawakened man speaks to convince himself that his illusions are realities.

The enlightened man speaks to show others that their realities are illusions.

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Have you ever thought of words as petty dictators which command you to feel dejected or defeated?

That is what they are, which means you must no longer let mere words rise up and tell you how to feel.

Don’t let the word “weakness” arouse feelings of shame; don’t let “failure” frighten you.

Our emotional responses to words are unconscious, which means we must alertly noticed how a word arouses a feeling.

Be aware of the mechanical process, for this ends the power of words to whip you about.

(Transcribers Note: The author is encouraging us to notice how words cause different emotions to arise within us. This is a mechanical process, meaning: the emotions occur in response to stimulation without our consent. It’s automatic.

Another mechanical process is the stream of thought that flows between our ears, and behind our eyes, throughout the day.)

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Imagine a printing press turning out newspapers having several spelling mistakes in the headlines.

Workers grab the emerging papers and frantically try to make corrections- but no one thinks to correct the single cause of all the mistakes, which is the printing press itself.

No printer would make that kind of error, but society does it every day by trying to correct effects instead of causes.

Unconsciousness is the faulty printing press; consciousness is the correction.

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One flash of insight can clear up a thousand difficulties. Lloyd H., who was faced with domestic difficulties, could see no way out. However, Lloyd knew enough to work at clarifying his own mind.

When he changed his attitude toward the difficulties, their power over him disappeared.

At a group meeting he stated, “Where is the answer to a problem? I found out. It is above the mind that argues back and forth about it.”

From: Secrets for Higher Success by Vernon Howard