Vernon Howard (1918 – 1992)
American writer and spiritual teacher.
The power of fantasy is so strong that people think they are having a good time when they are merely wasting money.
Take disturbance as an awakening sign that you misunderstand something you assumed you understood.
We burden ourselves with useless ideas which we carelessly take as facts. Instead of letting reality come as a new surprise, we insist that it conform to our habitual concepts, and thus, we spoil everything.
Mental sickness has set up a system by which it never loses. No matter what you do and no matter what the results are, you will win an ego-victory. That means that when you send your desires out into the world: 1. You will get what you want, or 2. You won't get what you want. Of you get what you want, the pseudo-nature says, "I have at last been given what I so richly deserve," and the sickness feels affirmed. If you don't get what you want, you feel sorry for yourself. You still feel affirmed because you get a feeling, and that's all that neurosis wants is a feeling.
The only activities of true value are those which aim at inner transformation.