NEW SELF KNOWLEDGE AND THE NEXT STEP

·         Each of us grows physically without any real inner strength on our part

·         Social skills develop naturally

·         Inwardly, emotionally while we may develop better ways of covering up the turmoil in our hearts and minds, we never quite outgrow these same old fears and angers, the same doubt & worries.

·         Unlike our physical self which, being under the mechanical laws of evolution, realizes its eventual maturity virtually without any effort, the development of our spiritual self is not evolutionary. It is voluntary. It requires a conscious choice & effort on our part. We must fervently desire it.

·         Until we understand where the true cause of our unhappiness lies, we can never be happy.

·         We start learning from life when we stop blaming reality and accept that it was our lack of understanding that created the perceived problem.

·         Reality is very different from our distorted ideas about it. All those things we are afraid of are nothing more than ghosts created by our own minds.

·         We all have things inside of us that we fear: haunting thoughts and dark feelings. Instead of questioning any of them, we let them work in the dark while we go out of our way to avoid becoming aware of them.

·         Admitting we don’t know these things from ourselves is the first step towards real knowing and a real life.

·         As long as we accept ideas about ourselves and our lives from others and do not do the work of investigating for ourselves, even our comforting ideas will not be a real help in a crisis. We will always be afraid that something incomprehensible and all powerful is lurking below the surface. Only the truth that we know from ourselves can sustain us through any on the basis of artificial truth-false ideas that we never examine and that rarely change based on the lessons of experience.

·         Prudence doesn’t consist in evasion or flight but in courage. He who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any serenity must screw himself up to resolution let him front to object of his worst apprehension , and his stoutness will commonly make his fear groundless.