THE TRUTH IS THE LIGHT

NOTES FROM “BEYOND SUCCESS AND FAILURE”

AUTHORED BY WILLARD & MARGUERITE BEECHER:

If we wish to achieve any fundamental change in our character, it is quite futile to depend on information, sermons, and lectures as a solution of the problem.

We immediately run into the old stone wall of habit.

And habit never rests!

The mind is filled with misconceptions, which add up to dependency on authority figures.

These misconception must be destroyed. [That is, if one wants to improve.]

It is simply not possible to alter oneself—to go beyond old conditioning—without first destroying the compulsive hold that habit has on us.

There must be a period of unlearning, so that the person can de-condition himself to his old, habitual responses.

[When, with blind faith, you religiously accept what you are taught or told, you become subserviently dependent upon the source of those teachings or dictations. And, you essentially waive the right to think for yourself.

To become a self-reliant thinker, one must continuously improve and trust the potential of his or her own rational thinking. Rational thinking is the starting point towards spiritual self-reliance and spiritual maturity. Here I use the term spiritual to mean thought and/or emotion. –Perman Wilson]

The person who wants to change his habits must first reckon with his present host and pay his bill before he can be free of the debt he has to old conditioning. His job is to empty out the old garbage—not to try to fill in on top of it! The job is much like that of building a modern structure on the site of an old shack. The old encumbrance has to be removed to make way for the new.

When the old mistaken certainties and old dependencies from childhood have been cleared out, then the way opens for new behavior by itself, without any pressure on our part. When the old mistaken certainties and old dependencies from childhood have been cleared out, then the way opens for new behavior by itself, without any pressure on our part. We need only to discover and destroy mistakes and illusions that fog the mind. When we have seen accurately the What Is in a situation, everything turns right-side up by itself, as it ought to be. Nothing has to be learned or practiced. [“The truth is the light.” –Author Unknown]

Is there a way by which we can use our own existing powers to help ourselves? Did nature provide a factor within each of us for his own salvation? It must be so, at least at the psychological level. Two great teachers thought so. When Buddha came upon his own enlightenment, he said, “Be a lamp unto your own feet; do not seek outside yourself.” Jesus was of the same opinion when he said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is not ‘lo here’ nor ‘lo there’; it is within.”

The great sages of all time seem to agree that a man cannot turn to someone else to save himself—that the answer lays within his reach and in his own inner endowments. Each has been given the medicine with which to cure himself. To be self-reliant and spiritually mature, we must develop full trust of our own inherent capacities.

The following quotations by Mark Twain add support to the findings by Willard & Marguerite Beecher:

• Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

• It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

• It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

• You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.