"How to Look Above for Answers
When someone gets to the point where they say, 'I want answers, I can look
inside or I can look outside.' And they read a philosophy book somewhere
that says, 'Search within, look inside yourself for what is true, for what is
right, what is good.'
So the individual makes an experiment of looking inside and what he sees
scares him so badly, he doesn't do that very often. Because he sees himself
as he is and he sees what we just talked about, he sees his insincerity
that he's had all these years in which he said, 'I want to get rid of my
pain.' And he sees that that was a falsehood; he doesn't want to get rid of
his pain at all - his pain is his best friend.
By the way, that advice of look within should be changed a little bit -
should be changed to look within and then go beyond what you see, right? If
you just see what you are, no wonder you're discouraged, but that kind of
discouragement you must enter and pass beyond. And that's another talk, of
course, as to what we find beyond our own confusion, our own
self-deception.
So, you tried that, you looked inside and you found no guidance there, no
assistance, nothing encouraging, you found the exact opposite. So you say,
if I have to keep looking in that direction I'm not going to get anywhere.
So, the only solution seems to be to look outward.
And now you're in equal trouble, are you not? Because your inner state and
the world's state are exactly the same thing. But there's a certain tricky
advantage in looking outward in that we don't have to look and see that we
are responsible for ourselves. And since everyone else is playing the same
game with us, everybody is offering solutions and everybody else is
believing in them, so that everyone can abandon their responsibility….
So if there is nothing inside us presently and we can't find anything
outside of us, where do we go next? Where we go next, we must use a word, I
assure you that it's far above the word, and the word is 'above.' You can't
go in, you can't go out, then you must go above. ...Don't go into
imagination as to what it means, because you can be practical, and here's
what it means to go above instead of in or out.
Listen carefully, and you may be astonished at the revelation of what you
are going to hear. To look above means to so finally tune your mind that
it's extremely alert, extremely sensitive to hear truths that come to you
from anywhere.
Let me give you a couple of examples and then you can expand it in your own
work at home. You're walking down the street and a couple of men are
working in front of a house and you're thinking about other things,
thinking about your shopping or whatever, but here are these two men
working in front of this house as you're passing by. You don't know them,
but they're carrying on a conversation fairly near you and one of the men
just casually says, 'I'm going to do this thing right.' As simple as that!
He says, and you can catch this, the earnestness in his voice, he's doing
some carpentry work let's say, and he's obviously having a little problem
with it, but you hear him say, 'I'm going to do this thing right.' You sense
that he means it; if it takes him a half hour longer, he's going to get
that board and that nail and that shelf, whatever he's doing, he's going to
get it right. You heard him say that.
Now that has no connection with you, you're not the carpenter there, but as
you continue down the street, you know you have heard something true for
you. Just a little comment, because all our lives, we have been so
careless, so lazy with our life, we don't do things right and that man
reminded you.
You said you wanted answers to life and I'm going to be alert to hear it
wherever it comes from. Here's a total stranger sending it out in the
atmosphere and you hear it and you know that you have not been doing things
right. And you say from now on, whatever it means, I'm going to start doing
things right in my life. I'm not going to be careless with my life any
more.'
See, because you were alert that is already bringing you a little bit above
your present level.
And there are other things: maybe you're reading a travel book, geography
book let's say, and you read something about a compass is always true, a
compass will always tell you the truth about things.
Maybe that connects something inside of you. 'I heard about an inner
compass, I've never understood it but reading about a physical compass that
ships use, and ah, and that connects with what I heard about seeking
within.' And you have understood that you must go beyond the horrors of
yourself, go beyond it to where the compass is.
Everything comes together, everything begins to make sense. Here is the
instructions so far: anywhere you go, if you want the truth, begin to
listen to something that is different from your present collections inside
yourself, collections of thoughts, of attitudes, of viewpoints, of beliefs.
See, that man walking past those two carpenters, someone said something and
he was alert to it and it hit him just right because it was different from
the world. It was different from the world out there and the world he had
inside of him. I tell you - don't lose the value of that point.
So wherever you go twenty-four hours of the day, truth is always trying to
get through - and it can come in a purely mechanical form. Those carpenters
weren't talking about spiritual things, but what they said on an
intellectual level was true, and it's available for you to start to use and
to think rightly, to get our thoughts going in the right direction."
Look for Help in this Direction
DVD # 16, talk 1 Blu-ray # 6, talk 6