"At one time, you had, we all had a very strange fondness for what went
wrong out there. We wanted to be part of what we called the adventure, the
pleasure. Anything could set us off to marching somewhere and leaping right
into the hot water that's out there, the hundreds of hot waters. Anything
could set us off, because there was something wrong in us that liked the
chaos. There was something in us that wanted to feel excited, boiling in
the hot water down to that. There was something in us that wanted
exhilaration, that wanted a cause to stand up for and stand against the
party on the opposite cause.... There was something very wild and wicked and
ridiculous and sad and bad inside us that wanted a correspondence.
That wrongness within saw the wrongness out there and made a dreadful
mistake of saying, 'That's what I am - fiery. I'm going to get my way. I'm
going to win medals! I'm going to get somewhere. I'm going to make
something of myself.' That nature in us saw the sourness and wickedness out
there doing the same thing, and that false imitation nature in us screamed
out, 'Ah, I've got a friend! I've got someone to be with,' and so you join
the crowd, huh? It didn't make any difference to you what the crowd was
doing. You didn't care! You didn't care whether that mob was doing right or
wrong. Whether it was spiritual or evil, those thoughts didn't enter your
mind at all.
All you wanted was friends and comrades and people who would give you
medals, people who would congratulate you for having joined them. 'Now
you're doing something worthy with your life. Stay with us! Stay with our
philosophy. Stay with our scheme. Stay with our gang down on the corner.
Stay with us and you feel okay, and you'll always feel okay because we're
always doing something.' Of course wickedness is always doing something
wicked. What else can it do?
One day, hanging with the gang down on the corner looking for someone to
rob, someone to assault, looking for some crime to commit - and for every
outer crime, there are ten billion inner crimes - you allowed yourself
your first faint glimpse of the difference between right and wrong. You
always had it, but you buried it because you were...how many are what, weak
minded?
One time, walking home from the gang on the corner - which represents
practically every human activity on earth - something strangely fascinating
happened to you. What happened was, about one block away after leaving the
gang, you felt something awful, and I'll tell you what you felt. You felt
lonely and terrified and puzzled by that little glimpse of your aloneness,
of your isolation and you didn't know what to do about it.
At first you thought - I'm giving you a typical plan of how people are
saved for God's kingdom - all of a sudden a thought came to you right in
the middle of your agony of not having anything, of not even having a self
because you didn't have a real self. Something happened.
A little bit of pure logic, just a half inch tall, entered your mind and
feeling, and you realized the futility of turning around and going back to
the gang on the corner again. You realized that it would do you no good
because that's all you've been doing since you were a little kid."
from a talk given 2/17/1991 V. H.'s Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 31, talk 756, track 1
