"What's the chief failure of a man or a woman who enters this world?
Now we have studied long enough to know and know from ourselves that it
isn't the failure to attain gold and glory or to have a lot of people think
about you, and that's worthy of a paragraph in itself. Notice how much of
your actions, deeds, are devised for the simple purpose of getting other
people to think about you. They are - that's what you spend a good deal of
your time doing because then you want to think about them thinking about
you and you can say, 'See, it's all very solid, it's all very well with me
because when I do something bad, people think about me or when I do
something I call good, people think about me. In any case I can think about
them thinking about me and my mind is occupied with a very pleasant subject,
namely me.'
That is part of the failure in life and it persists simply because the man
or woman never set aside time and attention during his work day to think
about what might be a failure in life.
Instead, the individual is thinking about success, and all that success he
wants, including gold and glory, is for the purpose of trying to believe in
himself. Of finding things to think about no matter how ridiculous or
monstrous, how wasteful, finding things to think about - so that he won't
have to think about what he's afraid to think about."
from a talk given 10/19/1986 V H's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 7, talk 156, track 2
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