Inner Thought

Change yourself, rather than working to change others.
Place the inner man in control of the outer.
Abandon the false before seeking the true.
Be loving and you will be loved.
Attend to the reason why you felt hurt, not to those who hurt you.
Set inner integrity before good works.
Place thinking before speaking.
Be a real person, then a social person.
Understand yourself, then try to know others
set self-awareness before self-gratification.
Destroy negative attitudes, not negative conditions.
Place small efforts before great determinations.
— Vernon Howard, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, p. 127.

     All we need is a decision to seek the light. When that is done, all else is done for us.
     A sign of deepening insight: When you see how one psychological principle connects with another. You might, for example, see how “Resist not evil” connects with the law of not worshiping false gods. How? When we resist something, perhaps an unkind remark, the very resistance implies a belief that that remark can harm us. We are, therefore, worshiping a false and powerless god — the unkind remark. Non-resistance calls the bluff and destroys the falsity.
     The first step toward harmonizing with universal laws is to hear of them. Let me present four simple and basic steps which readers found helpful in my previous book, Psycho-Pictography. Called “Your Four Golden Keys to New Freedom and Happiness,” they are:

1. A sincere desire for inner change: Self-transformation begins from the moment we earnestly wish to be a different kind of person.
2. Contact with workable principles: We must connect ourselves with a source of genuine help, perhaps a book, or an enlightened teacher, or with our own inner light.
3. Self-honesty: We must heroically face the facts about ourselves, even if disturbing, in order to break the chains.
4. Persistence: With endurance, happiness comes gradually but definitely, like a blinking light that finally glows permanently.

As we read and work with mystic principles found in a book, we experience a mysterious change within. What we formerly took as attractive words and phrases now turns into a very definite feeling. This means that we have seen beyond the words; the intuitive self has broken through to transform an intellectual idea into a living experience.
— Vernon Howard, Ibid., pp. 130-131.

     Unfortunately, models and images of wisdom, goodness, love, and beauty aren’t easy to come by in popular culture and the mass media. Imagine watching the news and following the stream at the bottom of your screen as it moves along. “Leonardo’s lost notebooks recovered . . . but first, more on the latest celebrity scandal.” As a society, our priorities for the investment of attention are frequently out of alignment with our highest ideals.
     There’s actually a neurological explanation for this. One of the paradoxes and challenges of the human mind is that we are conditioned by the brain’s reticular formation (a structure in the midbrain) to pay special attention to anything that seems new, different, or “sensational,” while allowing more timeless, less topical material — such as universal spiritual wisdom — to be forgotten. But matters of the spirit always eventually resurface precisely because they are timeless and universal, as we can see from the fact that all of the diverse societies of the globe, at some point in their development, have arrived at fundamental insights that are remarkably similar. Author Aldous Huxley called it “the perennial philosophy.” One research group found that at least eight of the ten commandments are common to all the world’s cultures, constituting the equivalent of a global statement of human values. As my secretary, the venerable Mary Hogan, put it: “We may root for different teams, but we all love baseball.”
— Michael J. Gelb, Da Vinci Decoded, “Introduction,” pp. xvi-xvii.