2020 Steps Vigil Full Teaching from the Messenger | Night 3

Here is the problem with problems: little problem, big reaction; big problem, little reaction. This is the problem.”

Well, it certainly begs many different questions about our ability to deal with problems—big problems, even little problems—how we view solving problems or even facing problems; and where we stand in life in terms of our own preparedness, our resilience, our strength, our determination. It’s so based upon how much we have been able to face and solve problems in the past.

There’s nothing magic that makes you confident. Real confidence comes from facing and solving problems because that is part of being in the world. Where we’ve all come from, it’s not a problem. Being here is a problem. We have survival. We have safety. We have the need for resources. We have the need for relationship and community. We have the need to be protected from the vicissitudes of life, from the Earth itself and all of its challenges and hazards. Many, many problems confront us.

So I felt tonight it would be really good to talk about problems. And then we can look at the problems you will encounter in taking on the Steps to Knowledge practice, learning how to engage with it significantly and how to maintain that practice under changing circumstances in our current times. 

So first of all, I just want to emphasize that problems is a part of life and living in the physical reality. Whether you avoid problems, welcome problems, or just dutifully deal with problems really does make a difference in how strong you are to be in a changing world. And so we become more self-reliant and we become more able to trust our own inclinations with that kind of skill building that comes from solving problems. If we avoid problems, then those things just do not appear and do not rise. 

However, one of our big problems is we really don’t know what the problem is that may be bothering us at any given time. Because we live in a physical and a mental environment, we’re influenced by forces we don’t recognize, even forces that our senses don’t normally report to us.

For example, at this time in life there’s many people in the world suffering, facing loss, facing great anxiety, facing very serious illness, facing major disruption to their economies and way of life. And so you have a major disruption in the mental environment. And I know that some of you have reported in that having problems meditating in these times. Or you’re experiencing a kind of gravity, like there’s a cloud over you—gravity—and maybe where the elements of that gravity is grief, loss. You’re definitely feeling a weight of these times, a weight of uncertainty and a weight of suffering. And even though we think we live in our own little world, insulated from life, we’re really not that insulated. So this produces problems at different levels for us.

But I want to talk about different levels of problems tonight because the level of confusion that happens around problems is one of the problems. It’s one of the problems while there’s little problems, big reactions; big problems, little reactions. 

Now if we were a wise race, we would drop everything and deal with this pandemic, recognizing it’s a threat to our world order—everyone—if we were a wise race. Everyone would get a big problem and get with it, like, not just here and there, but seriously. It would be a planetary emergency. 

But we see that that is definitely not the case and that many people think the pandemic is a little problem, or that what may follow will only be a little problem. They can’t see it. They can’t feel it. They can’t know it. And they’re afraid to look at it. They don’t even want to go near it. They don’t want to see how it’s manifesting in the world. And so they’re unable to respond to it.

So they’re keeping it little in their own awareness because either they don’t have a capacity to deal with it or it’s just too upsetting for them to think about it or to follow it or to understand its manifestations. So here we have the problem with problems manifesting in our life at this time. 

So first of all, let’s make one distinction. There are little problems and there are big problems. Little problems are things that your intellect or the intellect of others can generally solve. They may be expensive. They may be unpleasant. They may require some time and energy. Maybe you have the skills to deal with it; maybe you don’t, but they’re really not very significant. But if you don’t deal with them, they become significant. If you don’t deal with problems arising in your health, your financial circumstances, your relationships, your work, profession, these little problems can become bigger problems. They can even become threatening problems. 

So taking care of little problems is really important. And I recommend you have a very aggressive attitude regarding that. Instead of complaining that you have this problem to deal with or all these problems to deal with, say to yourself, “Dealing with these problems will make me strong. Dealing with these problems will actually save me time going forward. Dealing with these problems will give me strength and freedom in the future.” Because if you don’t face them, you will not have these things in the future. 

The big problems are really in the domain for Knowledge within us. The big problems have to do with purpose, meaning and direction in life, have to do with your major avenues of activity: your relationships, your work, your health and your spiritual development. These produce bigger problems, bigger needs because they’re bigger needs for us. And they often don’t come with simple answers. There are no simple answers. 

Now the Step we just read says that there’s a simple answer to all problems that face me. The problem here is that we’re not simple. And even the simple answer may be one step to take amongst many that will be required to really answer that problem or that need. Simple, yes—but we may be too complex, too conflicted to respond to a simple answer.

In the Buddhist tradition there is a saying that the Great Way is easy for those who have no preferences. I used to think about that a lot. I used to think about that.

So let’s call a little problem a little problem, put it on your to-do list and get it done as soon as you can because you need to save yourself for the bigger problems. You need to have time and energy and focus for that because those are the things that are going to make all the difference in the kind of life you’re going to live, it’s degree of fulfillment, satisfaction and meaning for you. Even your survival in the future may hinge upon it. The bigger problems, the bigger needs. 

And you have to take this on as your challenge—not other people’s challenge, not everybody else. Don’t deflect this and talk about other people or everyone. “Why don’t people do these things?” Why don’t you do these things? Blaming others is another big energy loss and usually reflects the fact that you’re not facing what you need to face in your life. If you were really facing what you have to face in your life, you wouldn’t have time to blame other people for all kinds of things. That would be a meaningless engagement. Because every problem that you’re avoiding or deflecting or putting off is costing you energy. 

You’re losing energy every day. Why do you feel so tired? Why the lack of motivation? Why the lack of inspiration, the lack of your having lots of vitality and enthusiasm? Well, part of that is because you’re losing a lot of energy to things that are incomplete, unfulfilled, unforgiven, tasks that need to be undertaken, problems that are not being addressed. You’re losing energy. It’s like it’s wintertime and all the windows of your house are open. You’re losing energy. 

And one of the outcomes of losing energy over time is you enter a state like inertia. You hit a low energy state and that’s where you live. And when you live in a lower energy state, that means it’s very difficult for you to get yourself moving to do anything that requires effort and consistency, application, dedication. You may see the need. You will say to yourself, “Well, I need to lose 50 pounds. I really need to do Steps to Knowledge. I really need to get a new job”, but you don’t have the energy to do it. I call that inertia. 

Now inertia is a physics term and it means other things. But it’s related to the fact that an object in space becomes resistant to movement if it becomes too settled in one place. When we become too settled in a life without any kind of dynamic change, we become resistant to change. Even if it’s necessary change, even if it’s good change, we just don’t have the energy to take it on. 

So why is it we can’t get ourselves up to do the Steps practice every day? You could make time for it. It wouldn’t be easy. Sometimes it’s quite awkward to do that. But you would find if you added up all the wasted time in your day, it would add up to enough time for you to do Steps practices and read that Step a couple of times a day, and think about it. 

So somehow there’s a resistance factor that lives within us that’s built up over time. It is a resistance to change even if change is desired. I hear a lot of people talking about change, but I don’t see many people changing, as if change is all about what other people are supposed to do. 

So we get into this point of inertia and then we can’t get focused. We can’t mount the effort. We can’t sustain a practice. But you can because you do it every day. You brush your teeth every day, maybe take a shower every day. You eat your meals every day. You do lots of things every day. But if something new comes along that requires real time and focus, it seems really hard and I understand this.

If you’re keeping pace with your life in real time as you’ve gone along, you will have much more energy and vitality to bring to this endeavor. But if you’ve been lagging in any way or holding back or just letting things slide, you’re going to be losing energy. And that loss of energy is going to put you at a lower energy state. You may have the right ideas; you may see a true need; you may have very good principles for your life, but you really are lacking in the energy that enables you to follow these things. This is a problem.

What resolves inertia? Taking action. Hard at first, but once you get used to taking action and feeling the rewards of doing that and the freedom of energy in doing that, you begin to become more energetic, more inspired, more enthusiastic and more confident that you can take things on.

You know with human beings, if we’re not adequately challenged in life, we really do decline. Not just in old age, but we decline at any age. If we do not have adequate, appropriate challenge and we’re [not] meeting those challenges and recognizing them, we decline. Or we begin to live in a state of decline. It can happen for 20 year-olds. There are people who never took on the challenges of their life and so they’ve been in decline the whole way. We’ve gone through periods of decline where we were just sort of lost and adrift, or just unhappily acquiescing to a set of circumstances that were not right for us. And it took a lot of effort to get ourselves going again. So that’s very real. 

So doing Steps to Knowledge really is the way out of this morass, this fog of inertia because it requires you to do something every day. It gives you things to really think about, not just to read and memorize, but just really to think about. And it asks you to show up for practice. And you know in practice, half of success is showing up, to quote Woody Allen’s very serious quote about that: “Half of success is showing up.” You don’t have to show up rigidly, but consistently. And when you do show up, you need to be present to what you’re doing there. 

This is not a place to get answers for your problems or to think about other people. This is a time to focus on what this teaching is delivering to you today—seeing how you could practice it. What does it apply to in your life? What is it telling you you need to be aware of? 

And then of course, the stillness practice is really a massive redirect for your mind, which is anything but still. It’s like the mind…it’s like a runaway train. It’s just going and going and going and you’re just hanging on. In this case, you’re learning to gain control of your mind which heretofore has controlled you—a slow but necessary process. You’ll never gain this control by just wanting freedom and strength for yourself; it’s not enough. You actually have to lay down the tracks for it. You have to establish even the neural pathways in your brain for it. Your infrastructure of your brain, that has to be remodeled. 

So the big problems don’t come with simple answers; they only come with simple steps. You take steps to resolve them because they’re big. A problem, a fundamental problem in your relationships, with your health, is not something that you just have an answer to. You have to take a journey. Every big change is like a journey with many steps, just like Steps to Knowledge is a journey with many steps. 

To make a real change in your core relationships and your health requires a lot of intention and many steps, and you’ll have to stay with it. There’s no easy fixes. And you know, the change involves parts of ourselves we never even think of. Many people think all you need to do is just change your diet; that’s like low-hanging fruit. But you’re going to have to change your attitudes, your habits of thinking, how you spend your time, how you relate to other people, who you really want to be with, how you regard your feelings and emotions, how you regard your mind and your own mental states. Now your problem opens up a lot of dimensions to be explored and realized. It’s not just a simple change in your diet or your surroundings that can produce change at that level. 

So the big problems are journeys with many steps. And you have to be willing and determined to take these steps. So often Knowledge will not tell you the answer to the big problem because you’re not ready to act upon it. Many people just want to know things, but never have to act on them. “I just want to know. I just want to know the truth.” Well, whatever truth they come up with is not coming from Knowledge, I can tell you that. Because they’re not being honest; they’re not recognizing that the truth is a relationship. And the journey to the truth is a journey, and the journey has many steps, and you have to take those steps. Each of us has unique steps to take and all of us have similar steps to take. There’s movement; there’s doing something. 

So our problems represent our opportunity for gaining strength, courage, determination and consistency. You don’t gain these things in any other way that I’m aware of. There’s no trick of the mind or no affirmation or no Transcendental Meditation that’s going to give you this kind of foundation. So if you feel weak in these regards, this is a time to become strong. And we’re all weak in these regards in certain avenues of our life. 

And then you have to know the kind of problems that are the big problems of your life. If you think your problems are about fulfillment, then these are problems of fulfillment, but they may not be the fundamental problems that you really have to deal with, particularly in a new world reality. What’s going to make you happy is a hopeless journey when the reality is you’re standing on a very weak foundation in life. Your Pillars—Pillar of Relationships, Health, Pillar of Work, Spiritual Development—the Four Pillars that hold up your life are weak, which makes you vulnerable to any kind of change that happens in the environment. Anything you build can collapse because you don’t have a strong enough foundation. 

So the problems that really matter are more foundational, particularly at the beginning because the first job of Knowledge is to make you stable. God’s first purpose is to unburden you of conflicts that can never be resolved so that you can be stable. If you’re not stable, well, what else are you going to do in an unstable state except to have big dreams and poor outcomes? 

Knowledge’s first purpose is to get you as stable as possible—right place, right people, right purpose, as much as possible. And this for many people is a huge challenge because they’ve created a whole life that doesn’t have the right purpose, the right place and the right people. So their journey at the beginning is very challenging. But Knowledge can lead you through this dilemma no matter how hopeless or difficult it may seem step by step by step. That’s where the simplicity is. 

We’ve all got work to do in these areas; solving problems is ongoing. I have to talk to myself about facing problems that arise that I just don’t want to deal with in the moment. And I have to say to myself: “You know this will make you stronger.” Or: “If you do this now, you’ll be free tomorrow.” Because I don’t have room for small problems. I can’t let my mind be filled with small nagging problems that are barking at me for resolution. So you handle the small ones as quickly as possible. Keep the screen clear so you can stay focused on what really matters—what really matters. 

In time with Steps to Knowledge, you’ll be able to distinguish the real problems from the imagined problems—the imaginary problems—which have to do with achieving happiness and fulfillment and the kind of relationship you want and things like that, which is really not why you’re even in the world. And it’s not essential necessarily for what you’re really here to do and how you’re going to have to prepare for a very difficult and bumpy ride ahead. 

So most of the big problems now are about foundation building because that’s the greatest initial of need. You can’t do greater things if you’re unstable. You can’t take on greater levels of consciousness if you’re unstable without harming yourself even more. This is why we call the New Message a functional spirituality. It’s about making you really functional in the world. It’s not an escape from the world; it’s a reentry into the world. 

So every problem that you are aware of that you have not addressed is an opportunity for you to regain strength, regain energy and regain direction. Because there’s more important things for you to deal with going forward. But you cannot neglect the little—what is small—to take on what is great. 

May the blessing be with you.

* * *

You know, we lose energy I think the most in our primary relationships—our energy with who we are with intimately or closely associated. We’re gaining energy, losing energy, because there’s no neutral relationships. I mean, you’re either getting stronger or weaker being with people in close proximity on a regular basis. Where you live is very important. I mean, if you’re meant to be somewhere else but you’re not there, then that’s an energy loss. So it’s not just the unresolved or unfulfilled or incompleted things of your life. It’s also where you stand, where Knowledge is trying to take you somewhere, but you can’t go. This also produces an energy problem, too. So we lose a lot of energy to relationships and people, places and things that aren’t really meant for us.

And you can move to the most beautiful place in the world, but if that’s not where your destiny is, you’re gonna be losing energy living there. It can be beautiful. You could be impressed every day and “so happy I get to live in this lovely place.” But if that’s not where you really need to be, then your spirit is restless. You have a restless spirit; your soul is unfulfilled. You’re losing energy.

So this is a really big thing. And you can look at other people and see their energy condition can be very apparent. And to look not critically, but just look objectively to see: Does this person have good energy? Are they enthusiastic? Are they…do they move with enthusiasm? Do they speak with enthusiasm? See, you can just see this is a terrible dilemma and it afflicts the wealthiest as well as the poor. It’s the miscast life. It’s the life that never became what it was really meant to become, which is a huge problem. But that huge problem is built upon other problems that would have to be resolved in order to solve the greater one. 

So some people think you just have to solve the greater problem and the little ones will disappear. Mm, sometimes…but often you have to take care of the foundational problems first because they are the most immediate and you’re losing energy to them. They’re costing you time, enthusiasm, inspiration, well-being.

So the problem-solving product of Steps to Knowledge is just very, very important. And the more you become sensitized to your own feelings and experience—because Knowledge is operating in a deeper level of your experience, the core of your experience, if you will—you will begin to see things that you didn’t see before. You will recognize problems you may not have recognized before, that you interpreted perhaps incorrectly, now become very apparent and very clear and noticeable.

* * *

You want to be happy and be at peace. But the emphasis on happiness and peace is a low energy state. And if you’re in the world to do things…you’re sent here at great expense and great effort to bring you here at this time and you’re checked out for any reason—even if it seems high and noble and spiritual—you’re not getting the job done. 

The New Message keeps saying when you leave this world, you return to your Spiritual Family and they ask, “Did you accomplish what you set out to accomplish?” At that moment you have absolute clarity if you did or you didn’t. 

The question itself is instructive. “Did you do the things that you were sent to do?” And it’s not about happiness. They never ask, “Were you happy being there? Was it great?” No. It’s like, “Did you do the things you needed to do that you said and you knew you needed to do?”

So this is a big rethink about what’s important in life. And I think that Steps to Knowledge is not about making you be at peace all the time. In fact, it’s actually pretty challenging. And it has Steps that enable you to learn how to be at peace, like the stillness practice, emphasizing self-acceptance, letting your mind learn how to escape the surface of the mind. I mean, if you want to experience peace, that does it. But to have a mind without demands, that’s decline. That’s where people start to die. A life without demands is a life that’s in stages of dying. And we have plenty of demands these days. You either see that as a calling or a nuisance, an adversity or an opportunity.

* * *

Let us accept that Heaven smiles upon those who can receive its gifts and its preparation, for we are the promise of greater things to come in the face of tremendous change and possible upheaval. We are people of the future, for our mission is for the future, not just for this time alone. Though the New Message will serve us in many ways, we serve it. 

Our gift really is greater than our own needs. We are people of the Revelation, therefore it is within us and around us. We are in relationship with it now, and it is serving us in many ways as we learn to serve it. For true relationship is based upon what you can do together. In this case, our relationship with the Revelation is based on what we can do together. 

The New Message knows what needs to be done and how humanity is to be prepared, but it requires those of us who can share it and become its first students and can carry it forth into a world of growing confusion and upheaval.

Let us accept our humble, but significant, role here. Let us honor our nature and how Knowledge can use our nature to give things to life that we alone could not give.

Let us remember those who sent us, for they remember us with each passing day.

Nasi Novare Coram