Practice Will Move Your Life

These things that The Revelation speaks of and emphasizes that are so important can only be found through this kind of development. Now, one of the things that The New Message tells us is that you cannot escape practice, because every day you are practicing and reinforcing the content of your mind, the way you engage with the world, your habits, your strengths, your weaknesses, everything.

You can only practice and here, practice does not make perfect; practice makes permanent. So, knowing that all you can do is practice and reinforce what you believe or what you’ve been taught to believe or how your life has been shaped and formed by your environment and your relationships, The Assembly has given you something to practice that can alter the quality, value and direction of your life.

Knowing that you can only practice, you are given a real practice, something that really has merit. If you decide not to practice, then you are just going to practice something else. If you decide not to take this journey, you will just take another journey. And if you look at others without condemnation, you will see what that other journys really looks like. Don’t think it will be different for you.

The world is demonstrating to you and to us every moment, what life without Knowledge is really like and what it leads to: its great disappointments, its great failures, its lack of fulfillment.

So Steps to Knowledge tells us, in Step 340, in “My practice is my contribution to the world.” it states:

“Remember that all you can do is practice. No matter what you do, you are practicing something, you are asserting something, you are confirming something and you are studying something. Given this understanding, give yourself to your true preparation, for this is your gift to yourself and to the world.”

Now I understand that many people have never learned how to practice, consciously, anything beyond the normal expectations of life. Unless you have a job that is very demanding and requires new learning, most people are really weak in learning new things.

In your education, you learn things only to pass, only to get the grade, only to move on. But this learning is different; this is real learning. You are learning here now how to live in the world in an entirely new way, that is in keeping with your natural state, that is entirely honest—without deception, without confusion.

But the problem is, “Can we learn something new that is very different than the way we have learned before and what we have learned before?” This is the experiment that The New Message from God is giving to us. But it is not merely an experiment. It is a great necessity in the world, for if you do not prepare, you will not find your true path and you will not be prepared for a new world or for the emergence of a greater community of life in the universe, the most important things occurring in our world at this time.  

You will say at some point, “Oh, I didn’t see it coming,” though God has given you the eyes to see and the ears to hear, you didn’t see it coming. You didn’t consider the consequence of your actions or of the occurrences around you. You mind was somewhere else, caught up in other things of little or no value. You were not there to see.

So God’s first purpose is to unburden you and to keep you from calamity. It’s not about happiness. It’s not about fulfillment. It’s not about peace. It’s not about having high spiritual experiences. It is about keeping you from catastrophe—catastrophe within yourself, an unfulfilled life with nowhere to go, unknown to yourself, catastrophe of living in a new world environment that will effect change on a scale we’ve never seen before.

God’s first purpose is to unburden you, yes, but it’s also to prevent you from giving your life away to meaningless things, hopeless things, things of no real importance to why you’re really here and what you’re really here to do.

So since you can only practice, if you were to stop yourself during the day, perhaps doing an hourly practice, Steps to Knowledge and say, “What am I practicing right now?”—look at where your mind is. Look at what you are involved in. Look at what you’re saying to other people or not saying to other people.

Ask yourself, “What am I practicing?” And if you can identify some things you’re practicing, then you can ask yourself, “What would The New Message have me practice in this situation?” The New Message, which is giving you so many practices, so many directives, so many ways of interacting with life at all levels, in a very different kind of way—all practices, true practice.

Because at the beginning, you might be shocked to realize that you have no idea where your mind has been for the last eight hours. You’re on some kind of auto-pilot. You don’t know what you are communicating. You don’t know who you are with or what they’re doing with you. You have no recollection of your deeper experience. You don’t really know how you felt about any situation in particular.

We’re given hourly practices to bring us back into the moment, to give us an opportunity to recognize our experience and our circumstances. But you may notice that a whole day went by and you really didn’t know where you were or who you were with or what was happening.

You drive a car from one place to another, but you have no idea what happened in the interval. Your mind was probably not on driving that car, but engaged in any number of other notions or fantasies or recollections.

So this mysterious reality called Knowledge, which is ever-present, how can it reach your awareness, if you’re not paying attention? And how can you learn to pay attention increasingly—increasingly, until you’re paying attention at all times so you do know where you are; you do know what you’re communicating or not communicating? You do know who you’re with and whether you should be with them. You do know what your experience is ever increasingly, because of the practice.

So much of the practice in Steps to Knowledge is to prepare your mind to be engaged with Knowledge. It’s actually not to experience Knowledge. Knowledge will come to you when you’re ready, but if you can’t experience it, if you can’t feel it, sense it or call it forth, then its attempt to communicate with you is not successful.

So when I meet people who are studying religion, spirituality, I ask them—I’m not interested in what you believe; I’m only interested in what you practice. Because it’s only what they practice in their traditions, whatever it may be, that means anything. Belief becomes a substitute for practice, consciously practicing.  

So Steps to Knowledge, over a long span of time, teaches you how to practice—how to show up at the outset and then, how to deepen the quality of your practice. How far are you willing to go with this Step? How much does it reflect upon your current situation, state of mind and interactions with others? What does it have to tell you about where you’ve been and where you must go?

I generally recommend people do Steps to Knowledge at least twice, because in the first time through, they’ll probably only get about ten or twenty per cent of it. It’s that deep. They’ll only take in what they can take in and they really will not see much of what these Steps are really communicating.

So no hurry going through Steps to Knowledge, because the quality of your practice becomes now more important than the fact that you are practicing.

It is in this way that you begin to gain control of your mind, which heretofore was pretty much completely in control of you. Wherever your mind went, you went; how ever it reacted was your reaction. You were really a slave to your mind and this is a mind that’s been conditioned by your environment, not by Knowledge.

Now, you are directing your mind, telling it where to go, what to practice, keeping it focused, returning always, to the practice that has been given to you.

Without this self-correcting, self-directing, you will just continue to act out, and act upon, your social conditioning and the influence of others. And the world is demonstrating this in all possible ways to you.

So I call you to practice, because without this, you will not arrive at your destiny. And now you have a practice that is so extraordinarily important—a practice not created by man; a practice that is a gift from Heaven itself, bringing Redemption; a practice you can never fully understand, because you have never fully arrived at your destiny; a practice beyond your ideas entirely; a practice that will take you beyond your ideas, entirely. This is why we gather. This is why we honor Steps to Knowledge in this Vigil. This is a gift we are Called to receive, to share and to utilize.

May the Presence be with you.