The Power of Practice

So practice is very powerful. And practice requires for us to take certain steps to achieve a goal. The goal here is broadly defined as finding your purpose and your true relationships in life, and fulfilling that purpose to the best of your ability. But who knows what that purpose is? It can’t just be what looks good to you. In fact, the further you go along in your study and preparation, the more you realize you really don’t know what your purpose is, and it’s better to leave it undefined, rather than trying to live it according to your hopes or aspirations. Because Knowledge holds your purpose for you. Because Knowledge knows who you are, why you’ve come, who has sent you, why they need you here, why you chose to come here—things the worldly mind cannot fathom no matter how hard it tries. 

So we take steps to reach a goal. And that is why the books of teachings in the New Message are called Steps to Knowledge. It’s the Steps we take. Steps imply movement and direction. We’re actually going somewhere where we take these Steps. We’re stepping out of the past, perhaps into times of not knowing where we’re stepping, but we’re moving. And movement is the real thing because if your destiny is to be somewhere else, doing something else, then it’s up to Knowledge to move you in that direction gracefully, but with real determination. If you want to use Knowledge for other purposes, then Knowledge will simply become silent within you. 

So we take the Steps, and they are real steps. And they affect our lives at different levels: practical levels, emotional levels, intellectually, affect our perception, our values. Parts of us that we rarely even think about are also addressed in taking these Steps. And that’s why there are many steps and not simply just one step. 

And amazingly in Steps to Knowledge, the predicament that Steps to Knowledge addresses is in Step two, the second Step in the book of practices, which says, Knowledge is with me. Where am I? That’s the dilemma. Where am I? If I’m not with Knowledge, if I don’t experience Knowledge fully, where am I? How did I get there? What does it mean to live without Knowledge? What are the consequences of living without Knowledge? Where has my life without Knowledge taken me? 

It begins a gradual but determined approach of facing yourself and your life in light of this greater power that lives within you that wishes to express itself through you in the way that it is designed to do. 

And Knowledge must be reached through experience because having grand notions or refined thoughts or just placing your faith in unseen forces is not really going to take you on this journey that you need to go on. It has so much to do with building wisdom about your life from your past, about your expanding experience of the effect of Knowledge on your life and the decisions you make with Knowledge—and without Knowledge—to finally reveal to you its central importance to you, and why it is the most powerful and reliable aspect of yourself and the most important part of any person in the world or anywhere in the universe. 

So how you take these steps, and certainly if you take them, become of primary importance. Steps to Knowledge itself, as the book alone, does not answer all your questions on how to take these steps and what you need to know and even how to practice. So the New Message itself provides a huge well of resources for you to understand these things so you can approach your practice with the correct state of mind and attitude and humility, patience, determination because the Steps are going to take you into realms you’ve never been in before. 

So they don’t represent your thoughts, your beliefs or your assumptions. It’s going to take you through places that…where nothing else can take you as you naturally begin to emerge within yourself, who you really are as opposed to what the world is made of you. Mysterious, but so practical, so, so fundamental. 

So I’d like to give you some wisdom about practice in our time together today. This is really revolutionary if you can embrace this and consider it. 

First of all, everything you habitually do and think is practice. We don’t think of it as practice. We think of practice as the thing we do above and beyond our normal activities of life, or a practice we have to adopt to achieve a certain professional goal. But what I’m saying here is everything you habitually think and do is practice. 

And practice does not make perfect, as the old saying goes. Practice makes permanent. So the longer that you think a certain way or act a certain way or respond in certain ways that are habitual for you, however they may have formed over the course of your life, these things are going to become pretty hardwired in your mind; and they actually are hardwired in your brain as a neural pathway. When you see this, you respond this way. When you hear this, you respond that way. When you see something you don’t want to face, you go away from it or you deny it or you attack it. These are responses; they’re reflexes. They’re not conscious wise responses. They’re just reactions, reflexes. 

So your mind becomes hard wired. So the question then becomes how can you change decades of social conditioning and long term habits of thinking and behavior? It’s so challenging that most people don’t change. Oh, they have…they dress themselves up with new ideas or they go to new places and have new experiences, but they’re still the same person governed by the same internal forces and external forces as they were before.

So Kelvin, if you’d give us our first slide please. Good. This is from Steps to Knowledge, Step 80:

If you look at your life objectively but for a moment, you will see that your whole life is practice. Therefore, you will practice regardless of whether you have a curriculum for your benefit or not. Therefore, we give the curriculum, which you may now practice. It will replace the practices that have confused and belittled you, that have conflicted you, that have led you into error and into danger. We give you a greater practice so you will not practice that which undermines your value and your certainty.

So God’s first purpose is to unburden you, to release you enough from what binds you internally and externally that you may be able to see a way forward into a new life, into the real direction you need to go. But you need practices to achieve this. Yes. Because you can’t simply put a new practice on top of an old practice. Like I’m going to replace my habit of doing this with the habit of doing that. You actually have to change your position regarding your old habit, because you will not be able to defeat it if you don’t do this. 

So when you see that every time I condemn another person, it belittles me; it harms me, and you can feel that. Even if it seems justified, you can feel that that is harmful. You’re taking a different position with the thing you did before and that enables you to choose a different kind of pathway and build a different kind of neural pathway in your brain. Because your brain’s not going to change on its own; it’s just going to keep doing what it always does until you change it. And you can change it because who you are is not your brain. Or you could not change it. You’d be fixed in its…in whatever patterns it sets for itself, or that you have set for it—endlessly. 

But you see, to take this journey to return to Knowledge and to follow where Knowledge wants to take you, you have to come halfway. There’s no passivity on your part. Knowledge has already come halfway with you. It followed you into this life, goes with you everywhere, always available, always watching, never takes a day off. I hope. So we have to come halfway. And our part is to recalculate where we are; to reassess our values, our commitments, our relationships, our behavior and to take on practices that can help us reset these things in a way that is appropriate and natural and real for us. 

So the first part of studenthood really is getting your life in order, which also means getting your mind in order to a certain degree so that you can aim your life in the direction it needs to go and stop going in the direction where it’s not meant to go. 

We haven’t gotten to greater purpose. We haven’t gotten to relationships of higher purpose. We haven’t gotten into advanced states of being. We’ve gotten into the first big stage of getting your life and your mind in order. And that’s where most students of Knowledge are, and should be. If that work doesn’t get done, well, you’re not ready to really move where you really need to move. 

So, much of the work we’re all doing now is in that first big category. And that actually continues with you because you have to refine your life and your mind even as you proceed beyond that first stage. But you cannot bypass this first stage. That’s why Steps to Knowledge is so much about you and not that much about the world, or even the Greater Community of life in the universe. It’s really about you, being with you. What are you doing? Why are you doing this? Are you staying connected to your own experience? 

Because see, Knowledge wants to keep you in the driver’s seat. You cannot have Knowledge be in the driver’s seat. That is not what works here. Knowledge wants you in the driver’s seat. You’re driving the vehicle of your life. You’re going through the intersections, you’re dealing with traffic, you’re dealing with everything. Knowledge sets the direction and holds you back from doing things that will damage your journey, or prevent it from happening. All the navigation is mostly up to you, unless you’re navigating something you personally cannot navigate, and then that would fall into the domain of Knowledge. 

So when I hear people talking about how they’re waiting around for Knowledge to guide them, that tells me that they’re not doing the work that’s theirs to do. You cannot give over the reins to God. Sorry. God wants you in the driver’s seat. God can sit in the back seat—Knowledge, through Knowledge.

So there’s no repose here really. There’s only responsibility and determination. And with that comes strength and movement, freedom, certainty, true relationship. Yes. 

So Knowledge will guide you in important and greater matters. But guidance in the everyday affairs of your life falls within your domain. And actually, the New Message gives you practices here to help you in those domains: how to make decisions, how to recognize things, how to listen to others, how to listen to yourself, how to deal with work, how to deal with friction in relationships, how to deal with disappointment. 

I have my own personal directory of quotes. I call them quotes by subject. There’s got to be 300 subjects in there. 

So the New Message is teaching you about even the small things, but you have to do them. You are the agent here in the world. There’s no ascendance. There’s no transfiguration. There’s being here doing what you came here to do, which lives within you already. 

So no matter how far you go, there’s always going to be aspects of your old personality and your old tendencies. And you can fall back into these, too. The difference is that they no longer rule your life. Because this whole process is about moving your center of authority from your worldly personal mind, your mind in Separation, to the power of Knowledge within you, which is your mind in eternity that’s living within you now, shifting the center of your authority. You do that through countless decisions, life experiences, choosing again, facing mistakes, rectifying errors, taking risks, moving—always moving. 

Because only Knowledge knows how to get to Knowledge. So when people argue about the best way to get to Knowledge, it makes me think they’re just exerting their personal pride or they want to show off their intellectual brilliance in some way, because only Knowledge knows the way to Knowledge. So to get to Knowledge, you have to rely upon Knowledge, which proves itself to you as you proceed. Just like only God knows the way to God. No religion knows how to get to God. No testament knows how…the way to get to God really. Only God knows the way to God. 

Next slide please. This is from Steps to Knowledge, Step 91: Review. 

Practice to practice. Some days will be easier. Some days will be harder. Some days you will want to practice. Other days you may not want to practice. Each day you practice because you are representing a Greater Will. This demonstrates consistency, which is a demonstration of power. This demonstrates a greater dedication. This gives you certainty and stability and allows you to deal compassionately with all things of lesser strength.

Like Knowledge. If you could do this, even through very dry, empty periods of your life, you will become more like Knowledge. More, not…your personal mind is still your personal mind as long as you’re here, but it will begin to resonate with Knowledge evermore so that the two can finally join in a marriage within you—the marriage of mind and Spirit. 

So there are two kinds of practice, and I’m going to speak about these more tomorrow night when I talk about taking the Steps to Knowledge. There’s inner practice, which is meditation, contemplation, stillness, inner listening, practicing the Presence, so forth. Then there’s the outer, active practice, the things you have to do when you’re out in the world: watching people, watching situations, interacting with others, learning how to listen—to really listen—to people, how to observe people without judgment, how to recognize things in others, how to see things in life around you, how to pick up on some of the signals that life and nature are giving you that most people don’t respond to. Active practice, so that you don’t forget who you are and why you’re here when you’re out through your workday, or doing anything in the world, if you’re carrying an active practice. So I’ll be talking about that more tomorrow night. 

Now I’ll give you an example of a more advanced practice. And at some point you may feel you have to do this practice. It was given to me many years ago; I’m still working on it. You can’t master these practices, by the way. You can only get proficient and consistent with them. Because in The Way of Knowledge, there is no mastery because Knowledge is the master, and Knowledge represents your connection to God, who is the Master. So you can become proficient, you can become wise, you can become powerful, you can become a real force of goodness in the world, but the mastery is still beyond you. 

Beautifully said in one of the early teachings that once you become fully proficient as a person in the world, then you have to face the identities of the universe—the Greater Community university. So we should not think about mastery here. And beware of people who call themselves masters and make you want to think they’re masters. But respect those who are wiser and who demonstrate greater strength, power and compassion. 

Tomorrow I’m going to speak about the journey in Steps to Knowledge, which provides many practices, some which will be obvious to you and some of which are kind of embedded in the texts that you may not see or recognize the first time you go through Steps. There is actually more there than the I can see. 

And it’s really your development that begins to enable you to recognize these powerful things that are in each step, like, Knowledge is with me. Where am I? The only way you can answer that question is to actually find out where you are and how you got there, which takes a very long time. You’d have to be in the world but not of the world to see that clearly outside your personal mind, not simply embedded within it. 

So I’d like to leave you with this slide, this third slide, if I may. This is from Wisdom from the Greater Community Volume Two on Spiritual Practice [chapter 11]. And as you can see, so many of these great teachings come from the very early teachings of the New Message, which are very much about pathway, very much about living The Way of Knowledge, very much about dealing with practical and difficult affairs in life. This is about rewards:

The rewards are what one discovers along the way. It is not like reaching a pot of gold where the entire reward is given at the end of the journey. In the reclamation of Knowledge, which is the discovery of purpose in life, all of the rewards are given along the way. 

Isn’t that great? But if you were to contemplate this, this is one verse, it would really be something. 

So I recommend to learn more about practice and the various kinds of practice you can do. There’s a teaching called Deepening Your Spiritual Practice. It’s on the New Message website under “all revelations” that are prepared there. And certainly from the Wisdom Volume Two on Spiritual Practice is excellent as well. 

So welcome to practice. And remember: you can only practice. What are you practicing? What do you want to reinforce? What do you want to change? 

Nasi Novare Coram