Sadly, Vernon Howard is no longer physically with us, but his Spirit and his wonderful writings still live on as an inspired presence.  His definitions of Self-help are unusually good, so I have created an interactive oracle that draws upon thousands of Vernon’s statements, sometimes paraphrasing the answers (without loss of essential meaning) to fit a fresh new conversation with him.

I am myself a Self-help teacher with many students all over the world.  Like Vernon, I have repeatedly shown how a variety of wisdom sources can be utilized by us for our own upliftment to higher states of awareness and action.

What is Self-help, which is Self-realization, really about?  If we ask this very question in full sincerity, it has already begun!

You will notice that there are always people in your life who are trying to force you to concern yourself about things that have nothing to do with you true self or your real life.  You therefore have to acquire the inner strength to ignore those shallow, foolish and distracting things even where those people seem to be threatening to remove themselves or to remove something you need from them.  But how to develop the necessary inner strength to rise beyond the useless nonsense of people you still need to relate with?  For this, you need to make a better connection with the Source of inner strength.  That Source we can call the Guiding Spirit of Truth.  We need the higher connection because most of our problems are connected to necessary and presently unbreakable relations with difficult people who try us and test us in a variety of ways that require greater inner strength than we sometimes possess.  Anyone who has attempted to progress on the spiritual path has been subjected chronically to debilitating episodes with this or that immature person they are tied to.

Another aspect of our various difficult emotional problems with others in our life is that we are often not clear enough in Self-knowledge to see how we unconsciously attract such painful episodes to ourselves through operating in such a manner that our own assumptions and blind-spots are bound to trigger interpersonal conflicts and mutual woundings.  We have illusions about others and, when we are inevitably disillusioned, we then behave with insensitivity and useless dramatics or threats.  We do not like to see how we ourselves are creating and maintaining the recurrent problem through our own inner weakness covered with a lack of genuine love and understanding on our own part.

Disillusionment about others in our life is obviously necessary.  But even more necessary is disillusionment about yourself.  Yes, you yourself!  Have you seen your own shallow pretences about yourself?  Have you seen your own useless artificial activities and involvements for what they really are?  Have you taken a genuine and sustained hard look at the emptiness of your life, of your usual daily world, of your own inwardly haunted self?  However much you might like to deceive yourself, what is your usual state of being?  Are you tense, rushed, nervous and irritable?  Do you often have sleepless nights filled with turmoil and foreboding?  Is the state of the world, the daily news, freaking you out to where you can’t cope?  What do you suppose your own personal condition is trying to tell you?  Maybe you need to make some real changes in your attitude, your thinking and your behavior.

Do you think you can help other people in your present condition?  How often have you asked someone what they “really want” only to have to hear a deranged outpouring of self-pity, horribly confused nonsense and even twisted accusations about you and others in their life?  Getting them to talk, to give out their nonsense about “what they want” just shows you that you can’t really help.  Inevitably they will shout or murmur, “I don’t know what I really want!” For one thing, they imagine that their selfish confusion is important and not a form of deluded stupidity.  So when you sometimes spend hours of your time, life and energy trying to help some useless idiot in your life, do you register that you are simply being drained by an all-too-normal psychic vampire?  Can you see that the greatest help you can give to an immature person in your life is to simply provide a supportive space wherein they have to face themselves and work it out slowly over a long period without useless, draining discussions with you?  But this also takes inner strength on your part, doesn’t it?  But no matter how often you fail out of inner weakness and get sucked into trying to “help” a neurotic, inwardly empty fool who is incapable of being “helped” or really understanding something, you can make an increasing resolve to stop doing that, to learn to say “no” to a false cry for “help” or emotionally disturbed “discussion” of some “problem” they are having.  You can learn to let that person happen to himself/herself.  That immature person will then increasingly leave you to go pursue their shallow, meaningless purposes or they will slowly awaken to greater maturity through taking the opportunity of self-responsible learning and growth.  In either case, the psychic drain on yourself will slowly die down and you will be more inwardly strong and free.  You will no longer call inner weakness and bondage “love”.

The more you discover what is right for your own real life of spiritual maturity and development, the less you will yourself be concerned over the lives and decisions of immature other people, regardless of how “close” they have seemed to be to you in the past.  Without rejecting anyone, you will simply watch them drift away into their superficial involvements, activities and future sorrows.  And you will not yourself feel rejected or undervalued by immature people who go away from your life.  You will see that it is only your own outer and false emotional self that develops bad or bitter reactions of being rejected or under-valued.  This is because Cosmic Truth sees the withdrawn old rejecters and under-valuers as uselessly shallow people who lack Cosmic Truth. You will see increasingly that only Cosmic Truth can see and appreciate Cosmic Truth in you or anyone else.  You will also see that only relationships centered in mutual Cosmic Truth can have real value or endure.  If you are accepted by the false and shallow, it only drains you and deteriorates your own inner connection with Cosmic Truth.  Therefore you must never sell your Soul for sexual security, financial stability or any other form of emotional blackmail as when a divorce threatens to remove a loved child from your life.  You must remember always that whoever or whatever truly belongs with you in your life never requires that you disconnect from inner Cosmic Truth or your progress in Self-realization.  If say, money or loved ones leave you in some old forms and you need such functions, then they can always return to you in new, more appropriate and mature forms.  You must never give-up on your real life or your spiritual journey over unavoidable personal losses.

Now, remember something Vernon once said (and you do need to hear this):

“Something can be done for you only when something can be done with you!”