I woke up early this morning, Independence Day in America. Our country continues to be under siege from Donald Trump and his cronies. Those of us with any sense are praying that he will be convicted and sentenced.

The whole world is under the threat of autocracy; it seems to be an evil theme in so many countries. It is hard to tear our attention away from it, but thankfully there is a higher world. It resides in each of us. It is up to us to live our lives free of conflict. Oh, I know how hard it is, believe me. No matter how much we believe in truth, our egos continually deny it, just as the disciples did.

Since time is only a measurement of eternity, it doesn’t really matter. I am growing old at my Mac, pounding out essay after essay about what is really going on with us. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” sums up the nature of the ego. It isn’t going to give up without a fight.

“The world, the flesh and the devil” take up a lot of time in our brief lives here on earth. We are hypnotized and habituated by evil in high places.

Yet solace can be found. I lose myself in thought all day long and thought is the enemy of spirit. So I watch this happening and if I am lucky, I can briefly break the spell.

We have to be at least as persistent as evil. And the definition of evil is mechanicalness. We, like Pinocchio, are at present, mere wooden dolls. But biblical promises are made about that. “Wake, thou that sleepest….”

By the way, Vicki is not who is writing these essays. Oh, her hands are at the keyboard, but something higher is also happening in spite of her reluctance to truly let go and let God.

She sleeps on and she is paying a steep price to remain comfortable in this world. That is not possible, even while she thinks she may have a shot at it. Perhaps she can have a taste of inner joy, but only when she lets go of everything that keeps her hypnotized by her own desires.

Vicki Woodyard

Now that I have reached the end of the line in a personal sense, giving up control is vital. The ego is simply a construct that can be seen through in due time.

Yesterday Rob and I tried a new restaurant right around the corner from us. We went around three o’clock, so there were only a few people there. The food was good but our waitress hung around our table and talked to Rob with her mask pulled down. Clearly, she had no business doing that, but c’est la vie. Things have so changed that I try and remember that covid is still a danger.

The ego is also a clear and present danger because it has no memory of right conduct; it behaves in a mechanical way.

I did the same thing the day before when the guy from the lawn service and I talked in the front yard. I forgot that covid was still a threat then, too.

The restrictions are not hard on either of us, due to our introversion. Rob plays Trivia with a few friends frequently, but I have no social life left at all.

So what are my days like, having given up on social life? I love my new smart TV. I work crossword puzzles and read now and then. I do housekeeping and the ordinary chores that a house requires. Right now I have no interest in selling the house; so I have to keep having things done to it. My bedroom is downstairs, so that is not a problem.

I also write as I am led to do. The words tumble out of my fingers and onto the screen. I have no plan on the essays that are written; I just draw on my considerable knowledge of how difficult the truth path is!

Yes, folks, the world is going to hell in a hand basket and there is nothing that can be done about it. We may think that things will get better, but that is not going to happen. The world has taken a hard right and nothing good can come from that.

I go back to the truth a hundred times a day and it is unflinchingly honest. We only have today.

Vicki Woodyard

Reaching the end of the line is vital to the spiritual student that wishes to awaken. What do I mean by “reaching the end of the line”? My front yard looks awful, even though I am paying for a lawn treatment service. The man in charge walked the yard for me, explaining why such and such an area of grass looked worse than others. In that sense, parts of our lives are always going to look worse than others. In this example, I will be happy when the yard looks nice and green. Of course they want to apply more chemicals that will make the yard look better.

You might notice that you complain about different things, assuming that you’ll be happy once you have worried enough. Wrong! We have to call the ego out for doing this to us.

Being a perfectionist, I have a long list of things that will make me happy once the problems are removed. I am sure you feel this way as well.

Some things we have no control over, obviously. We have no control over when we are born and when we will die. This is simply out of our hands. The Tao flows as it will, not as we will from our egos.

As I get older, the less control I have. I just don’t have the energy to control things tightly; it never contributed to my happiness when the lawn or my hair looked perfect. So I might as well. 1. Let go of outcome.
2. Pray daily to accept the will of what God has ordained.
3. Do the best you can and then turn it over to God.

These 3 things are things we all fall short of.

A long holiday weekend begins today. My vow is to read this essay daily and see how capable I am of reaching the end of the line as far as my will is concerned. It never worked anyway.

New inner task: Seeing how many things are frustrating us because the outcome is not in our hands. Nothing is, in actuality. Everything is just happening whether you will it or not.

Vicki Woodyard

God has given us two words: “I am.” What we say after “I am” says who we are and what we are about.

If we say “I am hungry”, that implies a need for food.

If we say “I am angry,” that implies a belief in two powers.

If we say, “ I am sorry”, that implies a state of repentance.

But keep in mind that we are mechanical in our speech and habits.

Waking up is about being in a state of awareness as often as possible.

Words can be either empty or full.

Today, try and remember what you say after “I am.” It can change your life for better or for worse. Yes, you marry your words with your state of mind.

It is good to say “I am confused.” God knows that about us.

I wake up confused and I go to bed confused. To admit that is a state of grace!

Grace comes, not when all of our ducks are in a row, but when we are quacking up!

Vicki Woodyard

During the course of a regular day, certain thoughts whirl around me, all connected to my life experience. I find myself thinking, “Bob has been gone almost 18 years. He has no idea what I look like now.” That’s a funny thought, but I look in the mirror and what I see is not so funny.

My latest skirmish with my ego involves around my hairdresser telling me that my hair is thinning out on top. The day I held up the hand mirror and regarded myself in the bathroom mirror, I saw what she was talking about and I freaked out! I have always had good hair and thought I had escaped my genetic inheritance. (My mother’s hair was almost non-existent by the time she was my age.)

I had an idea. I went on a FB neuropathy page and asked if anyone else had hair loss. One woman said she used a certain shampoo for body and I immediately ordered some. I have used it once and son of a gun if it doesn’t make you look like you have more hair.

A thought I have every day is that I have no social life. I wrote about this yesterday. I don’t want one and don’t miss one, yet my ego keeps reminding me that I am a loser in this aspect of my life.

Another thought reminds me that when I die, my son will be left with no other relative in town. That one really smarts.

In between these egocentric thoughts, I work on myself in the way that Vernon Howard taught his students. First of all, we are all experiencing life through our False Self (the ego). And secondly, it is a mechanical life destined to keep our sorry story going. Thirdly, if you can manage to remember this, your life will change. You will be happy you don’t have a social life and it doesn’t matter what you look like or what people think about you.

Any school of awakening that doesn’t show you that you are a machine with no will of your own is not worth its salt. Vernon knew this and rubbed our faces in it. As he would say, “only the tough stuff will do.”

And so my life lurches forward with one foot in my ego life and one foot in the higher world. There are simply no awakened people that do not forget who they are all day long.

I am a good writer and a disciplined one, mainly because I only write one essay at a time. I put these on the blog and return to my wool-gathering, silly little mind. It’s a good thing it isn’t real, huh?

Vicki Woodyard

For me, it has been “a white turnip of a Sunday,” to coin a phrase of Tom Robbins. Too much time on my hands and too little to fill the hours. I relaxed in front of a stream of quotes found on YouTube. The quote that got my interest was about when a man has few friends; in fact, I listened for half an hour before it got to that one. If I remember it correctly, it says, “If a man has few friends, it is because he has experience.” That makes total sense to me, as I have been observing my life for decades now. I prefer the solitary state to human interaction and it’s a good thing, since I have so little these days. For a solitary like me, friendship is bought at the expense of what my life’s work is about. And my life’s work is about waking up.

You see, we are living in dreamland calling it the awakened state. I live there, so I am not talking about other people. I am talking about myself.

What is the experience that I have had about social interaction? It is that I have to forego my own highest interest in order to maintain relationship, for relationship is divided.

I had a relationship with my husband and it had its ups and downs. We were not mutually compatible except for a couple of things. We both loved truth…and the other thing escapes me. But he was sociable and I was not. I craved a daily relationship with him and for many years he put work before me. Yes, he was a workaholic.

After I had grieved him for years, I finally returned to my solitudinous life. I poured heart and soul into writing. This is my passion, not socializing with other lost people. Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? Maybe to you, but not to me.

I see clearly that Mother Earth is being destroyed by her inhabitants not putting her before their own selfish interests. She will not survive much longer, given man’s ignoring the signs of global warning.

So here I sit on a dying planet writing my heart out. It is my job and should I quit doing it, I would be the poorer. And so I write on, threatening to quit because so few read me, but it shouldn’t matter to the truth within whether I keep writing publicly or not.

So here is today’s essay. Put your heart into understanding it. I did.

Vicki Woodyard

As little children we learned to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school; we understood that our country was something to be proud of. Today as adults we cannot say that, as women are losing their rights due to a corrupted Supreme Court.

However, this world is not one in which justice reigns. That is exactly why Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world.

It’s a fair question to ask where justice is done. As far as I can tell, the highest court of justice is love and love that is of a higher order than human love.

I have been studying truth for long enough to recognize lies when I hear them and I am no longer surprised that our government is slowly falling into the hands of autocracy.

It is time for spiritual students to recognize the true authority of the Word. We are called to come apart from the world. For me, that means to enter the silence as often as possible, for in silence we are healed.

The promises of man are broken but the promises of God are not.

It may be too late to repair the damage that Donald Trump has done to liberty in our country, but it is not too late to re-align ourselves with who we really are. We are children of God and let us not forget that.

Peace, like a pure white garment, will settle gently around our shoulders and we will enter the kingdom any time we remember who we truly are.

Vicki Woodyard

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Well, dear friends, it is back to the drawing board. When I tried to open my Pages on the iMac, I discovered that the icon no longer worked. I managed to open it from my hard drive, but I don’t know how to get the icon back where I can see it.

I dreamt of Bob last night and I woke up feeling blue. I tried to order my meds and had trouble updating my credit card. Those two online things have made me frustrated!

What is going on in America is also frustrating. Women are being downgraded to a state of lesser importance than men. Men can get women pregnant, but women have lost their right to secure abortions. The Supreme Court is supremely right-wing, sad to say.

Where does God fit into all of these mortal problems? A good question to meditate on. Can I ask the God within? My own answer is that God is not in the human scene, as Joel Goldsmith pointed out.

If He is not in the human scene, where is He but within. I must look to my own conscience for answers.

My blog is read by few people. Perhaps it is time to hang it up. That is why I have not been posting lately.

The summer doldrums are setting in while our country goes to seed. Nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed.

Patience is needed. I must breathe and go on.

If you care to donate, click the link below. This is decision time for me as to whether to keep the blog going or not.

DONATE TO VICKI’S BLOG. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Love,
Vicki

No one can say the world is a good place to be anymore. The ones wearing rose-colored glasses can say it, but they would be wrong. Too much ignorance setting fire to intelligence. Too much hatred claiming to love. Too many indulgent people that love only themselves and their immediate families.

Just imagine if Jerusalem would have had Facebook and Twitter or if it had people like Bezos, Musk and Trump greedily consuming everyone’s share of the planet.

Where is God? George Carlin said he does not exist. What do you think? Is he not just a thought rattling around in our selfish brains when we suddenly feel a lack?

Carlin makes me laugh at his version of the truth, but I don’t think he is completely right.

I look at my own fears and turn to God for answers, but there are none. Is it because I don’t ask him for anything during the good times? But there really are no good times as long as millions of people in the world are suffering.

And we put our own faces on him, don’t we? He must understand the language we speak, first off. Then he must be able to read our minds as well.

So there is room and reason for doubting him.

God is okay with doubt and fear and confusion and agony. He lets it continue despite our prayers.

What is a human being to do?

Well, folks, humankind is a sorry lot and no amount of prayers will change that. Putin is on the warpath and we see the savagery on our smart TV’s. America democracy is on the way out as autocracy rises in the world.

There is only one real thing that we can do and that is to try and wake up from the nightmare that is human life. Oh, it is almost impossible; I know that, but try we must.

Perhaps when the human surrenders, God appears. Maybe he doesn’t exist as we think he does. Perhaps God is love in any form and that is enough and plenty, at least to start with….

Vicki Woodyard

Human existence has given itself over to mechanical suffering and no wisdom can be found in this. Anything mechanical happens without consent of the soul. The soul knows only what is found in effortless silence and acceptance. Therefore, human existence is noisy and combative.

It is good to see how bad off you are and how your thoughts and feelings are egocentric. Sitting in silence corrects everything because the soul is silence of thoughts and feelings.

Today is Saturday and the world is silent and in search of nothing. God may or may not exist, but the ego definitely does not. It is a mere reflection of our thoughts and feelings.

Rest awhile in your nothingness and see how quiet you become. Be content with nothing, for something engenders pain and suffering.

Yes, the world has gone mad but you can remain apart from it.

Continue this practice for as long as you can each day. Perhaps three minutes is sufficient time or it make take three years. Who knows?

You will reap the fruits of this practice when you hear nothing but silence arising in your mind.

In this silence a great peace descends, but it only descends for you.

You are the sole recipient of this peace.

Sit and see. Sit and be silent.

Vicki Woodyard