Each time you overlook on the spot and are outspoken— with firmness, kindness, and patience—you are developing (among other things) courage.

As long as you are patient, you will be free from beastly extremes of behavior; your patience will increase your ability to stand unmoved in the face of trials.

Everything you say or do will flow effortlessly from what you perceive in calmness.

It used to be that you were upset and said the wrong thing—or you were upset and said nothing. Now, the process within you is reversing itself; you are not upset, and you say or do something reasonable—or you are not upset, and you say or do nothing, in accordance with reasonable requirements of the moment.

Do not blame others, nor look into the past for the original cause of your trouble. You already know what it is. It is pride supported by the emotion of hostility.

It continues to feed and multiply your problems, upset by upset.

From now on, just watch and observe calmly. As you recognize your anger patterns, merely observe your related weaknesses and resentments and allow them to pain you.

Refrain from correcting your own faults. The stress of realizing our inability to make ourselves right will become repentance, and repentance stresses the compassion of the Father to grace us with the remedy.

Be patient with what you see within, as well as without. When you do not allow the injustice of others to puff up your pride with judgment or challenge you to deal with the threat to your ego, the spirit within you is stressed to reply for you.

"Each time you succeed,

true courage will emerge

and fear will fall away"

Soon you will be able to see and overcome hostilities you have not even noticed as yet (because of their subtlety), just by watching and not being upset by what you see.

Each time you succeed, true courage will emerge and fear will fall away.

In the past, you were afraid to observe life as it was, perhaps because of the violence of your reactions to what you observed. You could not deal wisely with what you saw, so you chose to see less and less.

Now you must observe the cruelties of life, and yet stand unmoved by them—allow a nature deep within to deal with each threat. You may feel as though your experiences were not actually happening to you, as though someone other than yourself were experiencing life for you.

In much the same manner, when we play god to our children, we react for them in time of danger, robbing them of that experience within—making them dependent upon us, as they would otherwise be on God.

You will see problems that your ego was never able to cope with being resolved effortlessly by the self you had once lost touch through your

reaction to your parents.

The process of self-alienation began with your first obvious error: becoming upset and judging the cruelties of others. The second mistake was trying to compensate for the problems and fears that arose in you as a consequence of that personal reply of hostility.

This, of course, only compounded the problem. A consciousness that allowed that response to begin with is in dereliction. Being in error, it cannot correct itself.

The meditation exercise restores your relatedness to truth and reason via repentance. It allows for a spiritual refueling in that extra moment you act. Patiently waiting for the intuitive prod to right thought or action, you will no longer be thinking

in terms of your own advantage, or fearing consequences.