What Is Critical

These days what is critical becomes more and more important to me. However, there is a problem with this; namely, that man cannot do. That is what Gurdjieff taught those who had ears to hear. You see, Gurdjieff taught esoteric Christianity. He was able to shed light on the teachings of Jesus.

Gurdjieff spoken in a confusing way in order to stun the minds of those who recognized something original and decent in him. They could not perceive it with their intellects, however. He knew that so thoroughly that the first thing he did was push people away. Vernon Howard did the same thing and so do I when I take to the keyboard.

I know my audience and they know me. Perhaps that is why I keep writing for the few, those with ears to hear and eyes to read.

I am not only an introvert; I am also one that knows better than to throw pearls to swine. I do not grow that way, not at all.

I have told you my story many times over, yet it is changing as the inexorable march of time leaves its mark on me. I have quit driving and traveling; I do not mind this at all. I savor the days at home with nothing to do but simple housework and kitchen chores.

I am a child of God, but society tells me to cover it over with pretense and lies and so we all do exactly that. No one is whom they pretend to be—that is a mere social role easily seen through.

I woke up before daybreak this morning and have already had breakfast as it shows 6:30 on the clock. In God’s time, we are eternal beings living limited human lives. We rail against that. We have looked for answers for society and have found none. So a handful of us keep up the search for the Real while it is right here in front of us.

How can I tell you that I write from a place I have not yet visited? It beckons me on, as it does you. We must be content to sit at the feet of the master. Time will be seen through just as soon as we have seen through ourselves.

Vicki Woodyard

This morning heaviness slowly lifting as I take time to love and forgive myself….

It is a gray spring morning towards the end of May. My brother has made his decision to enter hospice. His best friend from high school is with him daily now and that is a beautiful thing. My sister was able to drive to Memphis and be with him for a couple of days as well. That was a beautiful thing, too.

Some of you may remember that my brother and I emailed almost daily for three years. We talked a lot about our childhood and how it was a mixture of real love, but also real emotional damage done by a father who was addicted to prescription meds. Anyway, my brother got too weak to email and the relationship rebuilt on email is now in silence. As you know, silence is the greatest healer of all. We give it all over to something bigger than ourselves.

I see my neurologist today and then Rob and I will have lunch somewhere. Since I have quit driving, eating out is a great pleasure.

I am going through some of my old files and and organizing them. Most of what I write holds up, thank God for that. Here are a few lines that I can share with you today:

You will come to this place one day where everything is so complicated that you say ‘uncle’ to all of it. Then the space becomes who you are, rather than the mind trying to figure it all out.

I emptied out the pockets of my mind. Lots of lint, little content.

All is lost only that all can be found on a higher level.

And this one, not mine. ~ Hew Len: “God is not a concierge.”

Bits and pieces of the truth are enough. No one is required to memorize anything and that is also a good thing.

Vicki Woodyard

Don’t tell your truth or you will be burned at the stake. That is not what happened in the past; it is what happens today. At the hands of society you will die, not having ever lived. If you leave society, you will be abandoned to your own confusion. Left without a home or family or friends.
Do not think this is not happening to you every day. Subliminally. Under the surface. Hidden.

No positive thinking will deliver you because it is created by the mind. And what the mind creates can be undone. Toss out every book you have on positive thinking. It has gotten you nowhere.

Be the mess you secretly know yourself to be. Get witnesses if you must. Let people tell you how wrong and misguided you are. Invite them to condemn you. That is what Jesus did.

Jesus was the light of the world yet He was killed. But not really. When you follow in His footsteps, you will be crucified. And you will rise. But not literally, never literally. Figuratively, metaphorically, allegorically.

It has happened to to me twice. I rose both times. And will again. The third time is a charm. Put down your books and pay attention to the misery that remains inside of you. This is the greatest blessing you can give the world.

Vicki Woodyard

Another day being Vicki, thank God the Self is running in the background. You see, Vicki is the one that is continually finding herself in a jam. It is not the Self that suffers!

Once you see this, you can fall back into the arms of the Self in every circumstance. How does this work? Yesterday Vicki made some soup for a neighbor who had just had surgery. She has made it often and it is delicious. But making it for someone else caused her to mess it up. It just didn’t taste as it good.

At some point, Vicki gave up, but not before suffering at the hands of herself. It was then that she gave up and let God handle something she couldn’t handle. Her brother has chosen hospice and she wept a bit about that. She knows that she had no choice but to cry.

Those three paragraphs describe every ego’s failure to maintain control. Vernon Howard used to say that there is no controller. Everything just happens. All true teachers say that and it is ironic that every human being knows it.

Today in America, a decline in democracy is just happening. Despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party, autocracy is winning. This is called fate. Trying or not trying has nothing to do with anything.

If I am doing my inner work, I am able to let go as often as I can remember to do so. Life as a personality is nothing but pain. We may win small victories, but that is just a karmic thing. At best, we are microscopic fish in a macroscopic bowl.

Okay, okay, what’s love got to do with it? It is the soul the loves, not the ego. Those nine words say it all. Love yourself for not loving yourself. Irony and paradox prevail as long as we strive to be who we can never be. Love is always enough. Start with yourself. Stay with yourself as often as you can. Love will find a way home and the ego is nothing but a roadblock.

Vicki Woodyard

There comes a time when people on the spiritual path have to say what they see. That time for me is now and it has to do with what is happening to our country, indeed in countries all over the world.

What I see is that the Republican Party is a dangerous cult promoting autocracy and authoritarianism. They scream so loud that it is blood-curdling. Meanwhile, the Democrats, as usual, are too polite, dull and a day late and a dollar short.

In times like these, anyone in America who sees what is happening and condones it is a danger to our democracy. The media are trying to warn us, but too many people tune politics out when they should be educating themselves about the peril that our democracy is in.

Anyone voting Republican is voting for autocracy. If they win, our democracy will die. Right now they have taken the right for women to have abortions and there are more restrictive rules coming down the pike at the Supreme Court.

Trump likes Putin and his ilk. The global trend is towards autocracy. Democracy lacks the will to overcome evil with good, although they are trying. It may be too little too late. Biden wasted time pushing his Build Back Better program when he should have been warning the nation about the coming plans of the Right.

Trump taught Republicans to attack, lie and then attack and lie some more. We have heard all of the lies. His is a party of white supremacy, much like the South in the Civil War. Our nation is going backwards.

I just had to get this off my chest. In these perilous times, democracy is on the line all over the world. And it is the right thing for me to do to write about it. The bottom line is that evil is on the ascendancy worldwide. God help us all.

Vicki Woodyard

Life is unfolding in a predestined way. There is no one riding the emotional rollercoaster; it just feels like there is. You see, life itself is impersonal. It has
never heard of anything but what is happening now. It is we that personalize it.

Go to a mountain brook and watch it burbling and tumbling over rocks. It doesn’t know itself; it just happens.

Go to a hospital and watch those in suffering. That, too, is just happening. Oh, the emotions are running over, but they are not in charge. The Charge Nurse is not even in charge; she just seems to be.

What is the point in witnessing what you cannot change? The point is that witnessing is not part of the human scene. It is above and beyond it.

Nothing is impaired; how could the witness do anything but witness?

The crutches may pile up in wartime, but there is no one fighting. Of course, the witness sees fighting, but it is not a part of it.

The moment you enter any kind of so-called battle, you lose your witness-consciousness and become lost in the worldly fray.

Governments all over the world are turning to autocracy and freedoms are rapidly being lost. But the witness just witnesses.

The ego will react to what I just wrote. That’s okay, because the ego is a phantom self. That is all it has ever been. Amen.

Vicki Woodyard

A Broke-Down World

We live in a broke-down world, a peeling planet, a positive prison. There is no escape except through acceptance. What a contradictory thing to ask of us!

How did I get here and when do I leave? Neither, it seems, has anything to do with me. Talk about puzzlement….

I am an introverted spiritual writer and I find myself in silence more and more. The noise of this world pushes me into the deep space of my own wordlessness.

In silence there is nothing to do but be.

In being I find no answers, but there are no questions, either.

I am not an admirer of the natural world, but of the inner one. I am fascinated with spiritual concepts, but they have fallen away, leaving me nothing to cling to.

Hours pass, days pass, weeks pass, etc. I remain puzzled and curious about this life I live. It clearly is beyond my control. I tap out these essays because I have nothing else to do.

You read them and move on and I write more. Everything is endless and causeless.

What of love? Somehow the silence takes care of that, too.

At night I have nightmares and am glad to be awake in the morning. Yet the day has a nightmarish quality as well. Because human happiness is an illusion. It doesn’t last.

I was happy once. Now I am peaceful. I am not sure how to explain the difference, but some of you are nodding because you know.

Vicki Woodyard

I have always been a seer. No, I do not see the future; I see through the illusions of the human personality. And no, I am not a channeler or a psychic; I am simply a seer of what I see and know to be true. It ties in with the Law of Levels, which says that people on the same level can communicate with each other readily. That is why I have never been a social animal; I can see through the pretense. But pretense is necessary in this world. People of every kind need food, shelter and clothing, so businesses must operate and the show must go on.

My writing arises from my knowing; that is why it comes so easily for me. I write what I am feeling in the moment.

Our beautiful planet is being destroyed by pure evil (mechanical behaviors. (Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.) It is too late to save Her and it is only a matter of time before there will be no more chances to do the right thing.

So what can we as individuals do? It is both simple and impossible. We must carry on as best we can doing what we are called to do. Service takes many forms, but so does evil. We must get it clear that the human mind cannot save the world. Only “I am” can do that. We must constantly sift the wheat from the chaff. And by that I mean that we must monitor our thoughts, feelings and behaviors constantly. Right now we are focused on evil and are reacting to it. That makes us part of the problem. I see that now. I see myself hating evil and the right thing to do is to rise above it—to focus on the truth.

I carry on by writing as I am led to write. That is it in a nutshell. I am putting my seventh book together and know that in doing so, I will be writing only for the few. I have realized that truth cannot be told to the masses. As Gurdjieff said, the masses cannot escape. Jesus spoke only to the few, but they heard and they will always hear.

And so I begin another day of simplicity. I had a nightmare last night in which everything in my life was going wrong, and in truth it always does as long as I keep pretending that I know what I am doing, or that I am not such a bad person.

We have all sinned (acted mechanically) and fallen short of the glory of God. But redemption is happening daily as we confess how like puppets we are, pulled by the strings of our very own egos.

Our first duty is to the Self in all beings. There is only the One. All else is a massive lie.

Vicki Woodyard

My website stat counter stopped working and I had to get in touch with tech support. Took me half an hour and left me with ragged nerves because when I hung up, it had not re-appeared.

After I had given up, it suddenly appeared again when I clicked on it. It took me twice as long to calm down!

The good news is that I am wrapping up my book. Now I have to let it marinate for a while. I will read it again and again and again. Such fun, not!

It is less than a hundred pages, but they are all meaningful. No fillers, guaranteed.

To write such a book took me decades of inner digging and outward witnessing. Sound familiar? We all recognize how hard it is to remember what needs remembering.

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get!

Vicki Woodyard

It’s me again. That’s the situation. The solution is to realize it’s always me again! We begin our inner work not knowing that we cannot change ourselves. A few years of inner work goes by and we realize that yes, it is indeed us again. That is the earthly situation and we are not learning to witness this “me.”

Decades go by and it is still us again. But now we have seen beneath many of the layers of self-deception. The main one is that we can change anything.

Vernon Howard always worked with situation and solution. You can plug in your own and see what happens. For example, the situation is that I always withdraw from challenges. All I can do is witness that flaw in my makeup. It is now that I can make an honest request to God. “God please help me, I cannot change myself.” That is the very beginning of humility.