Too often it happens that some people lose their interest in self-study. They give up on their inner work because they don’t see the immediate results hoped for. If anything, in their growing awareness of what has always been their actual condition, it seems to them that they are now even deeper asleep than ever before! Don’t fall for this trick! The negative thoughts urging you to cease your self-exploration come only from the mind of the intimate enemy. It knows that your persistent inner work is the same as its walking papers. The only weapon this false self has is its power of discouragement. So don’t listen! Instead, be encouraged by the fact that although you will likely fail many times along the upper path, self-study and inner success are really two ideas that mean the same thing, if you’ll only stay the course. All you have to do to stay the course and to win the inner war is be willing to start over and over and over again with your self-study. And here we encounter another beautiful law of higher life created just to help us succeed:

Starting over is always possible because Now is always new.

Life is continuously new in the present moment, and so are you. The negative voices issued from the intimate enemy that proclaim you won’t make it come only from what has been your world up until now, and not from life in its perpetual newness. Seeing the truth of this gives you the strength to brush away these feelings of failure and start over with self-study.

To double their inner benefit, read and then reread the following four special insights on this vital subject of self-study and the importance of starting over.

1. The power to start over is in the thread of reality itself. Volunteer to view every unhappy ending or defeat as the continually passing condition it is. Real self-study proves to you that there’s no such thing as defeat, for the voice that tells of your defeat is itself only an echo of a time that was. What was is no more unless you allow the intimate enemy to convince you that an echo is reality.

2. All feelings of failure include the unconscious assumption that you know all there is to know about what has you bottled up. Pull the plug on this self-limitation by meeting every moment of self-defeat with the realization that there’s no end to your ability to learn about yourself.

3. Just as the physical eye that sees can’t see itself other than through a reflection, you cannot see your psychological self other than by gazing at those mental images of your own creation. So, when seeing a failure in your mind’s eye, just remember in that moment who it is that put it there. See through the painful feeling by seeing its root as arising from within your conditioned self. Seeing that you unconsciously put that picture on the screen begins the inner healing that only real self-knowledge can provide.

4. Each moment that some self-study shows you how spiritually asleep you are, use that same moment to wake up and remember that you can always start your whole life over. Then see that the inner voice calling you a loser should be the focus of still a deeper self-study, and not the self that you look at yourself from.