When you get irritated you are irritated because you do not have all the control you would like. You want silence, and there is noise. You want to be undisturbed, and you are disturbed. You want to reach somewhere fast, and traffic has another idea. You want to take a nap, and the phone doesn't stop ringing. You feel foiled by the vicissitudes of life. Somewhere you got the idea that everything has to be in accord with your wishes. And you feel like a raging despot when they don't.

When you let life take its course, you are not controlling it. You may think you have already let go of control, but you are yet staunch in adhering to what you think should be rather than adhering to what is. You still resist much that is for your enrichment. Yes, you turn away gifts. You put off your acceptance of them because of some predilection you have, from some thought you have that you honor over what is presented to you.

If everyone came from confidence rather than lack, the whole configuration of the world would be different.

If no one feared they would be robbed, would there be robbery?

If no one worried that they would not be paid, would there be debt?

If there were not sense of lack, would seeming lack exist?

Are the robber and the robbed vibrating at the same vibration? Does the one with ten locks on his front door call the robber to him? Is the robber answering a request when he robs?

Do the ones who dun for payment attract those who do not pay?

Limitless are the recesses of your mind when it listens to your heart. When the mind listens to something else, someone else's thought or an amassed world thought, it is not using its head. It may exercise a particular skill but unless your heart is in it, the mind repeats or recites an exercise that keeps you in place.

Thrust your heart forward. Honor it. Accept it. It is a leader of you. I entrusted Myself to your heart, not to your mind. The mind is a receptor of the heart. It cannot bypass the heart and still find what the heart desires.

The mind thinks.

When you feel in the grips of something, in the grips of pain, perhaps, or in the grips of fear, or even in the grips of love, you have propelled yourself there and gripped that place, that occasion, that person. You attached yourself there. How crass of Me to say you are attached to even your pain, but attachment is its own pain. Attachment is false. Attachment is a conception you have, and — listen to this — it is never based on truth.

Attaching is its own art. You are skilled. You insert yourself. You embed yourself. You hold on for dear life.

You equate coming to peace in life with coming to peace with loss and death, the main issues you consider important.

What coming to peace with life really means is coming to terms with the unholy concept that life will not always go according to your will. When you come to terms with that and the little impish things in life, you will be at peace. The larger matters will then take care of themselves.

It's a good thing when you don't know what to do, when you don't know what to say or what to write. It is good because then you offer openness. When you know, or know for sure, you offer closedness. And closedness is control. Openness is not.

Of course, openness has to be true. An appearance of openness while you are sure inside that you know the answer is not openness but a manipulation of it.

Innocence is unknowing. Innocence is openness. Innocence is the greatest knowledge of all. It is a clean slate. It is openness. It is freedom.

It is not controlling.

How much will you leave others to Me?

How much will you get out of the way?

How much control will you release?

Release all of it.

What others do has to do with Me, not with you.

Your life is between you and Me, and others' lives, the same — between them and Me. I am the center of the vortex. You are not.

If you believe I am with you, then believe that others are with Me also.

Can you leave them to Me?

Can you leave their passage through life to Me?

Follow your own course, and let others follow their own as well.

Anger is frustrated control. Have not control or need to control, and you will have not anger.

When you turn up the flame under the kettle, it will boil. It will boil over. You try to contain it. But the boiling over came from your need to control passages and outcomes. What would you expect when you turn up the flame?

No one fools you. You fool yourself.

If you did not fool yourself, where would be your cause of anger?

When you release your attachment to ideas, you release yourself to Me. You come closer. Do you see? Attachment is resistance. As you resist less, you let go, and so you relax, and where is relaxation but with Me?

Your holding, gripping, and clutching on to the events and locations and people of the world means you have let go of Me. I do not tell you to abandon the world. I tell you to let go of your hold on it, or its hold on you. Do not tug the world or the people in it. Leave them to their own orbit. Release your hold because, unless you do, you are bound to that which you hold.