I hear your thoughts, dear wanderers. I hear you. I understand the Last Stand that ego makes. Do not make so much of ego. It is only ego.

I hear you say with trembling:

“Beloved God, You are so competent and savvy while I have an enormous lack of awareness of what I am doing and why. I do not understand what I am doing out in the fray. I am doing, yet I do not seem to be able to make sense of what I do or think when I am in the midst of life. I do not want to hear my errant thoughts. When, O God, will Your Beautiful Thoughts replace my soggy own?

“God, I read what You say. I think it through. I nod in agreement. I totally believe that I understand the heart of what You say. I am very simpatico with what I hear You say. My understanding You feels like a special blanket that covers me and protects me from trepidation. I get it, God. I truly get it.

“Then, when Your Words are not in front of me, it is like my thoughts are a Jungle of Thoughts, a Jumble of Thoughts, and my understanding and compassion vacate me, and I have no understanding at all. My thoughts use bad language. Oh, my state of comprehension and the living of Your advice are two different spins on life. Sometimes I forget I am dealing with souls who require pleasantness from me.

“O God, my ego shows up and seems to lead the band. Am I ever going to get out of the Maze of Smallness that pursues me? Sometimes I hang on by a thread. My internal dialogue becomes spotty. I know You are with me, yet, when all is said and done, it seems I have an ego will of my own whose voice is louder than Yours.

Dear God, too many of the thoughts that go through My mind are not Yours. I cannot believe they are mine, this mumbling I hear myself utter and mutter -- they wrack my heart, mind, and – I hesitate to say – my soul. I fumble in the world. Save me from the random thoughts I am inundated with that are not worthy of a Child of Yours. Free me from my thoughts that are not Yours at all. I do not want them to be mine.”

I say to you:

Beloveds, there is no ownership in the outer world. Not even your thoughts. They are not all your own. You pick them up. Call them wandering thoughts that besiege you. They are leftover world thoughts, and they walked into your mind. You are, perhaps, too hospitable to them, too kind, too quick to take over these leftover thoughts. They intrude. Their language wrenches your heart, and you feel incapable of warding them off. Such thoughts are against your sense of rightness. Consider that these errant thoughts have a mind of their own. They landed in your thought stream.

You are asking how to get off this track. The more you try to be rid of these thoughts, the deeper they may dig in. You would escape them if only you knew how. What you are asking is how do you get your mind off them? Or how do you ward them off in the first place? You certainly want them to go off by the wayside.

You don’t want to send these bungling thoughts back into the thought pool for anyone else to pick up. You want these unwanted thoughts to fall off the edge of the Earth and not find a place in anyone’s thoughts. You want to put them aside once and for all. Rightly, you want to do this without the anger you feel and the littleness you feel.

Kiss errant thoughts that visit you goodbye, beloveds. See them floating off to no man’s land. Give them a kind send-off. Imagine these thoughts turning into different thoughts. See the negative thoughts leave. Give them a gentle push. Show them the way to go.

These thoughts did not conceive themselves. You can be free of them. You are not the hapless unloving and disreputable thoughts that may go through your mind. You are capable of so much more.

Say:

"Farewell, dear thoughts. You do not have to be here. You can dissolve yourself. You are sounds that can turn yourselves around and become music.

"Farewell, outdated thoughts. Welcome, updated thoughts."