Moods...

"You must believe nothing; you must know everything. So right now,
you can begin to know something that is both startling and very
edifying - esoterically educational. And here it is, given to you
very directly. It doesn't make any difference at all how you feel.
It doesn't make any difference whether you're happy or unhappy,
depressed, or elated, excited or bored. I am telling you something
that you don't know quite how to take yet and understand, but take
it as a fact. Just do that much, and you can do that.

I'm telling you the truth, that you have made a great mistake in
thinking that it's important how you feel and so you try to mani-
pulate your moods in order to feel what you call a good feeling
and avoid what you call the bad feelings, but it just doesn't happen.
They are stronger than you are in your present state of misunder-
standing of life.

Let's go at it again, like a knight with a lance toward the enemy.
You can be just completely unconcerned from now on with your feel-
ings, with your emotions, with those surges of feeling mournful,
of feeling pessimistic, of feeling grouchy. No matter what the
feeling is, you really, that means in reality, have nothing to do
with it. You just think you do and having made that enormous blunder,
thinking that you're supposed to control your emotions, that you're
supposed to kick out the bad ones and invite the new ones. Believing
in that, now you're caught up in an impossible task and wherever you
look, everybody is trying to feel good because they feel bad and
their feeling good is as bad as the feeling good.

There is nothing more important for your spiritual growth than for
you to know that you are not your feeling."

from a talk given 4/18/1987
Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 11, talk 258