Blog 3494 – 05.28.2025

The Priceless Pearl

One of the longer phrases in my daily mantra goes:

“I am healthy, I am happy, I am whole, I am patient, I am persistent, but most of all I am kind.” Do I or does anyone always act the way we should? Probably not, yet I still believe that we get to choose the direction of our lives and that what we think and the words that we speak and that we take to heart determine our reality.

I set great store in the value of positive self-talk. We all hear voices in our heads from time to time. My dad liked to joke that the only voices that he heard were from the vicinity of the refrigerator saying, “Eat me.” We all have heard and remember every negative remark that was ever made to us. I believe that the voices that torment my wife, that only she can hear, are memories that haunt her. She thinks that I can hear what she hears, but I cannot.

She believes these voices and allows them to rule her behavior. She is not happy about being so cruelly bossed around. During his Christian phase singer/songwriter Bob Dillion wrote and recorded a song that said, “You’re Gonna Have To Serve Somebody.” I happen to believe there are only two choices God or the Devil, your higher self or your lower self, the True voice or Lying Ego – the one and only true enemy of our souls.

The still small voice always comes to us as an encouraging word. Ego is a false god, a poser, and an opposer and as such is the author of all the discouraging words that we have ever or ever will hear. He/she uses the mouths of others, but mostly our own to say these hateful and mean things to us. We give our power to the words we listen to and take to heart.

A psychology professor that I had in college told the story of the first recorded person to come back from being in a vegetative catatonic psychosis state. Even after he “snapped out of it” it took him six months to convince his doctors that he was well and in his right mind. During this six months he observed the patients who suffered as he had and came to some conclusions about what he had gone through. He summarized his experience this way. He said that he believed that people in the catatonic state were oblivious to all outside stimuli because they were consumed with trying to answer one question: “Am I worth anything?” He went on to say that he believed the reason that most people never came out of the catatonic state was that they conclude that they are not worth anything. Ego’s hateful and deeply discouraging words are always yelling such lies to us.

The young man was asked why he “came back” and he said it was because of a little chorus that he had heard as a child that kept echoing in his head as he focused all of his attention on an answer to that one great question. It helped him see his way back. The words to that little chorus: “Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

You do not have to believe in Jesus or the Bible to know that you are of infinite worth, but you do have to listen to your higher best self and disregard all the lies of puny little ego.

Another phrase from my daily mantra goes: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in my sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Our higher best self is always wiling to pay the price to redeem us, to buy us back, because we are to him/her/them, the priceless pearl, the Dearly Beloved.

“You can take that to bank.”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O9TSiE35PKzupP8NjHY7QDRKHN4HWngE/view?usp=drivesdk

Never Enough