"There is only one cause of crime, whether that crime is in the streets or in the avenues of the mind. That single cause of all criminality and offenses against people is a lack of personal responsibility, a lack of individual responsibility for your own behavior.

You are a person; you have personal one hundred percent responsibility for what you choose, therefore you have full responsibility for the results of your choices. If you suffer from self-caused crime, that is, if you hurt, that is evidence, which has to become evident to you, that the principle of individual irresponsibility and individual responsibility has not been made clear to you.

Now what I’ve said at the start of this talk is of so much importance that I wish you would take even these first opening sentences out with you and give them special attention. Individual irresponsibility is the cause of the individual wandering in lost-land and feeling bad. There is no other cause for you suffering inwardly than you failing to take,
failure to take strict one hundred percent responsibility for your actions and reactions and for the way you feel.Anyone who ascribes crime of all sorts including the crime of suffering, anyone who ascribes crime to anything else is an unconscious criminal himself, period.

Any time anyone tells you or he writes a book on sociology or he gives a lecture or a sermon, any time that false prophet
ascribes crime to any other source other than individual irresponsibility, he is giving you moronic nonsense. It is a crime to ascribe crime to anything other than the person himself taking personal responsibility for his life.

Now we’re talking about crime. I’ve used that word and you can expand it within yourself as I talk and see, for example, that crime in a good general explanation is anything that is evil. And I want to tell you right at the start tonight something else that I wish you would take with you from this room. And write it down when I give it to you because there is so much to do to escape the self-trap. So please, write down the following either in your mind or on a piece of paper as much as it is bewildering to you: evil has no right to exist. I said, crime, badness and all that they cause have no right to exist. I know, unfortunately, I know that that didn’t overwhelm you as it should have.

It’s too much, but you’ve started. Now what does that mean?

Evil, badness has no right to exist. Well of course it has no right, so the question is, why do you give it that right?"

from a talk given 3/17/1989

Vernon Howard's Higher World - MP3 CD Volume 26, talk 651, track 2...

http://www.anewlife.org/index.html