“Never identify yourself with the errors you have committed. You are God’s child. Claim your eternal relationship with Him.
Never dwell on the thoughts of your shortcomings. Recall, instead, the memory of the good things you have done, and of the goodness that exists in the world. Convince yourself of your own innate perfection. Thus you will find yourself drawn to remember your eternal nature as a child of God.
If you want to find something valuable that has been buried under a mud-slide, won’t you be thinking of that object even as you dig through the mud? If you concentrated only on the mud, you might lose sight of your very purpose in digging, and abandon the search.”
The Essence of Self-Realization – The Wisdom Of Paramhansa Yogananda, his disciple, J. Donald Walters, pgs. 53 – 55.