Why is it that peace of mind is so hard for us to stay in, to keep as our own? Why is being calm in the middle of a storm virtually the last thing that most of us are able to do? What is the source of real composure? And how do we work to develop it within ourselves? This is why we must have new self-knowledge as follows.

To be able to see any life event -- good or bad -- as a vehicle to help transport us from our present level of understanding to a higher one requires that we develop a new relationship with these unwanted events in our lives. Instead of trying to protect ourselves from them, we must become willing to see what they are revealing to us about ourselves in that same moment. The difference between these two paths and their attending possibilities...

Even though we all have our natural preference, no season of the year is greater than any other. Each plays an indispensable role in a cycle of life greater than its individual parts; and each one serves the season that follows on its heels, enabling it to fulfill its purpose in a procession as timeless as the earth itself...

When things naturally come to a close in life, our pain isn't so much born of the fact that something now ends, as it is that within this moment of ending, we are forced to meet a certain order of emptiness in us for which we are just not prepared. We are brought face to face with a great void in the center of our heart that we thought had been filled. And then we make this common, but largely unrealized mistake...

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

Most of us don't understand the nature of time and our place within it, and so we know nothing of timelessness, save for those rare instances when we encounter transcendent beauty and are transported out of our usual train of thought in time, into the timeless.

Classroom Talk: 03/16/2025 - It may be said that one finds freedom from suffering over oneself in direct proportion to one's realization that there is no separate self whose suffering is to be resisted.

Classroom Talk: 03/09/2025 - We can't change others – or, for that matter, the purpose of any given moment as it unfolds – but we can work to place one less demand on both. Only in this action can we hope to find the freedom for which we seek, because the only thing that imprisons us – in the end – is our resistance to whatever runs against our deeply seated demands.

Remastered Classic Talk: 02/28/2016 - The inevitable sense of emptiness that eventually nips at the heels of most men and women is the sudden realization that in spite of having "banked" a billion self-stimulating sensations -- even when all have been added up -- they still amount to nothing.

Remastered Classic Talk: 02/21/2016 - The vast majority of humanity views the idea of spiritual rebirth as some sort of prize to be claimed and declared: a new and exciting personal possession, like having won a tropical island in a high-stakes lottery. But true rebirth is nothing of the kind; (it is) a distinct awareness within oneself of a timeless and intelligent awareness -- a fearless and abiding patience, burgeoning with expectation -- that is "in the world (of passing time), but not of it."

Classroom Talk: 02/16/2025 - Somewhere between the past and the future there is a present waiting for you; to open yourself to its Presence…is to be given a life wherein fear cannot grow because its roots need darkness to spread, and there is none to be found in the holy space of this timeless place.

Classroom Talk: 02/09/2025 - Perfect peace is not found in some time to come; it has never not existed now. We are created to perfectly reflect this truth...and, in so doing, to realize its freedom.