Topics covered: How long do you want to live a life in which you can be carried off at any time, beaten up, and then released whenever your captor is done with you?; The beginning of the end of useless suffering is in seeing that, at present, you do not really know why you suffer. There is not one solution that you think you know that is going to save you; If you ever want to stop being thrown into a prison whenever conditions seem to conspire against you...

Classroom Talk: 11/15/2023 - No single substance -- whether physical, mental, or emotional -- creates an addiction, let alone the pain and conflict inherent in its corresponding dependency; rather dependency is the birthplace of all false solutions with which we first become identified, and then become addicted to... in the vain hope that it has the power to release us from a pain we have yet to understand, let alone resolve.

Topics covered: True exploration of your consciousness cannot be for the purpose of escaping from something, nor to confirm what you already know; The defintion of "insanity" is doing the same thing over and over again, and hoping for a different result. The same could be said about "addiction"; "Addiction" connotes the idea of unwilling service to something that is harmful.

Classroom Talk: 1/4/2023 - There is no such thing as a compulsive pleasure, let alone a contented "slave" that lives under its lash; and yet billions of human beings serve some form of addiction, willing to turn a blind eye to how much they suffer for the sake of a pleasure they cannot keep, a security that cannot be possessed.

Topics Covered: There is no such thing as a compulsive pleasure; We are not meant to spend our lives compulsively defending and justifying ourselves. Those things are addictions; Physical hunger and thirst are natural, but being hungry for approval is not natural; Every day we go compulsively looking for what our mind says we need in order to find fulfillment. What we long for...

Topics Covered: Someone has to be the first; The healing of pain is in its revelation; Stop analyzing the pain and just see it instead; No reaction can heal itself; Do not oppose what opposes you; Every denial of the appearance of pain is the perpetuation of the consciousness responsible for it; Resistance to any unwanted condition is attributing power to it; If healing does not start with...

Topics Covered: Suppose when we become Truthful, less people agree with us and desert us, particularly family. What will I do in this case?; Freedom from the resistance and anger that comes up to "handle" my spouse's non-stop patronizing in her attempt to fix everything about me; "Who" is it who feels hurt?; What happens immediately after we die?...

Classroom Talk: 11/10/2019 - For too long we've believed that whatever limitation we meet in ourselves -- in some unwanted moment -- would not exist were it not for that same unwanted moment in which we meet it. It's just not true. The real limitation is how instantly identified we become with a fearful reaction "telling" us that we...

Topics Covered: What is the difference between little "I's" and the whole of the divine; I've battled with anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder since my late teens and don't know how to practice the higher ideas I learn; How do I help a young student in my classroom who is rude and hateful; Is conscience a conduit of truth.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of June 18, 2018. Our unconscious agreement to identify with the pain of any negative state - including the usual (anxious) rush to escape it - is one of the ways our false nature suffers - in vain - to prove (to itself) that whatever "self" it imagines, and then pretends to be is, in fact, real.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of May 7, 2018. Let every search for a solution to the suffering you feel begin in the unlit corners of your own consciousness, and soon you will never again wonder "why" you feel the worries, fear, and the bitterness that you do.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of February 26, 2018. Any old and particularly familiar pain that repeats itself does so for a single reason: we believe that we understand the reason for its appearance, when nothing could be further from the truth... as evidenced by the reappearance of that suffering.