Topic: Escape the Unseen Prison of Painful Dependency (Classroom Talk 11/15/23)

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.

Topic: Out with the "Old Addictive Self" and in with a New Dedication to be Free (Classroom Talk 1/4/23)

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.

Student Talks: 5/28/2021 - Key Lesson: Since no desire can complete itself -- by itself -- through anything it imagines -- its only recourse is to imagine "more of" whatever failed to satisfy it the first time around. This unseen cycle is the mainspring of all forms of addiction, as unconscious desire keeps trying to fill a bucket 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?...

Topic: Rise Above the Unconscious Source of Any Painful Addiction (11/10/19 Classroom Talk)

Topic: Rise Above the Unconscious Source of Any Painful Addiction (11/10/19 Classroom Talk)

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.

We are not meant to keep our eye on some "tomorrow" from which we blindly borrow the false pleasure of what "might be." Such dreams serve nothing save the sleeping self, an imagined sense of "self" that always realizes, too late, that its "hope in things seen" is the same as tomorrow's sorrow.

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.