Self-observation is the key to a higher order of awareness; it is how we learn to become inwardly vigilant to our own thoughts and feelings, even as they pass through us. When we can observe ourselves in this new way, our higher nature naturally prevails over any troubling thoughts or feelings that want to drag us down into their lower world...

What happens when we see things about ourselves that we don't want to see? In order to avoid looking at itself, the mind will seize on the anger, impatience, grief, loneliness, or anxiety it has seen... and it will try to explain it. It will take the initial darkness, the negative energy, and because it seems to be so bad, the mind will make something out of it that it can deal with...

Have you ever noticed that when you're under the cloud of some negative state, what you do to try to "make things better" actually makes the situation worse? Struggling to free yourself from your own negative reactions is a bit like throwing gasoline onto a fire, isn't it? Recognizing that you get trapped in this pattern of taking action that neither relieves nor rescues you from...

In this short talk, bestselling "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about how we can understand painful tension in a new way so that, instead of being tormented by it, we use it as a source of revelation and release from the false self that blames everything outside of itself for its pain.

Do we not try to escape the stress we have by further imagining ways to relieve ourselves from the circumstances held responsible for it? And the more we do to create for ourselves an enclave in which we will no longer be confronted with the trouble, the more we isolate ourselves, and the greater the problem becomes because we increasingly resist anything not part of what we've..."

Human beings walk around in a kind of self-made suffering that is the expression of something in us that is afraid of seeing ourselves as we are. We've come to think that avoiding a unwanted fact about ourselves is the same as escaping the effects. Our lives should be a ceaseless realization of where we miss the mark, because that is the only way to transcend the idea that...

There are unique challenges for the human being who wants to have a relationship with the source of his or her being. We try to control events outside of us in a futile attempt to find a fearless life, when our energy would be better spent attending to our inner lives. Yet at the same time we are in a body and we do need to take care of our basic householder responsibilities...

Student Talks: 11/17/2023 - Key Lesson: Anytime we struggle in the dark of ourselves -- trying to change our nature -- our efforts are misdirected; our real work is to learn to see by the light that dwells in that darkness, and to know the truth of ourselves, as (it is) revealed.

Topics covered: Genuine prayer is connected to something you have genuinely seen about yourself. The wrong kind of prayer, the selfish kind, is connected to the avoidance of seeing something true about yourself; Ongoing psychological pain is always the product of having mistaken who you are. "Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind..."

Topic: 3 Real Wishes that Bring Real Results (Classroom Talk 7/26/23)