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...
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..."
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Student Talks: 1/19/2024 - Key Lesson: The greatest possibility for acquiring the Divine energy required to facilitate the transformation of oneself is found only in the moments of higher awareness that, itself, can only be realized in the same time and place of one's greatest resistance to that moment.
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Topics covered: It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions; The greatest prize hidden within our inner life is victory over death. Uncovering the treasure is a matter not of intellectual knowledge only, but of awareness, relationship, participation and understanding; The desert in spiritual stories represents the endless useless struggle to escape from conflict, not seeing that the attempt to escape is the perpetuation of the conflict.
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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.
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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..."
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Topic: 3 Real Wishes that Bring Real Results (Classroom Talk 7/26/23)
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Topics covered: We live under the government of an order of being that makes sure we do not understand that the Divine knows what we need before we know that we need it; We have wishes that we think are our own. But not one wish that we have originated with us; We have the capacity to manifest some of the things that we desire, but the things that we desire never come with the peace and fulfillment...
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Classroom Talk: 7/26/2023 - Why waste time wishing on a star for a "better time" to come... when it's possible for you to know that you are a wish made by a star.
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