Being an Instrument

Remastered Classic Talk: 5/31/17 - True patience, the seed of being consciously kind, begins with the interior work of never forgetting the following: what someone else does, whatever the nature of his or her action, has no authority over who you are.

Topic: Transform Any Troubling Relationship into a Timeless Treasure (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 2/18/26)

Imagining all that remains to be done to realize the contentment we seek -- or that we must struggle with to attain some illusive peace of mind -- is like trying to calm the ripples on the surface of a reflecting pond...by throwing a polished stone into its waters.

Student Talks: 9/13/2024 - Key Lesson: Words are rocks in the stream of consciousness; no name is the experience it seems to define. Experience -- like the flow of a river -- is a silent, wordless movement. We can either live in, and from the conditioned experience of a word, or in the timeless awareness of experience itself.

Topic: How to Transform Painful Questions into Healing Answers (Classroom Talk 7/31/24)

Topics covered: You are tired because you think yourself into exhaustion; One of the pitfalls along the way is that our minds are starving for things to think about; The purpose of a spiritual school is not to give you something new to think about. The purpose is to show you the need to point your attention in another direction; Familiarity breeds contempt. Boredom is built into identification...

Student Talks: 2/23/2024 - Key Lesson: The present moment and our awareness of whatever may be passing into and through it are one consciousness, much in the same way as the Eye of The Beholder shares an awareness of both the mirror, and the object it reflects.

Topics covered: Our struggles to find freedom have not done anything other than set up the next series of conditions that we will find ourselves struggling against; Freedom has nothing to do with overcoming the conditions that we blame our pain on. What we must overcome is the level of consciousness that feels itself to be apart from the conditions that it perceives to be outside of itself; Useless struggle is battling with conditions that seem contrary...

Student Talks: 12/23/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1: We cannot hope to find true peace without fulfilling the purpose of (our) life, and we can't fulfill that purpose without awakening to the Web of Divine Relationships within which the purpose of (our) being has already been sown. So that anything working to interfere with this realization is, at best, delaying its revelation...

Topics covered: Though we are not usually aware of it, we live within a field of forces that is perfectly organized; Your hope rests in being the willing recipient of the revelations about yourself that are always being given; We are not here just to serve nature. We are created to serve a greater good; When you are complaining about your life, you are participating in the futile attempt to bring order...

Topics Covered: God enters as self-love exits; You cannot separate useless suffering from the level of consciousness that produces that same suffering; When the real truth about suffering is revealed, most people run from it; Why else would we try to escape our suffering unless we believed that there was a way to do it?; Resistance to pain is not the same as the pain being resisted...

Student Talks: 1/8/2021 - Key Lesson: Into what do we gaze when looking through a telescope or microscope... other than into the yet discovered depths of our own mind? For whatever world we explore -- inwardly or outwardly -- what is it we uncover there... other than a corresponding knowledge of it; and, if this is true...