Student Talks: 3/10/2023 - Key Lesson: Allowing any part of self to act in such a way as to deny yourself a new awareness of yourself -- whatever its quality -- is the same as refusing your right to realize the limitless depth and breadth of your true Self.

Topics covered: To paraphrase the well-known koan: If a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there wishing it didn't, does it create fear or suffering?; The very struggle to escape the captivity of the consciousness that you are born into is why you remain a captive of that consciousness; The task is not to save yourself. The task is to realize a relationship with a part of you that does not need to be...

Classroom Talk: 3/5/2023 - Allowing any part of self to act in such a way as to deny yourself a new awareness of yourself -- whatever its quality -- is the same as refusing your right to realize the limitless depth and breadth of your true Self.

Imagine for a moment you're driving home from work, or wherever, and that you've just come from having a pretty rough day. As you drive along, your eyes see the road before you, but your mind is in the past. It's very busy re-running all of the day's unpleasant events.

Topic: Escape the Prison Called the "Pain of the Past" (Classroom Talk 8/17/22)

Topics covered: There's only one thing in this life that sits at the center of all of our pain and problems in life, which is that we believe we can save ourselves; Until you understand the illusion that the "you" who suffers over your past is who you really are, nothing will change; We must enter into a new kind of "confrontation" with the part of us that blames everyone and everything else outside of it for the pain...

Classroom Talk: 8/17/2022 - Unconscious identification with any pain from the past -- especially as it involves, or otherwise lends support to some negative perception of oneself -- is a slow-acting poison that, once ingested, soon darkens the soul and leads to its destruction.

Student Talks: 6/17/2022 - Key Lesson: It's the rare dog, indeed, that doesn't dream about -- and then chase after -- a "bone."

Topics covered: Not wanting to see something that is right in front of you is willful ignorance. You have to be willing to see the truth that you don't want to see; There is no such thing as a painful want that is natural; The constant state of "I want" goes before you to make the straight places crooked; When you meet a moment that you don't want, you immediately know what you DO want in...

Classroom Talk: 6/12/2022 - It's the rare dog, indeed, that doesn't dream about -- and then chase after -- a "bone."

Regardless of the assertion of any fearful state that seeks to convince you otherwise (using its painful presence within you as "proof" that the prison you're locked within will stand until the end of time), apply this one great truth: That fear must break down if it doesn't succeed in breaking down your willingness to test its reality. How do you conduct such a test?...

Topics Covered: We are not intended to live within and behind any kind of walls that limit our right to explore all of our celestial possibilities; We unconsciously identify with, and become captive of, self-constructed boundaries that are imagined by our consciousness; Our ideas, beliefs, and opinions are a kind of construction of an unconscious nature that prevents unfettered self-exploration.