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...

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...

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.

Classroom Talk: 12/29/2021 - Only as we dare to explore and understand the nature of fear -- including how it projects and protects its prison-like boundaries -- only then will we see its illusion fall apart, and begin to quietly disappear.

Topic: Detect and Drop Useless Thoughts that Are Dragging You Down (12/1/21 Classroom Talk)

Topics Covered: Blame is the same as avoidance of seeing yourself; Every creation is given, every day, what it needs to work; Discovering the truth of yourself is the same as discovering where energy has heretofore been wasted; ATUTS is "Addicted To Useless Thinking Syndrome"; The thing that you are addicted to has power over you only so far as you believe in its power to free you from pain.

Classroom Talk: 12/1/2021 - The more we think about what's wrong with life, with others, or about ourselves, the less we see this self-evident, but simple truth that once realized... helps set us free: the more we think about any disappointment, or the prison of some lingering pain we can't seem to escape, the more we are made a captive of those very same thoughts.

Topic: Bringing Silence to a Noisy Mind that Won't Stop Talking to Itself (10/20/21 Classroom Talk)