Captivity

Student Talks: 06/26/2026 - To identify with any experience of life, no matter how whole it makes us feel in that moment must – at some point – reveal that the “experiencer” of that moment is, in fact, apart from it.

Key Lesson: Every moment is a marriage made in heaven to which you've been invited, so why stand outside the door? To enter you need only make a gift of yourself.

Topics covered:  The thinker can't escape its own thought. It is impossible. And yet we spend most of our lives trying to do just that; Two people arguing with each other each believe that they know what reality is. But there cannot be two different realities. There is only one reality; There are I's that are trained in the art of combat, and there are I's that are trained in the art of compromise. Each I is seamlessly handed off to another I. "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch."

Topics covered: We go looking for a way to save ourselves from a nature that creates the very thing that we suffer over; We are intended to live within the immensity of God's life. We are drawn to that immensity because everything else pales in comparison; Something within us is terrified of disappearing, of not being able to find itself in passing time.

Remastered Classic Talk: 2/8/17 - 

Part 1: This moment -- now -- is the timeless ground, seed, and fulfillment of all that is possible for us to be; to discover its riches is the first step in realizing, and then reclaiming our True Self.

Part 2: Wanting to be anything other than aware of what creation is ceaselessly showing you about yourself is wasting what Life itself wants for you: a chance to realize, and become as one with a new and higher level of consciousness attainable in no other way.

The end of suffering is not found in the pursuit of freedom from suffering, but in realizing the divided nature of desire that imagines and identifies with a pain-free time or a place to come, only to imprison itself in a fear it may lose the heaven it has imagined.

Topic: How to Ask For and Receive Perfect Freedom (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 10/29/25)

Topics covered:  When I am caught up in some conflict in my life, I unconsciously turn to the nature responsible for that conflict to end it, but it can't do it; "The way the wise man became wise is that he stopped answering his own questions." -Vernon Howard; The answer I come up with to address a problem may temporarily resolve it or give me a way to navigate around it, but I keep coming back to the same problems, which means the consciousness that created them never changed.

Remastered Classic Talk: 8/3/16 - Authentic spiritual teachings are designed to do two things at once: first, to help us remember that our true nature -- Real "I" -- is an unconditional strength born of an unconditional love. But, the second part of this teaching -- equal in every way to the first, and why the vast majority of aspirants reject true interior teachings -- is as follows: we must also agree to see where some form of weakness...

Remastered Classic Talk: 06/08/16 - The repetition of patterns, even painful ones, is a form of safety to a mind that prefers to remain asleep to itself... because in the continuation of the known it finds a fitful kind of rest, even as it talks to itself about how much it hates being stuck in a rut!

It's a great mistake to believe that negative imagination needs our involvement to trap us in fearful, conflicted, or otherwise angry states of self. The truth is just the opposite: our most familiar -- and often dominant -- sense of 'I' is shaped by the recurrence of these negative states; where our unconscious identification with this dark inner machinery is, in fact, the real source of our sense of captivity.