Captivity

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.

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.

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.

Only as we run out of ways to explain our pain to ourselves do we come to realize the true source of that suffering; a revelation that includes the shocking fact that whatever keeps giving us the reasons for this pain... is inseparable from its unwanted, yet unabated continuation.

Classroom Talk: 11/22/2023 - The "importance" of any given moment is inseparable from whatever may be the momentary sense of "self" responsible for lending it that significance. If we are to have any hope of realizing what is actually important in this life -- which is to see through the illusion of a separate self -- then we must be honest enough to admit the following truth: What really makes one moment seem more important than any other...

Classroom Talk: 11/15/2023 - No single substance -- whether physical, mental, or emotional -- creates an addiction, let alone the pain and conflict inherent in its corresponding dependency; rather dependency is the birthplace of all false solutions with which we first become identified, and then become addicted to... in the vain hope that it has the power to release us from a pain we have yet to understand, let alone resolve.

Classroom Talk: 9/20/2023 - To see that "taking thought" leads to naught... is the beginning of the end of all useless solutions.

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.