Captivity

The real adversary in our lives, that proverbial thorn in our side that leaves us aching and angry, and then sends us looking for someone to blame, is not what we have always believed. It is not something "out there." It's something "in here": an intimate enemy.

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.

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.

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.

Topics covered: When we try to avoid the consequences of our choices, we believe that the best thing to do is to make more choices that lead to more unwanted consequences; Conflict in consciousness is always a war between what it wants and what it does not want, along with its identification with those desires; You can't have a fear that isn't born out of a desire that you have identified with...

Topics covered: Spiritual parables and symbols are intended to convey celestial principles that words cannot explain; One of the chief deceptions that we fall for is that something is missing from our lives, and that we will be able to acquire it in a time to come. As a result, we don't want anything that gets in the way of that ambition; We spend our lives trying to possess what we perceive to be good, and avoid anything that is judged to be bad.

Topics covered: Without being able to see the big picture, we are lost. And negativity can only see its particular enemy of the moment; The divided consciousness derives a strong identity through resistance and its attending negativity; We have learned to live with unconscious suffering to a large extent, until the pain reaches a level at which it can no longer be denied; Negative identification is the unconscious...

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...