True Self-Discovery Begins and Ends Here

Talk Takeaways

There is no condition in your life that isn't perfectly suited to change you for the better.

The way we are now, our reactions are always there before we are.

Inherent in every reaction is "What does this mean?" and "Hurry up and make a choice."

The explanation for the thing is not the actual thing. But for us presently, it is. We find consolation in our explanations.

You cannot change the moment that you are reacting to. But the reaction tells you that you can. It tells you that you are separate from the moment you are reacting to.

Reactions tell you that you can find an alternative to your experience of the condition that is happening by swapping the condition for another condition. In those moments you don't realize that what you are experiencing is yourself.

What does it mean to look at the thing, as opposed to your thoughts about the thing? In many ways, thought is the avoidance of the thing. To look at the thing is to be present to the whole of the moment. There is no "you" and "the thing"; you are "the thing."

Despite being immersed in the same experience, no two people see the same thing. The mind is always focused on a particular part of the experience, the part that is the most familiar to it. We have almost no tolerance for anything beyond what we believe we already know.

The more that you can experience something completely, the less afraid you are of what you are experiencing. Your level of understanding is inseparable from your experience. What is going on inside of us that is preventing us from experiencing the complete impression?

You can know that you are not experiencing the complete moment when you are about to argue with another person or with life itself.

Right now, our experience of life is a byproduct of thought. Thought has nothing new in it.

We imagine what it means to be empty in an attempt to escape from whatever it is that we are filled with. Actual "emptiness" is nothing and everything at the same time. We cannot create, control or sustain what we call "emptiness." Awareness is already perfectly empty.

An alternative to your current condition only exists in imagination. The thinker believes that the condition he or she is thinking about is the condition itself.

The mind believes it is separate from what it resists. But the resistance, and what is being resisted, are one thing. The not-wanting 'I' appears at the same time as the thing it doesn't want.

The thinker turns to thought in order to escape from the current thought that disturbs it. Like talking to yourself in a mirror; you are reacting to your own thoughts.

The thinker and the thought are the same thing. The chooser and the choice are the same thing. You cannot come up with another choice that is not the continuation of the thinker.

The evil you fear is your own conditioned reaction to what you see. "Evil" is not what we have been conditioned to believe it is. Evil is the result of what has been imagined we have to do in order to escape emptiness.

We imagine what is good in order to avoid the complete experience of our own conditioned mind.

Evil is the result of missing the mark. Hitting the mark is seeing the whole, with clarity, and any subsequent right action or non-action is downstream of that awareness.

The more that you know what you need to be free, the more you are dependent upon those conditions.