We don't know that we walk around with our mind literally looking at the world around us through our eyes full of darkness. And the darkness that our eyes are full of is imagination and the self that it generates.

Unattended imagination relies on what it imagines in order to bring into existence a simultaneously imagined self. It is the most dangerous force in the world, because anything that challenges that imagined sense of self is an enemy to the consciousness imagined. That's when you have violence and all manner of horrors that human beings do to one another.

There is no light at that level of consciousness. It's a false light. It's a fake light. I call it a Reality-Adjusting Device. It thinks it sees, but what it sees it has given itself to see, and it sees it by the light of imagination that confirms whatever it's saying to itself as being the truth.

What is the actual purpose of the Reality-Adjusting Device? It prohibits us from realizing the teaching moment. It simply appears -- without being summoned -- to wash away, to deflect any moment in which something happens that it tells us is not supposed to happen.

What makes real spiritual work so difficult for us is that this nature just wants to live at all costs -- at our cost. There is nothing it won't do. It will kill, steal, lie, maim. It will do anything in order to keep itself in place, and it always does that through the sleight of hand called the Reality-Adjusting Device, because all it has to do is imagine strongly enough that something is threatening its existence, and then it has the right to do what it does.

That's what you see in the world today. You see a civilization completely possessed by the Reality-Adjusting Device, and unaware to any degree at all of what it's doing to itself, because each self that acts from it believes it is protecting the most important thing in the world... and what's that? What it imagines is true and good and right.

What is true and good and right doesn't need to be imagined. In fact, it can't. That's our problem. We're brought into a world where we're conditioned to start believing that we actually know what is good and right and true, and once you get that notion in your mind, you can't separate anything that challenges that image from the reaction you have to the challenge.

Everything depends on what you do with the teaching moment. I don't know if you've noticed how easily you bat away that split second when conscience appears -- when it's beyond the shadow of a doubt that something is the right thing to do.

It is this moment that produces sight, that produces awareness. Nothing we do can keep awareness, and yet, every moment brings about another kind of consciousness, a repeated appearance of a consciousness that has an awareness that is, in itself, all that's required of a man or a woman to begin the process of being changed from the inside out.