Death / Dying

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/08/17 - 

Part 1: Humility comes only with our capacity to feel our own nothingness and, at the same time, to feel all that we are given to be.

Part 2: It's impossible to feel real life and to fear it at the same time.

Key Lesson: Most people are so afraid of dying they are unable to see that agreeing to identify with any imagined state of self is itself a form of death unfolding in slow motion.

Topics covered:  Within each moment is that which understands the purpose of its creation; The purpose of real contemplation is to give an individual, according to their willingness, an ephiany, which is a simultaneous glimpse of the opposites, revealing a wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts; Desperation is born of feeling oneself as separate and apart from life.

Student Talks: 10/24/2025 - Calling on anxious thoughts to check the rising tide of some fearful feeling is like trying to stop a landslide by throwing rocks at it! 

Topic: How to Find and Enter the Place of Lasting Peace (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 10/8/25)

Topics covered:  We are not looking for new ideas to understand with the old mind. Rather, we are looking for a new mind that already understands; A moment of beauty is silent because there is no thought involved in it; A mind that is being consumed by itself does not think to itself that it is being eaten alive by its own thoughts.

Student Talks: 8/15/2025 - No condition that our unconscious nature imagines into existence can change, let alone liberate that level of self that, out of fear, finds itself compelled to imagine it…in order to feel secure!

Topics covered:  The only way you will know the whole story of your life is if you participate in the Life that gives your life to you; "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do." -- New Testament. St. Paul was saying that we are involuntarily committed to a will that hurts itself because it cannot see itself. We would not be the involuntary instrument of that will if we knew we were doing it; The nature that reacts to the moment we don't want was there before the moment we didn't want. So what is it really that does not want the moment?

Student Talks: 05/2/2025 - For us, death – even as we “learn to live” in its fearsome shadow – seems to mark the end of all that we have known; a looming “last show” when the theatre will be closed, and the final curtain drawn. But, there is another kind of death; and it is the end of fear: rebirth realized in the voluntary sacrifice, and concurrent death of the “knower”.

Topics covered:  Demands, and the sense of self that come with them, are blind because they mistake the part for the whole, incapable of seeing the bigger picture; Parables and teaching stories are able to communicate truths to us in ways that other means of communication cannot; In the story of the King looking for a new Governor for the Kingdom of Agape, most of the candidates were self-serving motives and full of demands, seeking more power and authority. The one who was selected said, "How can I be useful to you? How can I best serve what it is that you Will for the Kingdom?"

Topics covered:  Our lives are spent in an almost endless conflict with everyone and everything that we believe to be the cause of our pain and negativity; We pretend to be someone because we do not know who we really are; Discovering who you really are comes with the cost of discovering all that you are NOT.

Topic: Take the Deep and Mysterious Journey that Leads to an Awakened Mind (Classroom Talk 11/20/24)