Demands

We all know what it's like to find ourselves unhappy and in conflict with someone who just isn't giving us what we want or need from him or her. Whenever this happens, we usually find fault with these people, judge them as being inadequate, and then blame them for the negativity we now feel toward them. But how many of us are awake enough to offer these same people..."

What many of us have yet to understand is that dark, negative reactions to unwanted events do nothing to cure them. In fact, these painful impulses have just the opposite effect. They actually "cement" things -- fixing both themselves and the false sense of self through which they then are empowered to run their unhappy course.

Topics covered: All that glitters isn't gold; The source of our unhappiness; We're all in training; Relationships is Self; Relationships are the ground of revelation; The woo hoo and the boo hoo stages; We are intended to reveal the truth of ourselves; Expectations and demands are limitations; We develop unconscious mechanical patterns; Real love illuminates...

Remastered Classic Talk: 2/22/17 - There is likely nothing more painfully mistaken -- no greater impediment to the realization of our freedom than the feeling that we are somehow entitled to it; we are entitled to nothing, and yet -- even in this world of spellbound souls who can only dream of being free -- we may have anything for which we're willing to make the appropriate payment.

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: Dying to the False “Doer" (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 9/10/25)

Topic: The Secret Path to the Summit of Ourselves (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 8/27/25)

Student Talks: 3/14/2025 - We can't change others – or, for that matter, the purpose of any given moment as it unfolds – but we can work to place one less demand on both. Only in this action can we hope to find the freedom for which we seek, because the only thing that imprisons us – in the end – is our resistance to whatever runs against our deeply seated demands.

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/02/16 - It makes no difference to whom, or at what we point the finger of pain as the figure to blame for our suffering, because until we are aware of our own hand in these same unwanted moments... nothing can change.

Classroom Talk: 10/23/2024 - No moment is painful in and of itself; any conflict, or suffering ascribed to it is a dark creation of our own unconscious, negative assessment of it.

Topics covered: Give people something to be against in the name of the greater good, and they will not notice that they are actually against the greater good; Integrity is relationship with a Conscience that does not belong to any one single individual; People fight over the meaning of love, not seeing the contradiction due to being so identified with their position; Have you ever noticed that no matter how many things you seem to reconcile...