Depression / Sadness

Topics covered:  "We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started, And to know that place for the first time." -- T. S. Eliot; A paradox is understood when seemingly irreconcilable opposites are seen as complimentary; One question that we never ask ourselves: "If I do something that I regret, why does it seem like that action was the only choice in that moment?"

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?

There lives nothing real in our past -- regardless of how disappointing or painful it may have been -- that can grab us and make us its captive, any more than dark shadows have the power to keep us from walking into the sunlight.

Topics Covered: Dealing with the effects of aging in our marriage; My husband has rage issues - can he change?; Feeling pain from someone else's dishonesty; My adult son lives with me and is sullen and uncommunicative; Should we treat others the way we wish to be treated; Feeling like I haven't made any progress in my spiritual work; I've slipped into a black hole...

Topics Covered: How do I handle my judgmental feelings about my son; Can I still grow while in a toxic relationship or should I leave; How can one heal and free themselves after a sexual assault; Nothing in me loves the truth anymore; When I’m tired and I listen to a talk I’m suddenly reenergized; How does the universe know what's best for you; I’m resentful and angry...

Classroom Talk: 7/14/2019 - Enlightenment is not an "achievement" because it can never be a static state. (It is) a level of being that sees, effortlessly, that Real Life is secretly a single, beautiful movement incapable of contradicting itself. The more we realize how this timeless celestial truth includes everything that happens to us, the more empowered...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of October 22, 2018. We must persist in finding out that we don't know what we think we do... until the presence of any "knower" within us is seen as being one and the same as the cause of all our useless suffering.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of June 18, 2018. Our unconscious agreement to identify with the pain of any negative state - including the usual (anxious) rush to escape it - is one of the ways our false nature suffers - in vain - to prove (to itself) that whatever "self" it imagines, and then pretends to be is, in fact, real.