Expectations are so common to our sense of self and its well-being that we barely even realize we have them until we run into something that dashes them.

Surely we've known certain "perfect" moments in our lives. But who hasn't been in the middle of a dream vacation, without a care in the world, when--kaboom! In spite of the abundance around us, we're suddenly negative, deeply distressed simply because something or someone fails to please us according to our expectations! Or how about those moments when--regardless of how many of our friends...

There is one essential reason why there is so much constant heartache and war on this earth, and why conflict has continued as it has down through the ages. The answer may surprise you. We do not understand our own pain -- our suffering. Six-and-a-half billion human beings live in ignorance of their pain. But this is not to say that we live pain-free. In fact, without exception, human beings...

In days now thought distant to us but perhaps not as far as one would imagine, the queen of a great country said to her daughter, "Constance, come here and sit down next to me. Even though you are still but a child, you are now old enough to receive the gift I have been holding for you since the day you were born." Constance met her glance with a big open grin that fairly shouted, "Tell me mo...

Are failures in life inevitable? Does the Higher Power, once attained, see to it that we only succeed? Try to understand the difference between living from something within yourself, whose nature is contentment itself, and living from those parts of yourself that are forever seeking contentment. For the man or woman who persists with the wish for Truth/God to be first in life, there reall...

There is an endless hole in the heart of most of us; a pit that demands our faithful daily service and that causes us, in our compulsion to fill it, to be pitiless towards those who stand in the way of this endless ambition. Most of us will spend our lives as slaves to this psychic abyss, driven in one form or another to satisfy in ourselves what can only be satisfied by our continuing struggl...

While experience may serve as the path to self-knowledge, still it remains the lesser half of the path to self knowing.

Topics covered: When we try to avoid the consequences of our choices, we believe that the best thing to do is to make more choices that lead to more unwanted consequences; Conflict in consciousness is always a war between what it wants and what it does not want, along with its identification with those desires; You can't have a fear that isn't born out of a desire that you have identified with...

Topics covered: Real power begins to reveal itself when a person starts to realize that there is no need to seek for power as it is imagined; Life presents conditions that prove that the sand castles we have built for ourselves are not real due to how easily they can be washed away; The consciousness is set on ensuring that everything stays in place so that it can continue to look at itself through familiar conditions, and imagine itself as something real and permanent.

Topics covered: The cost of freedom is letting go of the idea that there is a "you" that is going to find freedom in a time to come; It is not life that is hard, but there is something in us that has hardened itself against life; Your mind will never be able to take you past the point that it cannot go, but your mind can understand that fact; Every desire has a corresponding identity attached to it...

Topics covered: The divided state of our consciousness is always struggling in some form of contradiction; Desire itself is a formulation of the opposites; The original definition of the word "Mammon" pertained to an endless desire for possessions; The wreckage of desire are the psychological strings that come attached to any desire that we are not aware of; A negative reaction knows exactly what is the cause of...

Topics covered:A true teaching shows an individual where he or she is complicit in their own unnecessary suffering; A new "body" is necessary in order to move from a lower, limited world into higher, more inclusive world; The acronym "SBARAAHP" in the doctor story stands for "Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place"; If you feel like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place...