Desire

Topic: The Sure Cure for Painful Stress and Tension (Classroom Talk 7/6/22)

Topics covered: It is not in our power to change WHAT we experience. But it is in our power to change WHO is having the experience; To understand the nature of your experience in each moment is the beginning of changing who is having the experience; Most of us would not even know who we are without having something to be tense about, something to be in conflict over...

Classroom Talk: 7/6/2022 - Part 1: No stress or tension exists outside of the seed of some desire from out of which it grows. Part 2: Everything is better without tension!

Student Talks: 3/18/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1: By wanting are all things not wanted... thus created; much as joy and sorrow, bound as one... are related. Part 2: If you build it, they will come; if you leave it empty... it will be filled.

Topics covered: Every psychological pain is the outcome of a unseen desire having been thwarted; The source of your pain is the disparity between what you desire and what you can't possess; What seems like a new, reconfigured desire always comes in to fill the hole left by an old desire that was not fulfilled; There is really no such thing as a new desire. The only things that seem new are the objects of desire.

Student Talks: 5/28/2021 - Key Lesson: Since no desire can complete itself -- by itself -- through anything it imagines -- its only recourse is to imagine "more of" whatever failed to satisfy it the first time around. This unseen cycle is the mainspring of all forms of addiction, as unconscious desire keeps trying to fill a bucket with...

Topics Covered: There is no such thing as a compulsive pleasure; We are not meant to spend our lives compulsively defending and justifying ourselves. Those things are addictions; Physical hunger and thirst are natural, but being hungry for approval is not natural; Every day we go compulsively looking for what our mind says we need in order to find fulfillment. What we long for...

Student Talks: 4/16/2021 - Key Lesson: All unconscious negative reactions -- with others, events, or with ourselves -- deflect this one crucial revelation: as long as we meet life with any compulsive demand or unseen craving, we can't help but be painfully remanded into the hands of one self-punishing reaction after another...

Topics Covered: Desire presently knows more about us than we know about it. Until that changes we will be the instrument of desire; We presently use thought to restore balance when it seems as if we have been thrown off balance. Laws are created by imbalanced people in an attempt to restore balance according to their idea of it; Nothing that is truly balanced can become imbalanced...

Student Talks: 12/4/2020 - Key Lesson: Part 1: There are as many desire-driven dead-end roads promising to deliver us from our fears as there are fearful thoughts looking for a way to escape the consequences of the unconscious choices they helped to create. Part 2: As long as desire remains unaware of itself... it can only chase its own...

Topics Covered: All psychological fear is an unseen form of exile from the Kingdom of Heaven produced by the presence of an unsuspected form of self-ignorance; The only time we harm ourselves or others is when we are afraid; When does fear appear? Psychological fear appears when a condition -- that we were relying on for our happiness -- starts to change; Who and what we...

Topic: How to Walk Out of the Haunted House of Endless Wants (11/11/20 Classroom Talk)