Dying To Yourself

Long before it's possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves. Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world. Because the way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me.

Any person who believes in a passage to heaven as their right for merely professing some belief -- or who asserts he or she is already being one of heaven's bulwarks -- is not just deluded but constitutes a real danger to anyone foolish enough to believe in their assertion of having such privileges.

To make bread you have to bring a lot of different ingredients together. Each ingredient by itself, or even mixed together, does not make bread. The individual ingredients must have heat applied and be married together in order to create something altogether new that is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Topics covered:  The end of fear is not only possible, it is the purpose of your life to realize the end of it; The worldly kind of success and security that you pursue turn into things that you fear losing; A river is constant, even though it is never the same river. It is the same with real life itself.

Topic: The First Step in Saving Yourself from the Most Painful Illusion on Earth (Classroom Talk 3/13/24)

Student Talks: 8/25/2023 - Key Lesson: Having no real direction of its own in this life... a wandering mind is incapable of recognizing the difference between finding the promise of (another) false purpose to live for, and the pit into which it falls... as it's tempted to reach for the treasure it imagines it has found there.

Topics covered: Between awakening and rebirth there has to be a death. Nothing is born anew that doesn't die to what it was before; Our lives are presently the experience of our own creation; Until we are aware of what dwells in the dark of ourselves, we are subject to whatever that nature does in the absence of that awareness; Imagined security requires an imagined self to keep it in place...

Topic: Drop These Useless Thoughts and Leap into the Indescribable Life (Classroom Talk 12/14/22)

Topics covered: Spiritually speaking, if you are going to become a new human being, something old has to die; Every desire promises you freedom. But does the fulfillment of a desire ever really deliver the freedom it promised?; To die to oneself does not involve doing something with one's own will. "The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be taken by force."

Classroom Talk: 12/14/2022 - The immediate recognition, and subsequent negation of any useless thoughts serves, on the spot, to negate the pain born of being identified with their unconscious "thinker."