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:  We are not typically aware of the weight of the physical objects that we pick up, just as we are not aware of the weight of the thoughts that we carry; Lying has become second nature to us. For instance, it is a lie to try to manipulate the way that we are perceived by others; A lie is any attempt to force life to line up how you have imagined it should be.

Topics covered:  If the Kingdom of Heaven is within, then there is no distance between you and the Kingdom, and it takes no time to get there. Whatever is keeping you from knowing that must be something that sits outside of the Kingdom; It is impossible to resist "what is" without there being within us some unseen presence of a fixed position that is already in place. There cannot be a struggle with "what is" without the presence of something that is fixed.

Topics covered:  What we call our thinking isn't really us doing the thinking at all. Rather, it is a mechanical mind talking to itself about what each moment means; The nature that reacts mechanically has already concluded what the moment means even before the condition that stirs it to the surface. As we are, we are that reactive nature; Any time life runs counter to expectations, there is instantaneous judgment and resistance.

Topics covered:  A key does not do any good if it stays in your pocket and if you don't put in the lock and turn it. Likewise, if you don't prove true spiritual ideas for yourself, then the ideas can become worse than useless; What is the one thing that never comes to your mind when you find yourself in a negative state?... That you could actually be interested in what you have no interest in. Our interest is usually in what we have to do in order to escape from the negativity; We are not rightly interested in our suffering. We are wrongly interested in what to do about it. What would happen if we could actually be interested in what we usually have no interest in?

Topics covered:  We can clearly see when other people are harming themselves unnecessarily. But what about the harm that we do to ourselves?; All judgment is blind by its nature; We falsely believe that hiding our pain from ourselves is the same as having escaped from its influence.

Remastered Classic Talk: 2/1/17 - 

Part 1: Between a reaction and our response (to it), we must find the will to repose. Without being able to enter into the timeless space between what stirs us, and what it reveals within us, it's likely that what we see as a wise choice (in that moment) will prove itself an action born of some ignorance yet to be realized.

Part 2: Knowledge doesn't exist without the past, while Wisdom has no past.

Topics covered:  You will never be in command of anything that you don't want to understand. A new understanding changes your relationship with what you want to understand; You serve what you do not understand, and you presently do not understand pain; If we knew that we were inwardly at war all the time, then we would be more attentive to each moment that we enter into.