Enemies

When this sensory mind of ours perceives life, it mistakenly sees things as happening to it from the outside in. How does this error in perception affect us? It means that we perceive life as a series of things coming at us. Everything about us is oriented outwardly, and it appears to us that our lives are being determined from the outside in.

It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.

We each have ideas about who we are, how the events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy. What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don't give us the respect we deserve.

The real adversary in our lives, that proverbial thorn in our side that leaves us aching and angry, and then sends us looking for someone to blame, is not what we have always believed. It is not something "out there." It's something "in here": an intimate enemy.

Remastered Classic Talk: 2/15/17 - 

Part 1: Behind every expectation that we have for how we should be treated by others lurks the inevitable sense of feeling betrayed by them any time they fail to hit their assigned mark. Behind this disappointment in their character or demeanor -- in fact, its partner in this kind of discrimination -- dwells an unseen sense of righteousness based on a false assumption that we are nothing like what we are so easily moved to judge.

Part 2: It's always the right time to discover something new and true about our present level of being, even if, in that same moment, what we uncover seems altogether wrong.

Remastered Classic Talk: 07/13/16 - The false self, ever-pursuing or struggling to protect the dream of its imagined sense of importance, doesn't care who or what it picks a fight with; all that matters to this divided self is that it finds someone or something to be against, as this is how it validates its insatiable need to feel significant; (it is) the absence of love, incapable of humility, compassion, or remorse.

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/23/16 - Being responsible for our negative reactions begins with becoming aware of them. For instance, until we can observe and learn what it means to be consciously passive to our own negative reactions then what else can we do but go on identifying with them and embracing, by default, the false perception that someone or something else is responsible for our pain.

Classroom Talk: 4/3/2024 - When it comes to conflict between us, and any other -- let alone a person we may love -- anytime there's some kind of painful drama being enacted... each of us is responsible for whatever continues to be played out on that stage.

Classroom Talk: 9/9/2020 - The strength of my enemy is no greater than the fear of my weakness.

Classroom Talk: 7/15/2020 - The real reason "why" we should "love our neighbor" as ourselves is only answered as we agree to see – by the Light of the Divine -- that their life is, in fact, the same as our own. It is this Love -- and only this Love -- that frees us from the pain of judging others, as well as the suffering born of judging ourselves.

Classroom Talk: 10/21/2018 - Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of October 29, 2018. Part 1: It may be said one finds freedom from suffering over oneself in direct proportion to one's realization that there is no separate self whose suffering is to be resisted. Part 2: All unconscious suffering is... consensual.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of March 5, 2018. The unconscious "self" that lives in the dark of us has no shape or form of its own... other than the one it creates -- and then identifies with -- as it weighs and measures all that moves in and out of its temporary existence. Its false -- and always alternating sense of superiority and insecurity -- is the unnatural byproduct of an eq...