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.

Topic: Make This Your First Action and Be Forever Free (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 6/17/26)

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.

Topic: Hatred Hides in This Unseen Hell (Remastered Classic Talk)(Classroom Talk 7/16/25)

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.

Topics covered:  "You do not see at all, but you think you see. You are identified with every thought that passes by, and the sense of self that comes with it;  Anything that you imagine, and then identify with, has no life in it at all; It is impossible to have a lingering negative reaction unless, in the moment of the reaction, you have met a moment like that before."

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.

Student Talks: 1/24/2025 - Awakening is the (graduated) process of negating all forms of identification; (it is) the realization that no matter how real the feel of any familiar sense of self -- for its pleasure, or pain -- nevertheless: no sensation does a “self” make, any more than a wave on the sea makes the sea from out of which it rises, and must return.

Topic: Transform Any Painful Relationship into a Spiritual Triumph (Classroom Talk 4/3/24)