Topics covered: Part of your spiritual work is to see that you do not know what your best interests really are; The conditions in life that seem to oppose us have actually appeared in order to help us realize our best interests; A negative reaction looks outside of itself in order figure out what condition or person should be blamed for its pain; The very act of blaming the condition you don't want strengthens the consciousness that created those conditions...

Classroom Talk: 2/28/2024 - The unwanted moments that move in-and-out of our lives are like shadows that pass through a forest on a sunny day; they do not come as some blind force set against our best interests; rather, they come to help us realize what our best interests actually are.

Topics covered: The real secret of letting go is to discover for yourself that there is a completely different order of understanding in which there is necessary practical struggle, without the useless struggle of trying of bringing an end to your pain; The world believes that it is natural to worry. There is another order of being that does not have in it any lingering negative states like worry...

Classroom Talk: 2/21/2024 - Spiritually speaking, we have but one problem: we are unable to see that the source of our conflict with life -- including the suffering it induces -- is inseparable from an unseen false belief, as follows: unless we keep struggling with unwanted moments, we'll never reach, let alone realize a time in our life... when we can finally rest from our struggles!

Topics covered: To say that these are unprecedented times is to forget the fact that human consciousness repeats itself over and over again, which means that the world has been in its current state many times before; Notice that whenever you are thinking about someone that bothers you, you are at war with that person; Whenever you struggle against the clock, in a rush to get somewhere and get things done, you are at war with time...

Classroom Talk: 11/1/2023 - When it comes to being in conflict with one another -- at whatever level or scale in which that painful relationship plays itself out -- each of us is responsible for what is happening to both of us.

Topics covered: There is no such thing as the winning side of an argument, because the reason we argue with others is that we are in distress; The mind complains, "You are giving me an experience of myself that I don't like." And so we argue because that part of us is sure that we must change others in order to change our present experience. But our experience of life is nothing but the experience of ourselves.

Classroom Talk: 4/19/2023 - The less we try to "teach" others about their shortcomings, the more insight we gain into our own.

Topics covered: The reason that life has stopped being precious to us is because we live in constant judgment of everyone and everything; When you really want to understand something, you don't try to understand it with thought only; Our lives are presently shaped by incessant thinking and judgment, which is why our lives are misshapen; Have you ever found freedom from...

Classroom Talk: 9/7/2022 - Nothing makes us more common, more like all those we constantly judge, than being identified with a false sense of self that would have us believe that -- by some "act of God" -- we're so much better than all we see.

Topics covered: Do our daily struggles with life serve us, or do we serve our daily struggles? The answer is that, presently, we serve our daily struggles; The individual components in nature often struggle against each other naturally in order to perfect nature as a whole; When something happens that we do not want, we typically struggle against the condition that seems to be against us.

Classroom Talk: 6/1/2022 - Trying to assess, and then assign blame to the stress that exists between you and whatever you may be struggling with in life... is like trying to judge which side of the rope in a tug-of-war is to be blamed for the tension (in it).