Freedom

Topics covered: We seek fast relief from our problems. But what we really want is freedom from the consciousness that is the problem-maker; Get tired of your own explanations for the pain that you are in; The only thing that troubles you about other people is what you want from them; The solutions that the unconscious nature prescribes are designed to ensure the continuation of the nature that is prescribing those solutions.

Topics covered: The unattended mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat; Your highest aspirations are reflections of your unrealized possibilities; All that we need to know to grow beyond who we are is already a part of our true nature; The seeker undergoes the interior search after he or she negates all of the other exterior seeking; The mind is not interested with getting beyond the mind.

Topics covered: Real freedom is not something that we obtain from the world. Real freedom comes about through understanding our true relationship with the world; Real freedom does not have a beginning or an end. Real freedom is now or never; A thousand imagined freedoms eventually turn into a thousand prison cells. But ultimately it's all illusion and all the same prison cell.

Key Lesson: Every moment is a marriage made in heaven to which you've been invited, so why stand outside the door? To enter you need only make a gift of yourself.

Key Lesson: Starve a fear and feed your freedom. Key Question: How can we be devoured by any thought? Might as well believe that a shadow can consume the light that creates it! Second Key lesson: The more any painful thought or dark feeling asks of you, the less you must give it.

We are only as locked out of the Kingdom of Heaven as we are locked into our many mistaken ideas about it... beginning with the false belief that we already know the true nature of (its) freedom, including what's required of us if we ever hope to win it.

It's a great mistake to believe that negative imagination needs our involvement to trap us in fearful, conflicted, or otherwise angry states of self. The truth is just the opposite: our most familiar -- and often dominant -- sense of 'I' is shaped by the recurrence of these negative states; where our unconscious identification with this dark inner machinery is, in fact, the real source of our sense of captivity.

Where is tomorrow's fear other than in today's imagination? And, if this is true -- and IT IS -- then what to do with our attention in the here and now? Let it be swallowed up in the dark shadow of what "may be"...or hold it in the Light of awareness where no shadow can dwell, let alone its fear?

Only as we run out of ways to explain our pain to ourselves do we come to realize the true source of that suffering; a revelation that includes the shocking fact that whatever keeps giving us the reasons for this pain... is inseparable from its unwanted, yet unabated continuation.