Hope

There is a simple, self-evident truth, a certain kind of insight that is the ground of self-realization. It is actually the ground of a person's gradual entrance into a new level of being. Using a simple analogy, the more still the waters are in a lake, the truer the reflections from that body of water. If the surface is rippled, you see nothing. If it's just barely rippling, you see just some of what is being reflected from above.

Convinced that the limited world their own thoughts reveal is the only world there is -- and that this world holds the only possibilities there are -- most human beings spend the predominant part of their earthly lives being washed back and forth within the confined space between their past memories and future hopes. And the "reality" of this, their tiny thought world, goes on virtually..."

Topics covered:  Within each moment is that which understands the purpose of its creation; The purpose of real contemplation is to give an individual, according to their willingness, an ephiany, which is a simultaneous glimpse of the opposites, revealing a wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts; Desperation is born of feeling oneself as separate and apart from life.

Student Talks: 8/8/2025 - Given the values of the world in which we live today, it's no small wonder that the first of the beatitudes -- "Blessed are the poor in spirit" -- more often than not proves itself a painful paradox regarding the notion of real wealth; for the truth is -- as Christ taught -- that the less we take ourselves to be, the more we're given to discover all that we are, and forever will be.

Topics covered: Fear tells you what you need to do in order to change the condition, ostensibly so that it will no longer be afraid; Judging yourself for making a mistake seems to prove to you that you are someone who is above those mistakes; Oil and water cannot be mixed together. Neither can freedom and fear. But we somehow believe that obeying fear's commands will eventually lead to freedom; Freedom and fear live in two different worlds.

Topics covered:  "You keep looking in the wrong places for what you are hoping to find when you get there in a time to come; The condition that we see is not responsible for the conflict that we feel; When reality challenges what we have imagined conditions should be, so that we can be who we think we have to be, we fall into conflict and suffering."

Topic: Wake Up and Walk Into the Light at the End of the Tunnel (4/7/19 Classroom Talk)

Topic: Wake Up and Walk Into the Light at the End of the Tunnel (4/7/19 Classroom Talk)

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of April 10, 2018. Part 1: There is but one relationship one can have with the wind-blown events of this world that isn't a part of all the useless, unconscious suffering they create... and that is to be a conscious witness of them.

Classroom Talk: 8/3/2025 - Given the values of the world in which we live today, it's no small wonder that the first of the beatitudes -- "Blessed are the poor in spirit" -- more often than not proves itself a painful paradox regarding the notion of real wealth; for the truth is -- as Christ taught -- that the less we take ourselves to be, the more we're given to discover all that we are, and forever will be.

Classroom Talk: 6/26/2019 Any sense of discouragement that would drag us down into its dark world -- where it feeds on feelings of hopelessness that it lives to create -- appears only when and as it does for a single reason: to keep us from realizing that there is no such thing as failure for anyone who will consciously walk into...