Identity

Life does not come at us from the outside in, even though that is the way we've always seen it. Once we understand this, we'll see the mistake we've been making all along about the true meaning of strength. Currently, we have a list of things we want to overcome: our past; our failure to acquire what we believe we need; a pressing world that has it in for us. We've identified these...

When you look at a flower in springtime, standing there with its beautiful petals and leaves, can you understand that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you behold and say, "Isn't that beautiful?" You could never experience the radiance of the flower or utter those words if it...

Classroom Talk: 9/11/2024 - For anyone with ears to hear, there is but one question and one answer: will we wait patiently for a single moment of relationship with what is eternal and real? Where - by the ineffable touch of something as unknowable as it is timeless - all the moments of our life - past, present, and future - are forever changed? Otherwise, we waste the precious few moments of our life chasing the pleasure of an imagined time to come that recedes from our grasp in the same instant that we reach for it.

Classroom Talk: 8/14/2024 - There is only one requirement if our wish is to "boldly go where no one has gone before"...and that is to realize that not only are we the explorer, but the new frontier is either found within us, or not at all.

Topic: The Unimaginable Cause of Stress, Fear, and Other Unwanted Moments (Classroom Talk 8/23/23)

Topics covered: Our lives are currently predicated on dealing what is unreal, the pursuit for answers to suffering that is blamed on outside conditions that seem to be responsible for the suffering but in reality are not; Every image that comes into your mind to lend you a sense of security also comes with a second force built into it that will prove it is unreal; A false sense of self, a false identity...

Classroom Talk: 8/23/2023 - The majority of would-be aspirants believe the "heaven" they imagine is the same as being in the presence of an unimaginable level of Self. And when -- as it must happen -- they are "rudely" awakened from their dreams, they do what comes naturally: they go back to sleep, hoping to find the comfort of another new shelter, in yet another make-believe world.

Topic: Live Every Moment of Life As If It's for the First Time (Classroom Talk 9/28/22)

Topics covered: What is the point of an experience if it carries us right back to where we started?; What is the point of experience if not to learn and grow inwardly through the experience?; You cannot separate how you experience any given moment from the corresponding sense of yourself in that same moment; We are presently always giving ourselves a familiar sense of ourselves moment to moment...

Classroom Talk: 9/28/2022 - Any lingering form of painful psychological resistance to some unwanted experience of life is the unconscious rejection of spiritual atonement.

Student Talks: 5/6/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1: Until we can see that unconscious identification sits at the root of all useless suffering nothing real can change for us -- let alone within us -- save for what we're moved to imagine -- and then identify with -- as the next new solution to our pain. Part 2: False 'I' is a disease. Real I is the healing. Awakening is the prescription...