Imagination

Student Talks: 8/25/2023 - Key Lesson: Having no real direction of its own in this life... a wandering mind is incapable of recognizing the difference between finding the promise of (another) false purpose to live for, and the pit into which it falls... as it's tempted to reach for the treasure it imagines it has found there.

Student Talks: 6/17/2022 - Key Lesson: It's the rare dog, indeed, that doesn't dream about -- and then chase after -- a "bone."

Student Talks: 4/8/2022 - Key Lesson: Practicing the Presence -- working to remember the truth of yourself -- doesn't necessarily change the kind of events that come to you; that's not how it works. But, what your inner work does change is for whom -- upon what 'I' -- will these events fall and, accordingly, the purpose they serve.

Student Talks: 5/7/2021 - Key Lesson:You can't heal the pain of the past by talking to yourself about it... any more than you can collect spilled milk, and coax it back into the bottle.

Student Talks: 11/20/2020 - Key Lesson: When it comes to the Great Way that leads to self-liberation -- of entering the Kingdoms above and beyond this temporal realm -- there is no such thing as "getting there." There is only getting the whole of that image, along with its false sense of self, out of the way.

Student Talks: 6/7/2019 - Key Lesson: No image is alive. If the pictures we cling to had the power to satisfy the desire that creates them, then a picture of food would ease our hunger, and painting a smile on the reflection of our face in a mirror would help console our broken heart.

We are not meant to keep our eye on some "tomorrow" from which we blindly borrow the false pleasure of what "might be." Such dreams serve nothing save the sleeping self, an imagined sense of "self" that always realizes, too late, that its "hope in things seen" is the same as tomorrow's sorrow.