You can be self-enlightened instead of self-frightened. You have a choice. This discovery that you can always choose in favor of yourself is real excitement. You do not have to accept your present life-level. Life-level is what determines whether you sail through this life or sink in it. At present, it may seem to you as if there are times when you don't have much choice in your own life. I want you to know that this is a lie...

Even if your best efforts - the work to be awake, and attentive to your inner life - feels as if it's failed to produce any real result... nevertheless, persist: one day a Light that is in exact proportion to your labor will flood the soul, filling it with New Life.

Topics covered: Genuine prayer is connected to something you have genuinely seen about yourself. The wrong kind of prayer, the selfish kind, is connected to the avoidance of seeing something true about yourself; Ongoing psychological pain is always the product of having mistaken who you are. "Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind..."

Topics covered: Reality, inner and outer, is a lot bigger than our thoughts about it; We have an innate longing to belong to something greater than ourselves; Thought is the limitation, not the way to transcend limitation. Identification with thought stops exploration and discovery; The greater our resistance to any unwanted moment, the bigger that moment seems...

Topics Covered: Your world around you is determined by the way you perceive it within you. You are meant to be nourished from the inside-out, not the outside-in; You are meant to be a part of the ceaseless stream of life, always being made new; We have to understand that we carry around a pernicious false belief, which is that whatever just happened wasn't supposed to happen...

Topics Covered: The moments in our lives that have been the most valuable have been those that reveal something to us that we had never seen before, where we are suddenly transported into another order of awareness; Everything that we will ever need to know about the spiritual life is right in front of our eyes twenty-four hours per day. There is a level of life that we are a part of...

Classroom Talk: 4/29/2020 - Part 1: Knowledge without spirit is like finding yourself on a cold night with all the wood in the world and not a flame with which to light it. Part 2: Many are the false beliefs that create real pain. For instance, the belief that we can change what happened yesterday by reliving it today is like trying to chase down an echo...