We can never hope to be free as long as any part of us struggles with, or suffers over what others are doing, have done, or won't do with their lives. Besides, if we could remain aware of the often-compromised state of our own character, that is, how we still do those things to others that we don't want to do, this awakened conscience would stir in us a new need. Rather than worrying about whether so-and-so gets his comeuppance for being the...
What is this power that can show us the truth behind the mystery of who and what we are - even as it gives us everything we need to know? A few examples from the history of human discovery prove helpful in our inquiry...
Do you find yourself going through your day, running around like some mad human being, trying to juggle the pieces of your life to make them fit into some picture you've imagined? Have you had enough of suffering uselessly over your best attempts to change those daily experiences? Then here's what you need to consider...
When we're negative -- in a "power struggle" with someone over whatever is being contested -- we're reduced to being little more than a puppet. We're literally "strung out" -- momentarily animated -- by unseeing forces in us that can only do one thing: mechanically oppose whatever seems to oppose them.
Useless suffering can't be separated from useless resistance. The more you resist something, the more you suffer, believing that somehow or other your resistance to what you don't want to do (or be) is going to separate you or liberate you from the thing you don't want. Resistance is an unconscious form of attention, and the more attention you give to something you don't want, the more of it you get.
Around and within us reside invisible and powerful laws that rule over reality in all its infinite forms. These forces of instant righteousness, or perfect balance, are always at work. Nothing escapes their imperceptible presence; everything yields to the weight of their judgment. We've all heard the phrase, "What goes around comes around." This principle of karma, the idea that...
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Student Talks: 07/18/2025 - If we’re still talking to ourselves about some past, painful, unwanted moment—justifying, revisiting, or analyzing it—we can be sure the invisible, Divine purpose of that moment was not fulfilled. And this insight, for those with “eyes to see,” reveals a deeper truth: if the lesson remains unrealized, then so does our reason for having incarnated the forces responsible for its revelation. Within this truth lies a still greater one, for those who would be free: under celestial law, such moments must return—either to be repeated, or – in our acceptance of a Divine will that seeks to strengthen our relationship with it – to serve as the ground of spiritual renewal.
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Topics covered: If you don't participate in life, there is no reason to be here; For you presently, so-called "positive" is figuring out how you can escape from the "negative"; You sink into the very negative state that you are trying to reconcile in thought.
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Multi
Format
Remastered Classic Talk: 01/27/16 - The only way it's possible to be punished by some mistaken action on our part... is if we make the second mistake: allowing the same level of self that we followed into that "pit" to condemn and then punish us for the very misstep that it first assured us was the right one to take!
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Topic: Insights into the Nature of Suffering, Surrender, and Other Painfully Misunderstood Ideas (Classroom Talk 10/23/24)
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Topics covered: There is no action that we take that doesn't begin with an impulse born of an unseen set of energies that inhabit us; The mind's analytical interpretation of a disturbance is not the actual reality of that moment of disturbance. The reactions that come out of the mind's analysis are based on illusion; Everything we do to change our experience of moments we don't want comes from an unconscious, mechanical will that does not belong to who you really are.
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