A man is walking through his office when his boss walks by and gives him a blank look. The thought pops into the man's mind that his boss is criticizing him or doesn't like him. Now, as he starts to fear this idea -- a negative picture produced by his imagination -- his mind focuses its attention on this disturbing image. And the more he attends to this dark dream, the further into its labyrin...

There was once a family living on a large farm, growing corn crops. As the children grew up and the older ones would leave home, the younger ones would get to take better rooms in the house. One boy lived on the east side of the house until one of his brothers left and he was old enough to get his own room on the west side that looked out onto the corn field. The first night in the new room w...

Meekly submitting to any negative emotion in the hopes it will run its course and leave us alone just invites it to subjugate us again.

Much of our time is spent identifying the so-called cause of our discontented states, and the rest of our time is taken up trying to change our unwanted situations into what we imagine will better suit our pleasure. Of course this description puts a kind of positive spin on what amounts to one's never-ending whirl of wishes, but the facts are that these dreams of a better time to come do not o...

Isn't it true that the minute something happens, there is a reaction that takes place to the event, and the reaction forms as a stimulus by which we then want to figure out how to resolve this pain that we're in, fix the person, or change the condition so that the disturbance we're feeling will go away? This means that in the moment where there is disturbance, we are meeting the disturbance w...

There is no such thing as a shaky situation, so any time you start to tremble, don't look around you for the fault. Look inward. It is the inner-ground you are standing on that is not solid. That seemingly scary condition, whatever it may be, is not the problem. It's your reaction that has you shaking. And that's why, if you'll become conscious of a fearful condition instead of afraid of it,...

Barring those moments when we find ourselves in real physical danger, conditions, of themselves, have absolutely no authority over us. It's true. No event or circumstance has any power to make us feel one way or another. The only command any condition may have over us is that which we unconsciously surrender to it. And what we've given away, we can take back. Insight coupled with action is a...

Look closely for all of the inner gold locked within the wisdom of the following fact. Your extra efforts here will pay off handsomely. If you can't see some thought or feeling as it goes through you, then you don't have the choice whether to be that thought or feeling or not. So, before we can choose not to compromise ourselves, we must first become acutely aware of those thoughts of our...

Reality is very different from our distorted ideas about it. For instance, there are many parts of us that are secretly afraid that should we earnestly reexamine our ideas about life we'd just stir up some things better left alone. However, if we don't stir them up, we'll never find out that these things we're afraid of are nothing more than "ghosts" created by our own minds. The following sto...

When we think about any painful event, be it three minutes or thirty years old, we look at nothing more than a shadow of what once was -- something that is no more! The catch here is that these same thoughts -- these shadows of experiences gone by -- seem to have a life of their own, and in a way they do, for each carries with it a full complementary set of emotional baggage -- the still-smold...

Have you ever limited yourself with what you thought was a power at the time you started it? Sometimes you can do something that takes you twenty years before you begin to suspect that it's a limitation and not a power. You think to yourself, "I'm really going to empower myself by getting an education, because when I have that new education, I'll have the approval I want, I'll feel accepted, a...

To be a human being is to seek. There is a part in us that is incessantly seeking something. We are never not looking. When we start out in life, we have inside of us this longing, this seeking, and we look for something that will answer whatever it is that has come into us that says it needs something in order to complete itself. For example, I'm eighteen years old, and into my mind comes...