Negative States

Classroom Talk: 3/28/2003 - Whenever we can remember that all dark thoughts and feelings require our consent to punish us, and that these negative states are, in themselves, literally nothing without the powers we grant them in our forgetfulness, then in this same bright moment of recalling the truth of ourselves are we made the conqueror of what would overcome us!

Classroom Talk: 2/26/2003 - Learn to let go of trying to protect yourself from psychological storms and watch how that tempest (in you) is actually just a "tea-pot" busy brewing up a discontented self.

Classroom Talk: 2/23/2003 - About the only thing that we don't throw onto the fire when finding others at fault is the explosive fact of just how often we have found ourselves guilty of making the exact same mistake!

Classroom Talk: 12/11/2002 - No one ever falls into a dark psychological hole that he didn't help dig!

Classroom Talk: 12/8/2002 - There are two paths through life thought to lead one to a happy Wholeness. The first path is littered with all manner of glittering things that one thinks are needful to complete oneself, while the second path is the way of discovering what one can live without. The former path is always cluttered, and leads only to increased conflict and self-compromise, while the latter path is as simple as it is peaceful in its native innocence.

Classroom Talk: 12/1/2002 - Believing that one of the many quarrelsome and competing parts at work within yourself can show you the way to a peaceful state of being is like hoping that you can find a quiet moment for yourself while walking alongside a brass marching band!

Classroom Talk: 9/15/2002 - Stillness is the backdrop of all that moves, and one's unwavering awareness of this Stillness is the backdrop of the Eternal Opposites at play in ceaseless motion. This means that within one's own awakened state of awareness rests not only the potential to transcend the passages of time, but to live within an un-passing, unsurpassed, and Timeless Peace that might be called the Ground of God.

Classroom Talk: 9/13/2002 - There is no worry so great, no anxious rush for resolution so strong, that these terrible twins cannot be taken up, reduced and returned to their basic nothingness by that mind brought back into its native quietude. Learning to be still is not just the remedy for our self-wrecking states, but proves to be their permanent cure.

Classroom Talk: 9/11/2002 - Part 1: The reason that you give to yourself for the suffering that has come over you is, itself, a secret part of the suffering that overcomes you! Part 2: The only reason that your inner enemies, those dark negative states, have so much say over your life is because you are so willing to stand there and listen!

Classroom Talk: 8/9/2002 - Whenever we are angry or upset with others for their unkindness towards us, the hardest thing to see in such moments is that the person we are about to punish is already in more pain than he or she can bear... and that this ache in their soul is the secret driving force behind their thoughtlessness. To see this suffering of the one before us, before we increase it, is how we learn to consciously bear our own.

Classroom Talk: 7/31/2002 - Part 1: When you can look a worry or anger in the eye and tell it, "There is nothing between us anymore," then you are well on your way to the birth of a new kind of freedom in you that nothing can oppose or ever take away from you! Part 2: Our problems, what amounts to our lives defined by these protracted burdens, become weightless the moment we cease to identify with them...

Classroom Talk: 6/7/2002 - Part 1: Those pointed negative states that jump out of us whenever we rush to blame someone else for our pain are always dead-end streets whose one-way signs deceptively read: This way out! Part 2: In a heated moment of a trial with someone else, instead of struggling in vain to get him or her to see the lesson in it for them, we should learn to ask ourselves, "What is the hidden lesson in this for me?"