Persistence / Adversity

Being in conscious relationship with what is Holy in life is only as possible as we are willing to see, and to be, accordingly, the whole of who and what we are in each moment.

Student Talks: 11/08/2024 - Key Lesson: Persistence – without our awareness of the parts of us that steadily insist there’s no further we can go – is a recipe for frustration; this painful sense of self slowly morphs from simple despair into an unholy cynicism that, in turn, serves to confirm what we see as our own unwanted, but unavoidable conclusion: we’ve no other choice but to give up our wish to transcend whatever limitation we’d been called to outgrow.

Student Talks: 8/16/2024 - Key Lesson: Part 1: Conscious persistence transforms unconscious resistance into Revelation. Part 2: Faith is the awareness of some yet realized higher possibility, and persistence is the act of proving its existence despite the difficulties along the way.

One of the hardest things to understand about the true spiritual path, and the struggles along the Way, is that the inner struggle we fear losing has already been won for us... if we will only (remember to) take our rightful place in the midst of that engagement...

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.

We are not being called to be more than we are, let alone to judge ourselves when we see we have missed the mark; rather, we are here to discover ALL that we are being given, and how - if we dare accept this unimaginable gift - we will see it multiplied a hundredfold.

Student Talks: 12/18/2020 - Key Lesson: Part 1: The Divine journey begins with our gradual awakening to the timeless depth and breadth of our own sleeping consciousness. All that we are, and hope to be already resides therein... waiting to reveal its Light to whoever will dare make the leap into the seeming darkness...

Student Talks: 8/7/2020 - Key Lesson: Here’s why no spiritual “secret” -- in and of itself -- has the power to transform, let alone raise our consciousness in any meaningful way: no self-knowledge, regardless how subtle, can serve its true purpose unless it is accompanied by the one element capable of actualizing it: consistent, persistent self-honesty.

Student Talks: 4/17/2020 - Key Lesson: Conscious persistence perfects those who will suffer through the work it takes to discover that discouragement is a lie. Only then is its deception seen for what it is: a lower level of consciousness that wants us to accept its mediocrity as the only possibility.

Student Talks: 3/15/2019 - Key Lesson: The real reason we so quickly summarily resist or reject the suffering of others is because it reminds us of what we're unable to keep buried and out of sight in our own "backyard."

Student Talks: 3/6/2019 - Key Lesson: Everything works out best -- for each, and all of us -- whenever we agree to put discovering the truth (of ourselves) ahead of some comforting, but imagined idea about a "wonderful" life to come; not only that, the more we prove this action to ourselves, the more...

Student Talks: 2/1/2019 - Key Lesson: It is through one's awareness of imperfection that the Divine reveals the possibility of realizing -- and then manifesting -- its endlessly eternal perfection.