Persistence / Adversity

When we talk about making changes in ourselves, it could be said that it's like climbing a mountain. Why is the mountain a metaphor for spiritual change? There's a certain kind of effort necessary for climbing, isn't there? Also, the mountain represents a higher view. Because as you ascend the mountain, not only does the atmosphere change in terms of becoming more rarified, but every step higher up the mountain produces...

There is one essential reason why there is so much constant heartache and war on this earth, and why conflict has continued as it has down through the ages. The answer may surprise you. We do not understand the nature of our own pain--our suffering. Billions of us live with almost no understanding of how much hurt lies hidden in our hearts and minds; in this case, ignorance is not bliss. In f...

How many times will you have that dreaded feeling that "it's all been for nothing"... even as you've "learned" from your mistakes? You may be growing in the addition of psychological information that you carry and refer to about yourself, with lots of facts why you'll never run into trouble again (you know the drill -- how it always starts with how much you see about what you didn't see before...

The only thing that stands in our way of finding the fearless life is something in us that tells us "I can't." And yet, three of the most powerful words in the English language are: "I can learn." Unlike every other creature on this earth, we are created to be changed, to go through transformations that put us into a new relationship with a different order of life...

The only thing that holds us down is what we don't yet know about ourselves. This insight explains why our ability to learn the truth about ourselves, to increase our level of self understanding, is the same as being empowered to raise our own life level. If we want to grow inwardly, free ourselves from the ties that bind, we must find new ways to learn the truth about ourselves. These higher...

Remastered Classic Talk: 6/7/17 - There are two good things about a constant, strong wind in one's face: first, how resilient one's legs become, the stamina that's developed by walking directly into a gale force. The other good thing is this: when the winds change direction which, by law, they always do -- so that now the wind is at one's back -- one sprints forward with great ease, but it feels as if one is walking.

Remastered Classic Talk: 1/18/17 - Action without knowledge is reckless at best, and is almost always dangerous to everyone involved. Knowledge without action is useless at best, and guarantees that the individual who is "inclined to recline" will remain in the realm of the sleeping intellect.

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.