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...

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.

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.

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: 1/18/2019 - Key Lesson: Spiritual patience is a priceless reconciling virtue that's learned, and earned in one way, and in one way only: by awakening to -- and then agreeing to consciously suffer -- what our impatience does to everyone and everything... not just around us, but within us, as well.