Relationships

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/09/16 - It is virtually impossible to consciously bear the unpleasant manifestation of any other human being until we have awakened to the same manifestation in ourselves, and learned to consciously suffer it. In other words, we can only bear in someone else what we have learned to bear in ourselves... which means none can be truly compassionate until we know what it means to suffer ourselves for the sake of something greater than ourselves.

Unconscious suffering is the negative effect of our (own) incomplete understanding of why life seems to keep giving us moments we don't want. To see the real reason hidden in this reoccurring relationship empowers us to let go of our resistance to life, and to enter into its unseen Divine flow.

Resisting the revelation of any existing limitation of ours... is like fearing the ocean because we never took the time to learn how to swim!

Classroom Talk: 4/3/2024 - When it comes to conflict between us, and any other -- let alone a person we may love -- anytime there's some kind of painful drama being enacted... each of us is responsible for whatever continues to be played out on that stage.

Spiritually speaking, all relationships serve one purpose: self-knowledge. And self-knowledge, in turn, serves a single purpose: discovering the truth of oneself: an inner awakening that serves still a higher purpose: rebirth...the reconciliation, and fulfillment of all relationships.

Classroom Talk: 8/24/2022 - We all want to be free of painful dramas in our life, yet refuse to see how we play a lead role in their daily appearance. Catching ourselves in a play of our own making -- hearing ourselves reiterate old lines even we are getting bored with -- sets the stage for closing the curtain on a show where we keep starring in our own suffering.

Classroom Talk: 7/7/2021 - Seeing the Truth of ourselves -- the first requirement of being set free -- begins with our willingness to be -- as completely as possible -- the whole of that experience even when we'd rather be doing anything else!

Classroom Talk: 11/25/2020 - It takes us less than a second to tell someone, "I love you," but a lifetime or more to learn not just what it really means...but what we must give up -- of ourselves -- in order to be able to do so.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of October 22, 2018. We must persist in finding out that we don't know what we think we do... until the presence of any "knower" within us is seen as being one and the same as the cause of all our useless suffering.