Repentance / Atonement

Topics covered:  We always find fault with what captures us instead of finding fault with what got captured. "The fox condemns the trap, not himself." -- William Blake; In the same instant that we identify with what we believe will make us whole, there is fear that we will lose it. Then we set out to protect what we have identified with; How can we be immersed in suffering and yet not know anything about it? We don't question our suffering; we question what we believe is the source of it.

Student Talks: 2/14/2025 - Perfect peace is not found in some time to come; it has never not existed now. We are created to perfectly reflect this truth...and, in so doing, to realize its freedom.

Classroom Talk: 8/7/2024 - No one can be "ready" for a real moment of self-transformation; but we can be awakened, and made aware of its immanent possibility...and then agree, or not, to cooperate with that process.

Student Talks: 11/3/2023 - Key Lesson: The ceaseless, anxious search to find our true place in life, including what we should be doing with it, can never lead to a happy ending until we realize -- in real terms -- to "whom" it is our life belongs... and to what end.

Topics covered: Spiritual ideas are worse than useless, unless you apply them in the laboratory of your everyday experience. You cannot fail, if you work; The problem with relying on a bucket-list to make you happy is that the bucket has no bottom; What we see now is only what is in the foreground, so that our experience is only what our attention is on in the foreground. But there could not be a foreground without a background...

Topic: Start Looking in the Right Direction for Self-Liberation (Classroom Talk 4/13/22)

Topics covered: In order to learn the right lessons and see the right things, you first have to look in the right direction; Being in a negative state cuts a person off from the nourishment freely and naturally given in every moment; Questions about what to do always appear whenever we find ourselves in a pit of some kind. The mind then answers those questions as if it knows the right direction...

Classroom Talk: 4/13/2022 - You are the answer to the question you ask. To have this true self-knowledge -- born of higher self-understanding -- leads to a life without fear, a faith that grows daily, and the patience it requires to perfect your relationship with the Divine.

Topics covered: The world that you are seeking to escape from is a creation of your own consciousness, which means that it cannot be avoided; The real source of conflict is inside the consciousness that blames what it perceives to be outside of itself; What goes around comes around, until there is acceptance of what is being revealed; The reason moments seem to repeat themselves...

Topic: Realize and Release the Useless Suffering of Unconscious Karma (8/9/21 Classroom Talk)

Topics Covered: Egotism and self-love produces useless suffering; Useless suffering cannot be separated from useless, unseen resistance; The more we resist something, the more we suffer, believing that the resistance to what we want to do or be will somehow liberate us from what we don't want; The more you talk to yourself about why you suffer, the more you suffer...

Classroom Talk: 8/4/2021 - There can be no reconciliation with (painful) karma until we enter it understanding the following truth: whatever sacrifice is asked of us to release our suffering serves a higher purpose than can be known by the parts of us thus called to realize them; and to that Divine end -- and for it alone -- do we surrender ourselves to a Timeless Intelligence greater than our own.