Resistance

How many of us have had moments in our lives where we have tried to escape certain qualities of ourselves by doing different things, only to find ourselves unable to escape the condition, unable to escape our present nature, so that finally the day comes where there's no escaping it, but there's no living with it either? And in the moment, we can no longer resist our own character based on the assumption that we ought not be that kind of human being.

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.

Little by little, the purpose of life for men and women has become directed to one thing: I want to get to the point in my life where there are no more disturbances. The purpose of this life is not to avoid disturbance, or to find a disturbance-free existence! If you examine this, you can see the fact of it for yourself. Are you getting more relaxed in life when it comes to people and problems?

Whatever we try to go around in ourselves guarantees it will come around again, which is why the things we fear in life and about ourselves always tend to reappear. Here's the law that governs this relationship: whatever we resist in life persists as it does because whatever we oppose grows!

Have you ever gone through a crisis of some kind, and after 20 or 30 years of the same lesson coming back, you realize you have been walking along the same dark road? I know that it gets tough sometimes, but those of us who have any love whatsoever for what is true, good, and Divine should be encouraged. Because you have no idea what's on our side, how much is trying to be given to us at all times.

Why do we limit the impression we have of any given moment? We never limit an impression when we're sitting in front of a nice plate of food. Can't get enough of that! We never limit the impression of the idea of some beautiful place to go where we're going to have a marvelous time. There's no limitation to the impression produced by imagination. We want it with every bit of our being!

There are in existence, as part of creation, extraordinary primordial opposites. We know them as darkness and light, expansion and contraction, attraction and resistance. We don't know anything about resistance. What we know is to be ruled by resistance in our lives, instead of recognizing it as being part of a creative force meant for us to develop.

What is it, then, that balances? What is that which allows this nature -- this divided nature, this nature that works in opposites -- what is it that would permit it the peace it seeks? What is it that creates balance in a human being?

There is no consumptive negative state in the consciousness without resistance being the "goo" it grows out of -- something black and dark pulling and pushing on you. And in the moment that dark state starts to swallow you, when you're starting to feel sorry for yourself, or you're trying to figure out what to do about something because you're asleep to yourself, all you know to do is to push back...

We must learn what it means to become unfixed from negative states, and we will when we realize that the sense of self we derive from them is worthless. It's not based on anything real, and it has no permanence because with time all states pass. We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light...

There are parts of our psychic system that reject the shocks -- the lessons needed for our evolution because they imagine they're already flying above the world of troubles. It is this mistaken sense of self that stands between us and true self-transformation. Nothing that resists life can hope to learn from it. Until we can embrace the lessons that ride into our lives on the back of events...

How many of you are short fused? We'll say it in other words. How many of you have virtually no tolerance for anything outside of what you want? On a scale of 1 to 100 degrees, what is your acceptable range relative to meeting moments? Is it something like 2 to 98? Or is more like 78 to 79? That's about it, isn't it? This tiny little bandwidth, and if anything even threatens to...