Sacrifice

There are so many things for a person to love, but if we ever want to be what it is that we say we want to be, then we must have one love. It is the extent to which we love -- and the degree to which we make the appropriate sacrifices for that love -- that the very thing we love rewards us with the relationship we long for.

Classroom Talk: 4/2/2023 - There is no reward for love, let alone for being "loving." Either love ITSELF is the reward, or it is not.

Classroom Talk: 2/6/2022 - The more we realize our higher, true role in life is to act as an agent for atoning the appearance of "what is" with "what has been" -- by agreeing to surrender the parts of us that interfere with this reconciliation -- the more we see the beauty of this sacrifice as inseparable from an ineffable peace that comes with no longer being apart from Real Life.

Classroom Talk: 8/1/2021 - Part 1: Whoever doesn't know himself, suffers uselessly for the sake of ignorance. Whoever works to know himself, agrees to suffer for the sake of wisdom. Whoever becomes wise, slays the suffering born of ignorance. And whoever transcends the useless suffering of ignorance shares in the birth and burden of creation, in which can be found...

Any form of suffering or conflict that tells us to look into the past for its "cause" -- or to the future, in the hope of some imagined freedom to come -- isn't just useless, it's wasted.

Classroom Talk: 7/30/2021 - Our greatest gift -- our highest possibility -- may be summarized as follows: not only are we created to give ourselves to what we love, but we are able to discern the difference between an order of Love that sacrifices itself for the sake of something greater than itself, and a kind of love that lives only to give itself what it imagines will make it great.