Self-Compromise

Topics covered:  One of the signatures of a small mind is the tendency to make mountains out of molehills; The sky has no reaction to the clouds that pass through it. But unlike the sky that allows everything to move through it, we identify with just about every passing thought; What we suffer over in any unwanted moment is not the event itself; we suffer over our reaction to the event. The reaction tells us that something outside of us is responsible for the negative experience of the moment.

Topics Covered: We are dependent upon any condition that we think will grant us independence. That is a recipe for fear; True independence can be found within the very feeling of impermanence that a part of us fears; Our longing for freedom belongs to another order of consciousness that is already free. To long for something is to want to close the distance between ourselves...

Second force prolongs whatever it is that we resist; The illusion that my identity exists apart from the image it's attached to; There is no 'I' without an opposite; Thoughts are outside of you; The self feels incomplete the moment it imagines what will complete it; Poverty of self; What is incomplete can't bring an end to itself with anything that it will acquire; Being called inward...

Classroom Talk: 11/24/2004 - The higher the Love we would know, the more steep runs its cost. 

Classroom Talk: 9/5/2003 - No animal hides in shame for being itself. No tree bends to the opinion of others. No wind avoids the granite face before it. Only human beings cultivate ways in which to fawn or cower before one another, and all for the sake of winning nothing but a fleeting feeling that for their cunning they have made it through one more day.