Sense Of Self

Key Lesson: Learn to let your love of exploring new and open spaces replace all of the ever-diminishing pleasures... found in all the old familiar places.

Topics covered:  What we see outside of ourselves as separate objects are connected and never not touching one another. Everything that exists affects everything else; All of creation is in constant labor, because there is never not something being born. Spiritually speaking, we don't generally understand the suffering that is inherent in the labor of birth; Pain is a mistaken love for something small that promises to love you back if you give yourself to it.

Remastered Classic Talk: 5/17/17 - 

Part 1: We are told that life is everlasting -- but see that nothing lasts! We are taught there is no death, and yet we see it everywhere around us! We dwell in the middle of an immense contradiction wherein one part of us feels the possibility of a life eternal, but that sees, and fears -- in the same moment -- only the inevitability of the opposite.

Part 2: The Great and Timeless Teaching -- that which can't be taught -- can only be learned through humility.

Topics covered:  There is something waiting to grow in you that you are responsible for and that requires your attention; There is a difference between a familiar reaction, and our awareness of it; A mirror reflects whatever is before it, no matter what the object is. Neither the mirror nor the object being reflected is aware of each other -- they do not know each other -- but we can be aware of both at the same time.

Remastered Classic Talk: 11/30/16 - The compulsive "need" to be constantly on the move -- ceaselessly occupied, either outwardly -- or inwardly, in some useless consideration -- is how the lower nature fills itself with the nothingness it needs to keep itself from seeing its own emptiness.

Sensation is but an echo -- a shadow cast by the Real. It belongs to life, yet it is not Life itself. Mistaking sensation for Life... is like mistaking a shadow for the sun whose light lends it form, and from which it has been cast.

Remastered Classic Talk: 8/17/16 - Part 1: You can neither control, nor change any anxious thought or emotion that rushes in and sweeps you off of your feet because this "I" -- this sense of yourself suddenly in a struggle to escape a psychological storm -- is itself a part of the squall it now so vigorously resists.

Part 2: Every thought, a blockage. Every emotion, a limitation. Every movement, a hindrance to Thee.

Remastered Classic Talk: 06/01/16 - 

Emergency! Then urgency!
Oh my... such an important me.
In this blindness, it's unkindness
Too late I see... the insensitivity
Of unseen self-captivity.

It is a big mistake to believe that negative imagination requires we be present to its calculated organization in order to imprison us in what feels like some fearful, or angry sense of self; quite the opposite is true. Truth be known, our most familiar, if not dominant sense of "I" is thus manufactured, and our identification with the works of this dark machinery is the unseen source of most of our fear and sorrow.

Student Talks: 11/22/2024 - Key Lesson: Real self-change begins with seeing that Real Life is change itself.

Topic: In Search of a Truth that Reveals and Releases Us from the Prison of Time (Classroom Talk 9/11/24)

Topics covered:  The endless stream of thought produces a ceaseless sense of self, each one as temporary as the thought. The sense of self disappears as soon as the wave that created that sense of self disappears; "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. " -- William Blake; There is a higher order of being that is unchanging, even as everything within it changes.