Sense Of Self

Topics covered: Real existence is being rooted in an awareness that doesn't pursue anything because it is already a part of everything; There is no addiction that doesn't begin with a sense of self that feels incomplete; In order to win the approval of others, we have to sell ourselves. Our sense of self is dependent upon exterior conditions; There is no fear without the fear of disappearing, without the fear of losing myself...

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

Student Talks: 7/12/2024 - Key Lesson: Believing that avoiding the experience of an unwanted, or otherwise unknown moment is the same as freedom from the fear of it is like being lost in the African bush, crossing paths with a hungry lion, and hoping that if you just look the other way... it will too!

Student Talks: 1/19/2024 - Key Lesson: The greatest possibility for acquiring the Divine energy required to facilitate the transformation of oneself is found only in the moments of higher awareness that, itself, can only be realized in the same time and place of one's greatest resistance to that moment.

Student Talks: 12/20/2023 - Key Lesson: To everything there is a season, and life's great cycles of expansion and contraction -- of yes and no -- serve no individual save the one who has uncovered the secret of being in the world, but not of it.

Student Talks: 9/15/2023 - Key Lesson: We remain convinced that if we feel like something is missing in our life, then the answer must be to acquire it; this has always been our go-to solution when suffering over some discontent. But as long as our hope for contentment is remanded over to a search for something outside of ourselves, we will never see the fact that this discontent is inseparable from our present level of self...

Student Talks: 9/8/2023 - Key Lesson: Creating, and then identifying with its own negative reactions is one of the ways the "false self" works to hide the truth of its essential nothingness... from itself.

Student Talks: 9/11/2020 - Key Lesson: Whenever we are taken over by a negative state -- and remain identified with our resistance to it -- we may not know it, but in these moments... we are as good as “dead.” Yes, it feels like we’re alive, but this powerful sense of self is really just the presence of our (own) painful resistance to what that...

Student Talks: 7/10/2020 - Key Lesson: The only reason we live in the shadow of any fear or sorrow -- let alone agree to suffer the dark reactions that justify such self-limitation -- is for the absence of a Divine Light that would show us -- if we would only dare step into it -- that the threat behind any unwanted moment is as unreal as...

Student Talks: 9/20/2019 - Key Lesson: There is only one thing that fears seeing ANY fact about ourselves: an imagined sense of self that is frightened by anything that may reveal it as being false.

Student Talks: 4/19/2019 - Key Lesson: Trying to assign blame to the stress between you and the one with whom you are in a struggle... is like trying to judge which side of the rope in a tug-of-war is to be blamed for the tension (in it).