Sense Of Self

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 will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

Have you ever noticed how the more negative you get, the more difficult everything about your life becomes, including being able to do the simplest things? It's like suddenly sinking into dark molasses, where not only can't you move, but everything you don't want seems stuck to you!...

What's the first thing that any of us do when trouble comes? The first thing that happens when we get into trouble is that we start thinking. Our little think machine just gets geared up, and it starts to go. And it goes. Now, what is it thinking about? It's thinking about the trouble it's in and it's thinking about ways in which to get out of trouble...

Living within us dwells an order of being that knows, without thinking about it, what is authentically good for us. The problem isn't that this higher level of being--with its natural, calm command--is actually missing just when we need it most. The real problem is that we forget it!

Just as our bodies grow healthy or not, according to what we take into our mouths, so too do we grow into wisdom, strength, or grace according to what we attend to with our mind. Our thoughts, like all energetic life forms, attract to themselves natures like themselves. The thoughts of a fellow not only flock together, but seek and are sought out by similar invisible creatures...

Everything under the sun wants to be loved. Trees reach up for the sunlight that brings them life. Flowers need the touch of the bees that pollinate them. Babies cry out to be nourished and protected. We can state this same celestial principle in different words: Everything in existence seeks what it needs to complete itself... and this includes negative states like anger, resentment...

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.