When suddenly -- through a sense of similarity -- I'm made present to some positive, uplifting quality outside and within myself, I am happy. I lend myself to it without doubt. But in moments I am introduced to something negative inside myself by an event that I don't want, I have to find a reason for it being there.

We have lost the relationship between what we see with our eyes and the registration of it as an aspect of our own True Nature because we don't see what we see; instead we think about what we see. And when we think about what we see, what we receive is the content of thought that has stored that experience. We don't receive what is real, alive, changing, creative, and forceful.

It isn't this world that threatens or disturbs us. We are dominated by our own thoughts and feelings. We are taken over by our own reactions. This is painful for us because our original nature, our True Self, longs to be free and unencumbered by self-limiting, self-defeating, compulsive thoughts and feelings. The problem is, at our present undeveloped level, we believe that another person...