Any part of you that wants you to feel bad, angry, or sorry for yourself, including whatever thoughts it may call on to justify why you must ache, is a secret partner of the very pain it resists. This unholy nature exists for one reason only: to ensure that you continue contributing to the suffering it creates, and then sustains with your unconscious consent.

The attempt to "save" ourselves -- to rescue and release the troubled "me" -- without first understanding just who and what this nature is that would save itself from its suffering, is the first real threshold over which the sincere aspirant must pass... since the presumption on the part of the seeker here is that he or she knows what's wrong with their life...

Topic: The Wisdom You Need to Surrender Useless Suffering (2/17/21 Classroom Talk)

Topics Covered: Everything is in the only place it can be in the moment. If we are struggling, then it is us who is in the wrong place; It is not really the same familiar day that we live over and over again. What we are really living over and over again is the familiar content of our own consciousness, which cannot be separated from the experience we have of life...

Classroom Talk: 2/17/2021 - In the end, the only thing we can truly be in charge of… is ourself. And yet, as paradoxical it seems, the cost of true self-command is the same as the conscious surrender of self.

Topic: Transform Any Bitter Struggle with Life Into a Beautiful Lesson in Self-Liberation (11/18/20 Classroom Talk)

Topics Covered: Instead of setting us free, anything that we identify with as being the source of freedom turns out to be a prison; We resist moments because of the perceived threat of losing something, of somehow being made less by the moment; The mind that resists the moment will produce an image of what needs to be done to get through the moment unharmed...

Classroom Talk: 11/18/2020 - Identifying with resistance to any moment the mind points to as a painful problem of some kind... is the only real problem there is in that moment. To see the fact of this -- which is the purpose of all true spiritual teachings -- is the end of looking for any kind of power to protect, or otherwise restore some paradise...

Topics Covered: "Made in the image of God" means that we human beings are the embodiment of all the forces that create and give life to all that exists. These forces are blind, and they have authority over us when we are unaware of their activity; Real beauty is not just in the beautiful object that is seen by the physical eyes, but in the realization that the observer is the observed...

Classroom Talk: 9/27/2020 - Before we can hope to know anything of Divine love - let alone realize an unconditional compassion towards one and all - there's something we must all know but, in truth, don't want to: humanity hurts; everyone suffers. But for those (of us) who see this burden - who would do our part to bring an end to this sorrow...

One of the reasons that you live with the pain that you do is because you don't understand that you don't have to. And the only way you're ever going to shake off that pain -- get off "the pain train" - is if you start to get fighting mad about what is making you the kind of human being that you are. I don't know if you can see it. I hope that you can. As a race of beings, we have become...

Topic: How to Stop Hurting and Start Healing: The End of Useless Suffering (5/10/20 Classroom Talk)