Suffering

Topics covered: Wherever anything is, according to its nature and what that relationship is, it is always exactly where it needs to be to receive exactly what it needs to receive; We want to be free because it’s too painful to be where we are. Our suffering proves to us that we don’t want to suffer; We are always exactly where we need to be in order to fulfill the purpose we have been placed here for; What we are tempted by in all instances, with no exception...

Classroom Talk: 10/1/2023 - The real reason life feels like it's so full of hard choices that we have to make is because, in our spiritual sleep -- and in the dreams we dream therein -- we stand between a self-created "rock and a hard place": a perpetual captive of the unconscious conflict born of struggling -- in vain -- to protect what we first imagined we must have to be free...from its unseen opposite: an equally imagined fear... that we might lose it.

Classroom Talk: 8/20/2023 - Having no real direction of its own in this life... a wandering mind is incapable of recognizing the difference between finding the promise of (another) false purpose to live for, and the pit into which it falls... as it's tempted to reach for the treasure it imagines it has found there.

Classroom Talk: 12/11/2022 - Part 1: There is no solving the mystery of ourselves without having first solved the mystery of (our) pain... which is why so few become self realized, let alone set free. Part 2: The higher purpose of suffering is to ground us in the Existence and Presence of an altogether higher order of (our own) being... where neither passing time, nor its pain holds a claim on us.

Classroom Talk: 7/3/2022 - Part 1: Unattended thoughts attract unwanted relationships. Part 2: Identifying with any painful reaction is a form of negative fascination; it is an inverse form of Narcissism where we feel drawn to "stare" at -- to dwell on -- whatever may be that dark thought or feeling we're so sure we don't want to see. Stranger still, the more we resist the...