Topic: Drop These Useless Thoughts and Leap into the Indescribable Life (Classroom Talk 12/14/22)

Topics covered: Spiritually speaking, if you are going to become a new human being, something old has to die; Every desire promises you freedom. But does the fulfillment of a desire ever really deliver the freedom it promised?; To die to oneself does not involve doing something with one's own will. "The Kingdom of Heaven cannot be taken by force."

Classroom Talk: 12/14/2022 - The immediate recognition, and subsequent negation of any useless thoughts serves, on the spot, to negate the pain born of being identified with their unconscious "thinker."

Topics covered: Whatever you deny in life is secretly the denial of revelation of yourself. Resisting the moment kills the possibility of revelation; When you deny/resist something in life, that thing is perceived as being your enemy; Fear does not exist apart from the nature that fears it. Fear is a mutually dependent relationship, in that fear cannot exist without a fearful self...

Student Talks: 2/11/2022 - Key Lesson: The more we realize our higher, true role in life is to act as an agent for atoning the appearance of "what is" with "what has been" -- by agreeing to surrender the parts of us that interfere with this reconciliation -- the more we see the beauty of this sacrifice as inseparable from an ineffable peace that comes with no longer being apart from Real Life.

Topics covered: Use your reactions as a springboard to revelation instead of allowing the reaction to use you; Freedom from a negative reaction cannot come by identifying with the second reaction that counsels us on what we need to do about the first reaction. It is a chain of reactions that cannot escape itself; Reactions unconsciously identified with lead to actions taken by an unconscious self.

Student Talks: 9/10/2021 - Key Lesson: Part 1: Let every disappointment in life be as the lighted wick of a lamp to first illuminate, and then to consume the attachment now revealed. Part 2: The beginning and the end of all true religion is one thing: surrender. Which begs the question: Surrender of what... and to what? The one who finds the answer to these two seemingly separate...

Topics Covered: One of the biggest problems we all have is that we think we already know the answers; Surrender has nothing to do with trying to escape from yourself. True surrender belongs to another order of consciousness; Because we are incomplete we cannot help but treat other people incompletely; When what we have imagined will make us happy does not make us happy...

Student Talks: 7/2/2021 - Key Lesson: Contemplation is sustained attention on a question the heart holds in its keeping, knowing, full well, that the mind -- of itself -- cannot answer. This form of sustained conscious inquiry is the ground of true meditation: it is creation aware of itself.

Student Talks: 6/20/2021 - Key Lesson: You cannot protect yourself from psychological pain or disappointment and hope to court the Divine at the same time. The narrow entrance into the heart of heaven is a movement; (it is) an unknowable accord found only where revelation and letting go converge and merge, and from their union give birth to...

Topics Covered: True ideas interfere with the agenda of what is untrue; We are taught early in our lives that we should know the answer to every question. Otherwise there will be a punishment; We believe that the sooner we can answer the urgent question our mind is asking, the sooner we will be released from the pain of not knowing; The pain is in the question itself because the question...

Topics Covered: You cannot understand your life through the level of consciousness that is the source of confusion; You can't convince a human being that there is something in them that can't wait to hate its life or feel sorry for itself; The one thing that people won't sell is their hope in things seen. It is the hope in things seen that is the source of fear; The false self doesn't exist...