No one really wants to talk about it, but the truth is, there is a kind of "evil spell" hanging over each of us and our world as well. In fact, part of this global spell is our denial of its existence. It is called suffering. Everyone does it -- and, like hypnotized captives, everyone believes that their suffering somehow benefits them. That's how the spell works. Why else would anyone punish...

We don't know that we walk around with our mind literally looking at the world around us through our eyes full of darkness. And the darkness that our eyes are full of is imagination and the self that it generates. Unattended imagination relies on what it imagines in order to bring into existence a simultaneously imagined self. It is the most dangerous force in the world, because anything that...

Whenever there is an unconscious inner dialog going on in our heads, we are actually looking in a mirror that we don't know is a mirror. And what we see in our mind's eye talks to us about what we must make ourselves into so that we might finally find rest and be at peace. Freedom from the dark inner dialog begins by seeing that the "self" that is talking to us only exists as long as we...

The depth to which we see something is directly proportionate to the consciousness that is attending to what is being presented in the moment. As we are now our lives are very superficial. But we're meant to be in relationship with life at a much deeper level.

Student Talks: 3/10/2023 - Key Lesson: Allowing any part of self to act in such a way as to deny yourself a new awareness of yourself -- whatever its quality -- is the same as refusing your right to realize the limitless depth and breadth of your true Self.

Topics covered: To paraphrase the well-known koan: If a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there wishing it didn't, does it create fear or suffering?; The very struggle to escape the captivity of the consciousness that you are born into is why you remain a captive of that consciousness; The task is not to save yourself. The task is to realize a relationship with a part of you that does not need to be...

Student Talks: 11/18/2022 - Key Lesson: The past does not give birth to the future, any more than we might think to look for the living in a graveyard.

Topics covered: What we have called our life up until now cannot possibly be the totality of our possibilities; The first person to feel any form of hatred or resentment is the one who holds it, protects it, and projects it; Unconscious choices are made in order to protect what that level of consciousness deems as being valuable; Truth is a pathless land and belongs to another order of being that is already in you...

Student Talks: 3/18/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1: By wanting are all things not wanted... thus created; much as joy and sorrow, bound as one... are related. Part 2: If you build it, they will come; if you leave it empty... it will be filled.

Topics covered: Every psychological pain is the outcome of a unseen desire having been thwarted; The source of your pain is the disparity between what you desire and what you can't possess; What seems like a new, reconfigured desire always comes in to fill the hole left by an old desire that was not fulfilled; There is really no such thing as a new desire. The only things that seem new are the objects of desire.