Temptation

Topic: Start Thinking for Yourself and Stop Sinking into Painful Thoughts and Feelings (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 5/27/26)

Student Talks: 02/06/2026 - Giving yourself empty things to do can't fill the emptiness you feel inside, so…risk leaving that space empty; allow it to be filled with something you can't give yourself: freedom from the fear of feeling empty.

Remastered Classic Talk: 11/4/15 - Here is the obvious, but rarely acknowledged reason why we must dig in and do the difficult inner work needed for real self-transformation: if we don't change, we gradually come to wholly embody the very weaknesses whose destructive nature we wish weren't (living) within us. The courage to see the truth of this inevitable outcome gives us the reason, the will and the courage we need to succeed in our quest to regain command over our own heart, mind, and soul.

Student Talks: 07/25/2025 - Our true nature is not discovered by acquiring new knowledge, but by awakening to what has always been present: the light of a living awareness, waiting to be awakened, and realized as being inseparable from one’s True Self.  

Student Talks: 05/30/2025 - It’s not by accident that we reach interim points of mounting resistance in our work to be free, any more than we accidentally meet the challenge of some uncertain, unstable ground that waits to be gained the nearer we come to the summit of a mountain.

Classroom Talk: 11/20/2024 - Whenever we kneel to the temptation of some consoling indulgence, or struggle to acquire a power to protect us from a fear...we yield to, and serve the pleasure of a darkened desire that has promised, once again, to save us from (our) pain.

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.

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.

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.

Topic: Release Yourself from the Circle of Stress, Fear and Sorrow (Classroom Talk 3/2/22)

Classroom Talk: 3/2/2022 - Peace is not the opposite of conflict; it is the absence of it.