Gradually I'm beginning to realize that my pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain are the opposites of a single thought. How do I back up and see the whole thing in its entirety, so as to be free from this unconscious duality? The understanding of the operation of the opposites is not an intellectual act. Using reason to try to escape the opposites, to negate them, is just the begi...

By changing the ingredients of our life recipe from false images and negativity to awareness and understanding, we discover a new sweetness in life.

If we are to succeed at taking back authority over our lives, we must persist. After all, we have many years of wrong thinking and negative emotions to see through. As we become more familiar with the wrong powers that have been ruling our lives all along, we discover many disturbing things within. With these new discoveries, it may even feel sometimes as though we're getting worse, not better...

Imagine for a moment what your life might be like if you never again were to pick up a complaining thought or feeling. Think of how your days would flow without carrying the additional weight of those inner voices always telling you, "I'm too tired," or "This is too much for me!" The weight of the world would be replaced by a new sense of freedom. Fresh, new energies would flow. If this is t...

Almost every kind of unhappy feeling is the result of mistaking the partial for the whole. What this means is that when we don't see the whole picture, we are likely to act in a way that is self-defeating. One example of this would be that terrible sinking feeling that comes with learning too late, after you've become upset, that things weren't the way you were so sure they had been. That, in...

As paradoxical as it seems, our journey to reach the undiscovered territory within our own consciousness -- this distant High Country above and beyond thought whose Promised Land lies yet hidden within us -- begins with a strange and often shocking discovery: What needs to be escaped are the constraints of our own conditioned consciousness. In other words, the freedom we long for is from our p...

In the competitive and complex worlds of business and science, imagination is critical to the processes of creativity. It serves a valuable and practical purpose. New developments are created by imagining better ways to improve old technologies. Important developments come in increments. Progress moves ahead one step at a time. But in our inner life, we don't want a continuation of *what has...

Before speaking to someone who intimidates me, I sometimes feel my throat start to close up and my voice choke up with so much tension that I find it hard to speak. I've got to get behind this fear, but I don't know how! One way in which it's possible for us to outgrow the problems that we face is to not let those problems dictate our behavior to us. In this instance, whenever we run into...