The gradual realization that you need never again try to find yourself in your thoughts about yourself is like one day happily realizing that hitting yourself over the head was the cause and not the cure for your daily headaches. To your grateful amazement, you discover that the inner-pounding you so wished would go away finally came to a stop when you stopped pounding. This startling realiz...

Special Insight: Never mind how much there may be to do, or how hard some task appears to be. Get one thing done and then, take that step again. Consciously brush aside any other concerns. Do what's in your power. Refuse to deal with what's not. Exercise and Instruction Have you ever had this experience? You're faced with so many things that have to be done in a timely manner...

If we wish to find peace we must understand something of its life. Here are a few such facts: Peace is the natural radiation of a living Now; it is one with that Light whose life is the eternal present itself, even as the emanations of light and warmth are one with the sun from which they radiate. If our intuition can perceive that the above ideas are based in truth, then we should be naturall...

One maxim of self-development I sense is true is that the way out of any stressful situation is to "go through it." How does this approach apply to reducing stress-producing thought-attacks? Everything depends upon our ability to inwardly discriminate between thoughts and feelings that are for us as opposed to those that are against us. Whenever confronted with an onslaught of internal i...

To be a human being is to seek. There is a part in us that is incessantly seeking something. We are never not looking. When we start out in life, we have inside of us this longing, this seeking, and we look for something that will answer whatever it is that has come into us that says it needs something in order to complete itself. For example, I'm eighteen years old, and into my mind comes...

Psychological suffering is a waste of life. It is pointless, cruel, and above all deceptive. I say deceptive because psychological suffering is an unnecessary pain that we are presently certain is not only necessary, but actually unavoidable . . . a part of real life. Mental and emotional suffering are not a part of real life. You do not have to live with any tormenting thoughts or feelings no...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...