What we become in this life is very much determined by the kind of "interior" company we keep. Even if this idea of "inner" company is new to you, its reality becomes common sense once we learn to look in the right place. Within ourselves we live in perpetual relationship with our own thoughts and feelings. If it helps you to visualize this insight, think of these psychological forms and force...

I was thinking this afternoon about the man who introduced you to me. What would I say to him now, if we could meet? Did he have any idea what he was doing? Had he given any thought to what was going to happen to me? How the rest of my life, every facet of it, would be shaped by that moment our paths then crossed? Did he understand I would lose everything I treasure because the only constant...

The feeling that everything is right with your life comes in direct proportion to you being for everything that is right in life. When you begin to be for God, for Truth -- before you're for yourself -- the Truth of God's Life will begin to be there before you. This Supreme Nature will start to live inside of you and do something that you've never been able to do for yourself. Which is wh...

Have you ever had appear in your mind the image of someone who hurt you, or run a whole mental movie about something that didn't work out, so that in recalling the event you actually relived the sense of loss? How does such a painful image seem to stay in the mind, especially given the fact of how much we struggle to make it go away? We all know how it feels to try and "fix" such visitations,...

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...

Why is it that we will challenge and then work to change the world's opinions as they concern us, but we never question our own beliefs no matter how much personal pressure, stress and anxiety they may produce? For example, we wouldn't dream of diving for sunken treasure in our bathtub because we know that the best we can hope to find there are a few plastic pearls. And yet we still dive headl...

I know someone who drives me crazy, and I want to help him by sharing the truths I am learning. Without using interfering tactics, how can we help others to come awake to themselves? One of the most difficult aspects of our work is learning to bear the unpleasant manifestations of people around us. But this can also help us grow quickly. If by interfering tactics you mean, "make someone s...

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...

Our task . . . Is to prepare a Vessel to be filled, And not . . . To fill an imagined vessel with what we dream it has been prepared for. The former begins by the light of inner work, fueled by an awakening faith. The latter has its beginning in the darkness of spiritual sleep; its inertia sustained by the machinations of self-centered considerations. The New Vessel is built to ho...

Don't be afraid to let the truth strike you. What does this mean? Whether in simple truths like the ones you're about to read, or in a moment of great personal crisis, don't fear what life is trying to show you about itself and about you. Welcome it! Yes! Don't resist anything that threatens to pull the rug out from under your feet. Welcome it! Why? Try to see the wisdom...

However expressed in us - from the lowest level of sensual life pushed along by pure desire, to that incessant drive to make ourselves special in the eyes of the world, to those loftier ambitions of longing to be an instrument of the creative life, whatever its form, be it lower or higher - it is Love that moves us. It is Love that guides us. It is Love that we seek and find. How? Because it i...