Watchfulness

Remastered Classic Talk: 7/22/15 - To identify with even the brightest star is to lose sight of the boundless heavens within which it shines... without whose vast tracts of darkness would no celestial light be seen.

Student Talks: 06/12/2026 - Don’t look back, nor ahead. Peace can’t be made, let alone seen with eyes blinded by time. Patience and conscious suffering travel in unseen lockstep, together…or not at all. Only the foolish look for one, and away from the other.

Topics covered:  "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." -- Ecclesiastes, Old Testament; Any sort of development requires a certain amount of voluntary suffering. The path of development requires that you meet limitations; We will go through great pains to make sure that we get what we want. But there is another kind of pain that we don't usually want: seeing the truth of our present nature.

Remastered Classic Talk: 5/24/17 - Constant inner dialogue -- that infernal internal conversation running through your head -- is the fear-driven manifestation of a lower nature that first imagines a threat of some kind, and that then can't stop talking to itself about how to protect itself from its own dark dream.

Topic: Stop Being a Slave to the "Wave" (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 4/15/26)

Student Talks: 01/02/2026 - We do not become prisoners because we fail to escape some painful pattern. We become prisoners because we imagine there is a “someone” inside the pattern who must escape it. In truth, the sense of self that feels trapped is a creation of an unconscious nature struggling to escape the experience of itself. Once realized that the suffering inherent in this conflict is not yours…it no longer needs to be transcended; it's released without effort because it simply has no one left to belong to.

Student Talks: 12/26/2025 - Awakening is the sudden, and often quite shocking realization that what we had taken to be the whole of our life…isn’t, any more than you can see the whole of a starry night through a skylight. 

Student Talks: 05/2/2025 - For us, death – even as we “learn to live” in its fearsome shadow – seems to mark the end of all that we have known; a looming “last show” when the theatre will be closed, and the final curtain drawn. But, there is another kind of death; and it is the end of fear: rebirth realized in the voluntary sacrifice, and concurrent death of the “knower”.

The sure way to guarantee that those painful voices in your head will continue to disturb you... is to keep listening to what they have to say about your life!

Topics covered:  What is success? Presently, winning approval is connected to the idea of being a successful human being. That is not success at all. Our ideas of what it means to be successful have destroyed us; True success is to exit each moment with a completely new understanding of yourself; An instant of resistance and limitation is not a punishment, but a pathway to higher understanding

Student Talks: 6/2/2023 - Key Lesson: Part 1: Realize the amount of pain in your impatience, and in that revelation you will also know the extent to which you're deceived about who you are, and the true purpose of (your) life. Part 2: The vast majority of humanity views the idea of spiritual rebirth as a prize to be claimed: some sort of special possession, like winning a tropical island in a high-stakes lottery.

Topics covered: "I am" when I can see; "We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them." -- Simone Weil; Everything outside of us seems separate because we presently we through eyes that either want or don't want what they see; "The flapping of the wings of a butterfly can be felt on the other side of the world." -- Chinese Proverb