Watchfulness

We don't usually think to ourselves that we're asleep and that our entire identity is the moment to moment fabrication of what we are reacting to in that instant. Until there is something that rides the waves of these reactions and sees them crest and fall, we will appear and disappear with every last wave. In watching the waves we will not mistake ourselves for being the waves.

Most of us like sitting by a river and watching the water or anything else come downstream and then disappear in the distance. When watching a river, we don't usually focus on one thing in the stream and then resist it as it floats by. We are intended to be the observer of the stream of our interior life in much the same way that we would enjoy watching a river.

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.