Watchfulness

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.

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”.

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.

Student Talks: 5/5/2023 - Key Lesson: The witness to experience is not bound by it, any more than a clear sky can be captured by a passing cloud, or a sound can seize the ear that hears it.

Student Talks: 8/5/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1: It is impossible to be afraid of oneself, and be in command of oneself at the same time. Part 2: Whatever fear seeds in us, it breeds in us.

Student Talks: 4/29/2022 - Key Lesson: It is a distinct stage in the development of the aspirant when -- rather than being easily distracted by some imagined consolation for his pain, or by concluding who is to blame for it -- his first and real preference in that dark moment is to increase his awareness of his condition, and not to find ways around it.

Student Talks: 11/12/2021 - Key Lesson: We must make -- and keep -- a special place within us for what we love; otherwise, our heart becomes an overnight motel filled with the visitations of a thousand fickle lovers... not one of which is capable of loving anything other than itself.

Learning what it means to take a deliberate step back from our reactions to life is the same as learning to walk past those parts of us that want us to believe our only choices in that moment are those presented to us from the content of these reactions.