Topic: To See or Not to See (Classroom Talk 3/27/24)

Classroom Talk: 3/27/2024 - New, true self-knowledge re-orders the world we see because, for one thing, the way we experience each moment of life is inseparable from how we understand it; so that just as a fractured mirror can only reflect back an image that seems shattered, so is it true that a divided mind can't see what is holy.

Classroom Talk: 3/20/2024 - So-called "self-love" is the endless hunger of an unconscious nature for the attention of others... to feed its insatiable appetite to feel as important as it imagines itself to be.

Student Talks: 11/3/2023 - Key Lesson: The ceaseless, anxious search to find our true place in life, including what we should be doing with it, can never lead to a happy ending until we realize -- in real terms -- to "whom" it is our life belongs... and to what end.

Topics covered: Spiritual ideas are worse than useless, unless you apply them in the laboratory of your everyday experience. You cannot fail, if you work; The problem with relying on a bucket-list to make you happy is that the bucket has no bottom; What we see now is only what is in the foreground, so that our experience is only what our attention is on in the foreground. But there could not be a foreground without a background...

Student Talks: 10/13/2023 - Key Lesson: No peace appears outside of, or apart from the disturbance that conceals it, and no disturbance appears outside of, or apart from the peace that reveals it. They are inseparable celestial characters, each surrendering itself to become the other... in a ceaseless, seamless Divine act of creation.

Topics covered: Real peace is beyond imagination because it transcends the self that imagines it; It is a person's ideas about the nature of peace that produce the conditions that are subsequently blamed for taking that imagined peace away; "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man." -- William Blake

Topics covered: Not one thought you have ever had has brought an end to the compulsion to keep thinking; In the unconditional acceptance of the experience of yourself is everything you need; The mind comes into each moment with a predetermined set of demands, comparing the present moment to what it imagines life should be. The mind does that because it feels incomplete...

Topics covered: Dreams of freedom are the very captivity that you are struggling to free yourself from; As your consciousness changes, so does the world that it creates; What is seen does not owe its existence to what is visible. Faith is understanding that what we see is rooted in what is unseen; The real struggle is to stop giving your attention away, because lack of attention produces the painful sense...

Student Talks: 2/24/2023 - Key Lesson: My most contented hours are those filled with emptiness; and I regret -- as comes their appointed time -- having to fill these precious moments with what is little more than the mandatory, but mostly empty business of this world: attending to all of the virtually endless forms that are, at best, shadows of the real... at worst, vanities.

Topics covered: A necessary realization along the upward path is that there are parts of you that do not want you to realize the truth of yourself; Although not really aware of it, the question of "Who am I" sits behind every pursuit, both worldly and spiritually; We are told that we are missing something, believe in the absolute truth of that idea, and then search for what we are told to pursue...

Student Talks: 7/15/2022 - Key Lesson: The problems and pains that plague a divided mind disappear in the same moment as they appear in a mind unified with itself.