Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of July 21, 2014. Here is the real reason why so very few ever realize a conscious relationship with the Divine: true spiritual union is consummated only through a growing awareness of one's inner poverty; in acknowledging its actual estate, one's soul gradually matures into an ever-deepening humility that -- since 'the beginning' was -- and is -- create...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of June 30, 2014. In remembering the truth of myself, I invite to the forefront of myself a Presence that can neither punish itself nor any other; (it is) a living light that naturally, effortlessly transforms and glorifies whatever it reveals. In self-forgetfulness, I forgo this relationship; instead I receive and agree, by default, to actualize a dark...

I am in a relationship with a man who has not received God as I have. I've tried to share with him my journey, but he rejects my feelings, telling me to shut up about my story of how I have received God. I trust in God that he will go into his heart in his own timing. However where I stand now is that we are to be married soon, and I feel I cannot marry this man who must have hatred and eviln...

By and large, everything we condemn in others is just a way of hiding something similar within ourselves.

Topics covered: What can be new for us if we do nothing but look outside of ourselves in the attempt to confirm the image we have of ourselves?; To be a true "co-creator" simply means that you understand your relationship to the whole. It means that you understand your role within that whole; Most of us don't know that we are actually alive because our attention is fixated outside of ourselves measuring whether or not the moment can serve us...

Topics covered: Give people something to be against in the name of the greater good, and they will not notice that they are actually against the greater good; Integrity is relationship with a Conscience that does not belong to any one single individual; People fight over the meaning of love, not seeing the contradiction due to being so identified with their position; Have you ever noticed that no matter how many things you seem to reconcile...

Topics covered: We cannot have a change in life until we have a change in light. Which means that we need a new kind of understanding that allows us to see each moment and our relationship with it; With thought we try to figure out what to do with moments, figure out whether or not we want them, instead of being present to the moment, which includes all the right instructions about any possible actions to take.

Topics covered: To paraphrase the well-known koan: If a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there wishing it didn't, does it create fear or suffering?; The very struggle to escape the captivity of the consciousness that you are born into is why you remain a captive of that consciousness; The task is not to save yourself. The task is to realize a relationship with a part of you that does not need to be...

It is not our duty to suffer over what will be or won't be -- to live with painful regret or guilt over what was or wasn't. Our sole task is to be responsible for what is -- and to allow this relationship with life to produce what it will. There may or may not be suffering in this order of responsibility but, if there is, it will be transformational as opposed to self-tormenting -- which is th...

When a wave of negative reactions comes along, something in us that believes itself to be apart from the wave, steps in and tries to mitigate or resolve it... and it never works! As long as we run into the wave, try to fight with it, change its direction, or evaporate the ocean, there's only one possibility. What's the possibility? The continuity of conflict. That's the only possibility there is...

Awakening to Real Life occurs in direct proportion to waking up from our own sleeping nature -- a fact which brings us face to face with some of life's oldest and greatest spiritual mysteries. The myth of the phoenix, the riddle of the sphinx, even the story of Christ's birth in a dimly lit stable of barnyard animals... all point to the existence of one nature dwelling in the midst of another...

Since what others may do to us is not in our power to change, we need only concern ourselves with what we do to ourselves, for this is in our power.