Life gives. Life asks. And when, at last, we are willing to surrender whatever Life may ask of us, excluding nothing -- let alone our most familiar sense of self -- then, for having died to the fear of death we are set free.

Classroom Talk: 10/15/2023 - When the truth is seen, Words, ideas, ambitions, Even lofty aspirations, Are recognized as blindfolds. Why wait to see?

Topics Covered: Seeing is the expression of (our) being; Our quest is to increasingly enter into a world within which a higher intelligence presides; An animal doesn't have selective awareness; Being is intended to be aware of itself; Creation itself is a ceaseless disparity; We don't know what to do with our lives; In a moment of disturbance we look for something known from our past to bring...

Topics covered:  So much of the pain that we have in life is not because of what life present to us. The pain is in our ambition to prove that we are what we have imagined ourselves to be; Real life is a process of discovery. Real discovery is not the enlargement of oneself. Rather, it is the realization that real life is immeasurable; We have a perpetual internal scoreboard that is always measuring how we are doing in the moment. It doesn't want to come out of the moment thinking that it has lost. It wants other people to know that they have lost. It is a set of eyes that measures life instead of meeting it.

Student Talks: 10/20/2023 - Key Lesson: When the truth is seen... Words, ideas, ambitions, even lofty aspirations are recognized as blindfolds. Why wait to see?

There's no such thing as having a bad day, only our (present) inability to see the Good in it...

To see that I AM (life), and that Life itself -- unadorned, unattainable, and unknowable -- is, just as it is -- the Pearl of Great Price, is to be, at once, the wealthiest and the poorest soul on earth, and in heaven...

You and I live from a black and white mentality. That means, we live from a mind that, in its divided state, is entirely the captive of opposites. For us, this idea of good and bad, black and white, means that "I know." I was told what was good. And by the way, how were you told what was good? Here's your parent saying, "Don't you be like that. You told a fib. You white-lied. Oh, hell is coming to you, it is. Hell's coming to you because you never should lie.

Topics Covered: The consciousness that creates separation cannot know immortality; "It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions." -- Vernon Howard; Living from a part of yourself that passes itself off as the whole is the same as living in time; Thought creates the illusion of time along with the self that seeks for completion through possessions found in time...

Topics Covered:Worldly inspiration can be beautiful, but it can only take us so far. Real inspiration is connected to one's realization that worldly ambitions cannot complete us; The older meaning of perfecting oneself was connected to the idea of completing oneself, completing a journey; Seeing the futility of the path of trying to complete ourselves is the same as stepping onto the true path...

The great circle of life is imbued with a unique kind of "gravity" where all that lives is drawn to join itself to a larger body of life.

Topics Covered: There is no real authority outside of your relationship with the Divine; A longing for the Divine is the need to close the distance between yourself and the Divine; It is impossible to complete ourselves as we imagine in the world of passing time; Time turns worldly ambitions into pain. "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you...