Whenever we find ourselves running after something -- anything -- to complete us, what is the real nature of this force within us that compels us in this way? We are pushed along in these pursuits by a very subtle, but solid sense of feeling as though we are somehow incomplete.

Our present level of Self -- with its accumulated fears, compulsions, and doubts -- knows only one way to deal with the disturbances that upset its precarious balance. It thinks about them. It calls on the body of its collected past experiences, compares them to its current situation, and then concludes both the nature of the problem and what must be done to "deal" with it...

It seems natural to fear moments we don't want, to avoid any knock at the door of some untimely event. But it's not these moments themselves that we are afraid of: what we fear is our reaction to them, so that we can't see that this experience we don't want... is actually the pain of a negative reaction as it unfolds within us.

Too often it happens that some people lose their interest in self-study. They give up on their inner work because they don't see the immediate results hoped for. If anything, in their growing awareness of what has always been their actual condition, it seems to them that they are now even deeper asleep than ever before...

Have you ever noticed that you get rid of one person in your life, and you get somebody just like it? But you didn't get somebody just like it. You got you again! That's the lesson, isn't it? You should be so tired of pointing your finger at other people...

If I were to leave a single message to the world, it would be quite simple: Your life, with all its unique experiences on this earth, is part of a much greater story. Yes, we can create, manifest pretty much what we will, but we are first and foremost creations ourselves, a vital convergence of celestial and earthly forces that are ceaselessly being expressed in what I call the "Presence moment."

When you look at a flower in springtime, standing there with its beautiful petals and leaves, can you understand that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you behold and say, "Isn't that beautiful?" You could never experience the radiance of the flower or utter those words if it...

We must learn what it means to become unfixed from negative states, and we will when we realize that the sense of self we derive from them is worthless. It's not based on anything real, and it has no permanence because with time all states pass. We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light...

Our work, in terms of reclaiming our right as human beings to be in relationship with what we choose to be in relationship with, begins with being able to see that we suffer because choices are made for us. And it's an unnecessary suffering.

Every day we are attacked by a multitude of pains, so frequent and so familiar we don't even question them. In fact, we accept them as friends, as something to occupy us. These pains can range from petty irritations to the anxiety we feel every time we write a check and see our bank balance decrease, to concerns about our health. One of the major sources of pain involves other people and our relationships with them.

Any person who believes in a passage to heaven as their right for merely professing some belief -- or who asserts he or she is already being one of heaven's bulwarks -- is not just deluded but constitutes a real danger to anyone foolish enough to believe in their assertion of having such privileges.

Have you noticed yet that wherever you go, the thing that you don't want the most seems to know where you are? Seriously. It doesn't just know where you are. The Divine has created the conditions under which a reaction will be stirred and brought into your consciousness so that you can finally realize that running from it doesn't change the reality of it. Only bringing it into the light...