Real self-independence is the fruit of an awakened inner life. And just as fruit on a tree must develop into fullness following a certain order of natural events, so too is there a natural order of self-realizations that lead up to winning your own life and living it as you please. Every step along the way to this higher independent life is both the challenge and the reward. The challenge is...

The more we practice quietly stepping outside that rushing stream of thoughts about ourselves, the more we realize our True Self as being something altogether unthinkable; for the undreamed power of a silent mind is this: Since it never sinks itself into useless considerations of the painful kind, it has no need to be rescued from its own troubled creations!...

Without something to defend, there can be no attacker. And without an attacker, there is nothing to defend. To see the lower nature in us that doesn't know it is both sides of this equation is to become conscious of the "intimate enemy." To see this as the fact that it is...is the same as beginning to die to yourself.

Remastered Classic Talk: 11/25/15 - 

Part 1: If it is our wish to touch what is whole, to be touched by what is holy... then we must stop "reaching" (for it) and start being the seeing that is already the whole of us.

Part 2: We cannot "make" things whole any more than the moon makes itself full by its own light. Rather our work is to serve as a witness to life's ceaseless, concurrent appearance of fullness and emptiness and, by so doing, to unite (within us) the awareness of Timeless consciousness with the experience of its own creations living in time.

There is no flood, no raging waters to be crossed in a time to come. There is only the movement of life now. And when we neither halt nor strain in the face of what we are called to meet there, what we will discover there is that His will is the Way, and that it will carry us to that supreme realization...if we will only agree to see it is so.

Student Talks: 01/09/2026 - Revelation is not a product of time, rather (it is) the sudden appearance of an impersonal, timeless awareness within us. These “ah-ha” moments do not provide intellectual answers; rather they provide, by grace, a glimpse of a higher order of awareness whose peace is inseparable the Divine intelligence it permeates.

Topics covered:  Within each moment is that which understands the purpose of its creation; The purpose of real contemplation is to give an individual, according to their willingness, an ephiany, which is a simultaneous glimpse of the opposites, revealing a wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts; Desperation is born of feeling oneself as separate and apart from life.

Remastered Classic Talk: 01/20/16 - The psychological weight of any pressing moment is the same as whatever level of importance is assigned to it by an unconscious part of us; this lower level of self looks for any situation where it can add "a cubit to its stature" by first imagining some unmanageable burden into existence so that then... it can feel itself struggling to carry its own impossible load!

Classroom Talk: 01/19/2025 - Awakening is the (graduated) process of negating all forms of identification; (it is) the realization that no matter how real the feel of any familiar sense of self - for its pleasure, or pain - nevertheless: no sensation does a "self" make, any more than a wave on the sea creates the sea from out of which it rises, and must return.

Topics covered:  Each of us has three different "bodies": a physical body, an intellectual body, and an emotional body. These three bodies are presently disconnected from each other; The physical, intellectual and emotional bodies are intended to work in concert, but they are almost always in conflict with one another; There exists a higher body altogether that is always present, but we are not present to its influence.

It's not the unwanted moment that limits our possibilities, but rather that we meet it from a limited part of us; where, without our knowing it, an unconscious nature has already decided not just the meaning of that event, but what we can -- or cannot -- do about it; where our choices in each moment are predetermined by our conditioned reaction to it.