Just as we know that we're responsible when a thief steals our car because we left it unattended with the keys in the ignition, so should we realize that we have no one else to blame for how bad we feel whenever we permit negative states to steal into our heart and drive off with it!...

Classroom Talk: 3/23/2022 - The spiritual body that alone can transform the pressure of unconscious opposing forces -- that learns to use them for the continued realization of its own innate perfection -- is further developed each time we struggle, as needed, to remember that nothing in this world (or the next) has the right to turn our own attention against us.

Part I: If you knew someone who gazed absentmindedly at the sun until he couldn't see, and who then cried out, "It's an evil sun that has made me blind," you would know that his unhappiness was his own doing. With this in mind, why is it each time we unconsciously look back into some personal moment of pain or sorrow that we cry out, "It isn't fair! Just look at the grief that this hateful...

In difficult moments with others let us remember this truth: it is better to find ourselves lacking the love we need to be kind -- and to quietly suffer this humiliation -- than it is to act from what is unkind by lashing out to blame another as a way of hiding our weakness.

The only thing ever gained by allowing any psychological pain to tell you what to do about itself is... more of the same.

Classroom Talk: 4/15/2020 - The sooner we stop looking for, and finding fault with others, the sooner we will see -- and more urgent will become -- our emerging need to heal ourselves. Where, by the nature of this special work within -- and upon ourselves -- the brighter, gentler will the whole world be.

Stains grow and spread by the law of accretion through attraction, meaning that similar substances are drawn to each other, and bond together as one. To see this law at work -- even in our own coffee cup -- is to see all negative thoughts and feelings for what they are: a source of foulness that, if left to breed in the darkness of an unattended mind, becomes a stain that first soils, and then...

Nature's creations are not conscious of the sacrifice they make for the sake of something greater than themselves; their limitation is that they have no choice in what they serve; our (limitation) is that we choose wrongly.

Hoping to end the fear that accompanies us in so many of the unwanted moments in our life ­without first realizing the unconscious “machinery” that creates it is worse than useless; it’s like blaming the path we’re on for the pain we feel while walking it... when the truth is there’s a stone in our shoe!

Classroom Talk: 3/3/2019 - The "power" we need -- the grace of higher awareness -- to transcend the conflict and stress inherent in a troubled, lower level of consciousness -- is granted in direct proportion to our realization that there's only one true solution that can end its suffering, as well as our own: we must become an impersonal witness of it.

When sitting in judgment of others, look to your own eyes for whatever darkness you see.

Topics Covered: Thought by itself cannot see the whole of anything; When we believe that we know why we are in pain, then there is blame. And the consciousness that blames is convinced that the reason for the pain is somewhere outside of itself; The blaming consciousness believes that it is separate from what disturbs it; The mind that blames has a future in which...