Topics covered:  A key does not do any good if it stays in your pocket and if you don't put in the lock and turn it. Likewise, if you don't prove true spiritual ideas for yourself, then the ideas can become worse than useless; What is the one thing that never comes to your mind when you find yourself in a negative state?... That you could actually be interested in what you have no interest in. Our interest is usually in what we have to do in order to escape from the negativity; We are not rightly interested in our suffering. We are wrongly interested in what to do about it. What would happen if we could actually be interested in what we usually have no interest in?

What we are willing to pay, to give up for the sake of being free all depends on how aware we are of how painful is our sense of captivity...

Buddha, Moses, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Jesus... each who had been walking along their chosen path happened -- at the exact same moment -- to come upon a shady nook nestled in the curve of a beautiful river...

It seems to me that the main reason we suffer, as we do -- over the things we do -- is not because these things, in themselves, have the "power" to punish us, but rather because we forget in these moments that who we really are cannot feel "punished" without having forgotten that God is good.

Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... I am never more blind than when all I see is who or what is to blame for my pain...

Life, in the broadest sense of it, both spiritually and materially, is an expression of an eternal descending and ascending set of forces: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" -- the principle of expansion and contraction, light and darkness, ascending and descending archetype ideas then brought into physical creation.

Just as a ship lost at sea must make a course correction if it hopes to reach a safe harbor, so must the aspirant be willing to be corrected by life for there to be any hope of sighting heaven's shore. And it isn't really so much that life itself corrects us as it is that it serves to reveal us to ourselves. When it does, the choice is ours whether to be self-correcting or deflect the light of revelation that calls for us to change...

Putting our life in God's hands does not mean that we hand Him our wish list for life, but rather that we make His life our wish. When God's will becomes our sole wish in life, then whatever happens to us not only fulfills our wish, but we realize it has always been our wish right from the start.

What would happen to any of us if we knew, without having to take thought, that the universe was set up to help us succeed with becoming fearless because we understand the right attitude to take... no matter what the moment seems to bring?

Whenever we find ourselves identified with some dark stream of thoughts and feelings, as opposed to being quietly aware of their downward-trending presence, we fall -- in that same moment -- into a world filled with unwanted negative states.

Isn't it true that the moment we are disturbed by an event, there is a reaction that takes place within us? That reaction forms as a stimulus we then respond to by trying to figure out how to resolve this pain we're in, fix the person, or change the condition so that the disturbance we're feeling will go away. This means that we are meeting the disturbance with further disturbance, but we don't see that the disturbed is an effect of the disturbance.

Here's a challenging idea: those who don't know their true identity do not know that they don't know who they are. It's a kind of spiritual amnesia produced by having assumed a false identity without knowing it. How is that possible?