Topics covered: Discussion about "The Secret of Letting Go"; Real life doesn't have avoidance in it; Resistance to a condition is the same as identifying with it; No psychological fear exists without negative imagination; When the student is ready, the teacher appears; We can't know something is true unless its character is already residing within us; The only thing that troubles us about othe...

There's only one way to stop being deceived by the empty promises of others -- including those produced from out of your own desires... And that is to know that nothing promised to you -- or by anyone -- has the power to "add one cubit to your stature."...

Part 1 The avoidance of any form of psychological pain -- no matter how cleverly construed, or thoroughly masked -- is not the same as freedom from its suffering. Part 2 Nothing is more empty of higher possibilities than a mind filled with resistance to the revelations of life.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of January 14, 2013. Part 1: Unconscious suffering is a creation of incomplete perception; it is the inevitable painful outcome of having mistaken the partial for the whole. Part 2: Employing self-remembrance, strive to practice Presence; (this) one action is the path of spiritual purification, even as it serves to reveal all of God's Kingdoms presently...

stillness, meditation, prayer, letting go, openness, surrender, trying, effort, strain, ambition, spiritual ambition...

I don't think I have to tell you - but I'll strengthen the idea - that there's nothing in the universe, not one thing, that doesn't have meaning. I can look out the window on a gorgeous Spring day here in Southern Oregon and see all the bounty, the burgeoning green - it has a meaning that words can't give to it but that the experience itself delivers...

Perfection of the opposites can never be achieved through their succession, but demands their simultaneity.

If the sky were empty, birds couldn't fly through it. The only way to know the fullness of the nothingness you fear to be...is to launch yourself into it. Do this enough times and you'll see that stillness binds all things together, even though it touches nothing and that nothing touches it.

Nothing can be fully transcended without having completely experienced its nature; and this includes temptation, whatever its nature. The "saint" is not someone who has never been tempted, but rather the one who -- having come to know its nature so fully -- can no longer be deceived by any of its empty promises... or veiled threats.

We can either spend our time thinking about what we don't have, feeling empty and bitter over some imagined contentment lost... or we can become quietly aware of what we already are and find there, within our Self, what is overflowing, full of Light, and beyond the reach of any dark thought.

Imagination, and the daydreams that it creates, act as a kind of consolation; it seems to compensate for the empty, fearful, and conflict filled world in which we live today; but, in truth, this level of imagination is the cause of our common sorrow... and therefore can never be a part of its solution.

Who can say that the price of winning spiritual freedom is too great to pay, especially when the cost of any alternative -- regardless of the pretty name we give to this compromised estate of ourselves -- ensures that our short time on this world will be spent as a slave to its essentially empty promises.