What we must learn to see -- whenever we start racing around to resolve some problem that we can't stop thinking about -- is that the faster our mind wants us to run after the freedom it imagines eludes it, the more of a captive we become -- held fast in the web of our own conceptual confusion.

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.

Topics covered: In order to realize what awaits us, we must understand the nature that interferes with that realization; It is a misunderstanding to get lost in misunderstanding; As paradoxical as it sounds, life is found within the season of emptiness just as it is found within the season of fullness when everything is in bloom. Everything that is born anew comes out of emptiness.

Topics covered: There cannot be a bridge without awareness of the opposing shore and the need to reach that shore. A bridge connects possibilities; True spiritual lessons come along when you don't really want them. Revelations of the unwanted kind; The resistance of revelation is reincarnation. Revelation of what has been concealed allows a healing to take place; Hell is the endless attempt to rescue yourself.

Topics Covered: If you do not know what initiates the actions you take, then there is no "you" choosing to do anything at all; Why would we limit the impressions that come with an unwanted moment? Why would we limit any impression at all, especially when it is these impressions that ultimately lead (through reactions) to our actions?; Within us there is a door that leads to...

The only person who may be said to be truly free is the one who is able -- interiorly -- to do as he wishes all the time, regardless of his exterior circumstances. All others -- who spend their interior lives doing what they don't want to do in exchange for some fleeting moment of exterior freedom -- are not free, but live out a secret servitude which their suffering betrays.

Topics covered:We get into trouble because we keep putting ourselves in the hands of an unconscious part of us that says, "Now I know what I have been doing wrong"; The first step of going beyond what is false is to recognize it as being false; What makes us so sure that we are right? What we KNOW. Our certainty. This is what sets us against other people and against life itself.

Topics covered: The mind believes that it possess what it imagines. However, to be in imagination is to be separate from what you are thinking about; Humanity is spiritually asleep, and the purpose of a true spiritual school is to show men and women that very fact; The fox blames the trap. The real nature of the trap is the nature of the fox that is identified with what it wants.

Topics Covered: Setting out on the spiritual path is not about achieving a result. We want to place ourselves on a path where there is a never-ending possibility of discovery and realization; At their root all negative states are connected to the fear of death. Not only the death of the physical body, but also the death of a cherished sense of self; An epiphany is the revelation of an understanding...

Part I: The one who sets out to conquer the world is himself already vanquished by the false idea that he can win his freedom apart from doing the interior work of conquering himself. Part II: What makes a person the master of any one thing in life is that he will not be mastered by anything other than the one thing that he loves above all else.

No one succeeds in realizing real freedom who -- when life seems to conspire against this wish -- is turned round by this trouble and starts defending the reasons why he must live as a captive for yet another day.

Wishing for freedom is like wishing on a star: until we learn what it means to personally reach out and help produce that brighter world we envision for ourselves and others, we remain little more than armchair architects -- those who believe that merely dreaming of a world without fear and hatred is the same as building one.