Student Talks: 8/20/2021 - Key Lesson: Part 1: A rose doesn't "try" to be beautiful; it never struggles to win one's attention, or to prove its value. Any part of us -- pressing on us to try and make a favorable impression -- of any kind, upon anyone for any reason -- is a form of useless suffering born of trying to escape the fear of being seen as "no one."

The belief that getting anxious or agitated over a problem helps to produce a positive outcome to it is a lot like yelling at a newly lit campfire on a cold night to hurry up and get hotter!

We cannot change what life brings to our door until we learn to change the way in which we answer it.

The belief that getting anxious or agitated over a problem helps to produce a positive outcome to it is a lot like yelling at a newly lit campfire on a cold night to hurry up and get hotter!...

Negative thoughts do not belong to you; they are the trash of disappointed gods who -- being powerless to create a sustainable universe in their own image -- can think of nothing better to do than to hate their own imaginings.

Classroom Talk: 12/28/2025 - We do not become prisoners because we fail to escape some painful pattern. We become prisoners because we imagine there is a “someone” inside the pattern who must escape it. In truth, the sense of self that feels trapped is a creation of an unconscious nature struggling to escape the experience of itself. Once realized that the suffering inherent in this conflict is not yours…it no longer needs to be transcended; it's released without effort because it simply has no one left to belong to.

Key Lesson: Whenever we hurry the only thing that happens "faster" are the regrettable ways we find out, too late, that we have compromised ourselves once again.

Not wanting events to unfold as they do often feels like a measure of control over unwanted moments, but no negative reaction can be the source of a rescuing power any more than running along beneath a dark thundercloud can deliver you out from under its threatening shadow.

We think that what troubles us most in life revolves around those things we can't control, or that we're otherwise unable to possess. But, the real source of what torments us is . . . we don't possess ourselves.

One of the greatest awakenings in this life is to see through the painful illusion that the faster you rush through something -- anything -- the sooner you'll reach a place of peace.

Classroom Talk: 2/6/2019 - Part 1: Before we can have a conscious relationship with what is Timeless, before we can know a "peace that passes all understanding," there must come a series of (conscious) shocks that prove the truth of the following to us: any imagined time, power, or possession to come...

Part 1 Rushing is the pain of trying, in vain, to avoid the awareness of what we are being given in favor of trying to get on to what it is that we want! Part 2 Only the simultaneous awareness of "Yes and No" is capable of producing the sensitive energies needed to receive impressions from the objective world, to know an Intelligence that isn't divided into parts that act against each other.