Discontentment is a kind of psychic echo. In fact, whatever the unhappiness may be, it is only an inner echo that is "sounding" within us. As difficult as it may be to understand this at the present time, suffering only seems real. It has no real life. How is this possible? Our inner stress, strain, and pain feel real to us, for sure; but then, so do all of the fears we feel in the middle...

Classroom Talk: 3/2/2005 - 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.

Topics covered: In the midst of unwanted moments, remember that real life is bigger than what you don't want; The mind is in a ceaseless rebellion against the perceived authority -- outside of itself -- that it believes is threatening to take away its freedom; You cannot separate a negative reaction from the consciousness that blames something outside of itself for the negativity; The last thing that occurs to us is that we may not know what we believe we do...

Each moment is unique; never to come again... and this includes all of our relationships as they're revealed through the celestial conditions that converge to create them. This is why our one real wish should be -- as best we're able to remember it -- to never rush through any moment of life; otherwise we lose the always new and higher possibilities inherent in its very appearance.

What happens in the moment where life throws something at us, or nothing goes as we had planned? We know what happens. Instant negativity! We become disgruntled. Unhappiness over what is unwanted ruins the day. Why? Because now we're resisting the event, wanting nothing to do with it. And how many possibilities do we have in such moments when we resist life like this? None . . . except to...

There is a story greater than ours, unfolding in each present moment, inviting us to embrace it as our own. Here is a true story to illustrate this idea. Under Paris is one of the largest catacombs in the world -- a hundred square miles of underground passages. Lamps for guided tours light up a small portion, while most of the rest remains in the dark. Two men got it into their heads that they wanted to go into the unexplored region of the catacombs...

Before speaking to someone who intimidates me, I sometimes feel my throat start to close up and my voice choke up with so much tension that I find it hard to speak. I've got to get behind this fear, but I don't know how! One way in which it's possible for us to outgrow the problems that we face is to not let those problems dictate our behavior to us. In this instance...

When those familiar feelings wash over us that we have somehow failed at something, or that we are sure to face defeat should we endeavor to claim some personal higher ground, we can do much better than allow ourselves to be carried away by these dark waves. We can call upon the following five light-filled truths to realize new self-victory. Study these friendly facts until they tell you why t...

On one hand, each of us professes to be concerned with growing and self-developing while, on the other hand, none of us ever wants to be wrong, which is a paralyzing contradiction.

Part of what we have not been able to remember and use in our spiritual work is the fact that everyone around us is just like us. All the people in our lives -- even people walking by us on the street -- are seen by us (in our present way of experiencing life) as being disparate, something different to condemn or condone, to embrace or push away based on what we perceive in them. What we don't...

Classroom Talk: 6/8/2005 - We must never forget that what we are given to do in any difficult moment -- for better or for worse -- begins with some part of us acting out what it has remembered to do. This means that if we ever hope to be consistent and true with what we do in moments of tribulation, then a whole new order of memory must first be established within us.

Almost every kind of unhappy feeling is the result of mistaking the partial for the whole. What this means is that when we don't see the whole picture, we are likely to act in a way that is self-defeating. One example of this would be that terrible sinking feeling that comes with learning too late, after you've become upset, that things weren't the way you were so sure they had been. That, in...