Topics covered: In order to learn the right lessons and see the right things, you first have to look in the right direction; Being in a negative state cuts a person off from the nourishment freely and naturally given in every moment; Questions about what to do always appear whenever we find ourselves in a pit of some kind. The mind then answers those questions as if it knows the right direction...
Topics Covered: Understanding is the marriage of thought, emotion, and body; Most of the time what we call "love" is secretly nothing but love of self; Love doesn't separate and blame others for their actions. Blame is a dividing action; What we love is what we do with our mind and heart every day; What we love presently is the identity derived from that consciousness considering...
Topics Covered: There must be a new kind of struggle, not with what our consciousness says is the problem, but with the consciousness itself; The world that we see outside of ourselves is a reflection of our consciousness. Whatever appears in the mirror of our consciousness was already there before it was revealed to us; There is no time and distance to cover between ourselves...
Topics covered: Blame is the denial of the manifestation of your nature. Be responsible for your own nature and for its manifestions; It would not occur to you to look for an answer unless there was also a feeling that something is missing; The perfect answer to your pain has been with you all along, but you have not been able to see it because the pain itself is what has been looking...
Topics covered: Our present level of consciousness believes it is natural and wise to not-want what we are experiencing; The sensation of life is not life. Believing that sensation is life is a trap perpetuated by a level of consciousness that pursues sensations that it is already familiar with because it produces a familiar sense of self; You don't need to imagine what it is like to be spiritual, because -- when you remember...
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: When you are afraid and you listen to what that fear tells you to do, then fear is your guide and your god; Until you know what is beyond fear, you will not know what is beyond death, because there is a connection. If you live in fear of death your whole life, then you do not have a life; Human beings are the very source of the thing they say makes them suffer.
Topics covered: New meaning is the same as new understanding is the same as new possibility; You must have patience with your inner work, but it must be a persistent patience; What we trust will lead us to an imagined liberation ends up leading us to the exact opposite; "I was born when all I once feared, I could love." -- Rabia of Basra (713 – 801); A false sense of self imagines and believes in a false sense of security.
Student Talks: 6/4/2021 - Key Lesson: In the end, all forms of psychological suffering can be traced back to a basic single source: the false belief that our unwanted conditions -- whatever they may be -- are greater than our capacity to change our relationship to them.
Topics Covered: Egotism and self-love produces useless suffering; Useless suffering cannot be separated from useless, unseen resistance; The more we resist something, the more we suffer, believing that the resistance to what we want to do or be will somehow liberate us from what we don't want; The more you talk to yourself about why you suffer, the more you suffer...
Student Talks: 4/28/2023 - Key Lesson: Once we realize that living within the limits of the known is the same as the limitation of our spiritual possibilities, there is no recourse other than to depart the safety of all that we have been... in favor of discovering all that we're created to be.