What good is it to find a solution, some seeming strength, that doesn't really resolve your problem, but that is just another form of secret self-deception? Outside of its power to help you temporarily feel better about the weakness that just claimed you, what good is the "strength" of being able to endlessly explain yourself to yourself? Of being able to "intelligently" justify some deliberately hurtful act towards another?

No gulf exists between your life and God's life, except for your awareness of yourself. No time, no space exists between you and God's life -- only the level of awareness from which you live determines whether you understand this unity or not. That means the task is not to try to change things in time and space, but to bring yourself back into the moment where the possibility of this relationship already exists, and where your realization of it...

We are created to know ourselves not by what we think about, but to know ourselves within God's ever-present, perfectly changing Life. The challenge for us is that we are habituated to thinking about ourselves and deriving a sensation of ourselves based upon the images that we consider.

Our lives are nothing but a series of invitations, a series of moments in which we run into what we don't know. And in this experience of our own limitations, something good and natural takes place. In its constant stirring and seeking, life feeds back to us the boundaries determined by our present understanding.

When life falls apart, or threatens to come unglued, it seems almost natural to carry around some desperate, stressed, or depressed emotional state. But why cling to something that makes us ache? The answer is surprising, but evident, once we're aware of what's actually taking place within us.

As we're about to discover, the little phrase, "I see myself," describes a single action that has the power to change the heart of whoever is willing to embrace its practice. But, before we examine the exercise, let's take a closer look at what it means to "see ourselves" -- as we are -- especially when someone else has failed to please us.

Why do we limit the impression we have of any given moment? We never limit an impression when we're sitting in front of a nice plate of food. Can't get enough of that! We never limit the impression of the idea of some beautiful place to go where we're going to have a marvelous time. There's no limitation to the impression produced by imagination. We want it with every bit of our being!

Remastered Classic Talk: 12/14/16 - Speculation, speculation: thy true name is doubt, and thy brother is fear.

Everyone can agree that no intelligent, conscious man or woman would ever intentionally hurt him- or herself. No one would choose to ache. Yet the fact remains that all of us do hurt ourselves every day when we harbor self-compromising thoughts and feelings like anger, stress, and resentment. Even at the simplest level, there is no doubt that fear and worry take an immense toll on our health and well-being.

Once something has outlived its usefulness, its purpose for being in existence is no longer needed. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight and then transfers its energy to the tree serves one purpose in the spring and summer and another completely different purpose through the fall and winter. Its form first appears as an agent to help feed the tree and then, as it dies and falls to the earth, the same leaf becomes food for the tree.

Rushing somewhere, through anything, in the hope of finding some imagined peace of mind is like looking for your heart in someone else's body!

When things naturally come to a close in life, our pain isn't so much born of the fact that something now ends, as it is that within this moment of ending, we are forced to meet a certain order of emptiness in us for which we are just not prepared. We are brought face to face with a great void in the center of our heart that we thought had been filled. And then we make this common, but largely unrealized mistake...