No one wins a war that rages on born of fighting with his perceived enemy, but everyone loses who runs in fear of engagement. Victory is assured only to the one who will neither fight nor flee, but who will embrace his foe until there is no one remaining to either win or lose the contested ground.

Part I: We are subjected to the unconscious pain of any negative state that we refuse to make the subject of our own conscious self-study. Part II: Peace can never be obtained by conquering fear but only in seeing that there is nothing one can possess that will gently hold the mind still or fill the heart with grace.

Whatever those things may be that he is driven to possess, regardless of the noble names he gives to them, he seeks these things only in the attempt to possess himself. But true self-possession is impossible upon such a path. Each of the images that he clings to -- as he pursues their gilded promise of helping him to reach his goal of feeling whole -- only secretly serves to separate him from...

There is no fate worse in life than to be a hater of Truth. And whoever turns against the truth does not know his hatred is secretly of himself, for the shadows that torment him are not caused by the truth but are the dark effect of his having turned his back on the Living Light.

Whoever struggles to protect himself from his perceived fear does not banish his enemy but secretly breeds the dark seeds of its life.

We know the disturbance of desire, as in the pain of when we don't want what life brings. But what we are not conscious of is the disturbance in the pleasure of wanting what we don't have! When we see that the disturbance of pain and the disturbance of pleasure have the same root and only seemingly different fruits, then our nature will begin its transformation.

Life is always new, which means there is no such thing as an "old" problem. The only thing aged in us, with regards to what continues to make us ache, is our worn out ideas about how to overcome our unwanted condition; dead-end resolutions that include learning to "just live" with regrets and resentments. What does, in fact, grow "older" in us -- and secretly seasons our suffering -- is how we...

Freedom follows the discovery that whatever it is within us that compels us to achieve can never itself be made content by achievement.

Only a mind awakened to itself knows the cost of being spiritually asleep. While the mind slumbering in itself knows nothing -- not even the cost it pays for remaining asleep.

Part I: We must continually recommit ourselves to the life of Truth, even as the Living Light ceaselessly recommits itself to sustain our soul through the truth of Its own eternal Being. Part II: When God's will becomes our sole wish in life then whatever happens to us not only fulfills our wish, but it is our wish to from the start.

The continuing unconscious comparison of who we think ourselves to be, in contrast with who we imagine we ought to be, is the unseen movement of misery seeking new company without ever leaving the house of itself.

If we could only see that any self that sits in judgment over us is not the perfected nature that it passes itself off as being, but is secretly an imperfection in us that only appears true to us due to the unexamined contrast it creates in us by its accusations, then we would at last strip off the mask of our accuser and be free to realize the truth of ourselves without self-destructive conflict.