Student Talks: 7/26/2024 - Key Lesson: Until the peace and pleasure found within us is equal to -- or greater than -- any consolation found outside of ourselves -- then our power to be patient, loving, and profitable in every moment is, at best, conditional; nothing better serves to sustain anger, frustration, and fear than being identified with a level of self whose life is founded, at best, upon the sands of passing circumstances.

Classroom Talk: 11/03/2024 - Persistence – without our awareness of the parts of us that steadily insist there’s no further we can go – is a recipe for frustration; this painful sense of self slowly morphs from simple despair into an unholy cynicism that, in turn, serves to confirm what we see as our own unwanted, but unavoidable conclusion: we’ve no other choice but to give up our wish to transcend whatever limitation we’d been called to outgrow.

Topics covered:  Until your attention is free, you are a captive of every condition that your attention falls on. To free your own attention means to possess your own attention; "You never enjoy the world aright till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you." -- Thomas Traherne (1637 – 1674)

Topics covered:   You do not really understand something until you understand it with all parts of yourself. The intellect alone can only go so far, and can in fact hinder understanding; The New Testament story of Christ being tempted is the story of yourself. It is a teaching story that is your story; The last thing that we want to know is that we have no power of our own, and that all power belongs to, and comes from, what is higher than ourselves.

Topics covered: "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn’t make any sense. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds...

Topics covered:  We are the way we are because of what we turn to in unwanted moments. As long as you spend your life not wanting, you will have the life you don't want; You do not know how to be yourself. All that you have are the derivative images that have been picked up through the years about what it means to be a successful human being; Our sense of self is based on a fight with life, trying to make it to conform to the images we have about who we are.

Topics covered:  We're created with the capacity to understand that we are part of a higher order that is always asking us to outgrow who and what we have been; We need a new understanding of order, and the purpose of a true school is to introduce men and women to what higher order is; Real beauty is incomparable, which means that there is no "you" there analyzing what is being observed. In fact, in those moments there is no separation between the observer and the observed.

Topics covered:  You keep looking to the order of this world to save you, hoping that some new law will fix everything that is wrong. The laws that you look to in order to rescue you are the very things that beats you down; A negative state happens when the laws that you cling to are broken by anyone or anything that doesn't agree with your law; Until you understand that order comes before laws, you will look to laws to reestablish order.

Topics covered:  The true interior path is about ceaseless exploration, not about coming to conclusions. We get stressed every time we come to a conclusion. Exploration stops when we come to a conclusion; The advanced spiritual life is already here in every moment, not in what you imagine the spiritual life is supposed to be; Nothing can grow without humility, because for anything to grow it must be in a position of receiving, yielding to what is above. No humility, no transformation.

Topics covered:  There is no action that we take that doesn't begin with an impulse born of an unseen set of energies that inhabit us; The mind's analytical interpretation of a disturbance is not the actual reality of that moment of disturbance. The reactions that come out of the mind's analysis are based on illusion; Everything we do to change our experience of moments we don't want comes from an unconscious, mechanical will that does not belong to who you really are.

Topics covered:  There is no urgency in a natural creature. There is no rush in nature. Every movement in nature is in perfect harmony. Human beings are always in a state of urgency; No creature in nature is concerned about what it means to be productive. Nature's creatures are already productive because they are already a participant in the whole movement of creation; "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment?" -- New Testament

Topics covered:  The endless stream of thought produces a ceaseless sense of self, each one as temporary as the thought. The sense of self disappears as soon as the wave that created that sense of self disappears; "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man. " -- William Blake; There is a higher order of being that is unchanging, even as everything within it changes.