Topics covered: Being present is the same as the capacity to do the right thing at the right time, without needing thought; "The truth about the action must be known and the truth of inaction also must be known; even so the truth about prohibited action must be known. For mysterious are the ways of action. He who sees inaction in action and action in inaction, is wise among men." -- Bhagavad Gita

Topics covered: Dreams of freedom are the very captivity that you are struggling to free yourself from; As your consciousness changes, so does the world that it creates; What is seen does not owe its existence to what is visible. Faith is understanding that what we see is rooted in what is unseen; The real struggle is to stop giving your attention away, because lack of attention produces the painful sense...

Topics covered: The solution to the disturbance is built right into the disturbance itself. The antidote is in the venom; The questions that appear in the face of a pain have been appearing to humanity throughout all time. These questions lead to plans that promise to get rid of the pain but only serve to intensify it; You think it is "you" asking these questions because they are so familiar...

Topics covered: To paraphrase the well-known koan: If a tree falls in the woods, and there's no one there wishing it didn't, does it create fear or suffering?; The very struggle to escape the captivity of the consciousness that you are born into is why you remain a captive of that consciousness; The task is not to save yourself. The task is to realize a relationship with a part of you that does not need to be...

Topics covered: How is it possible for you to act against yourself? Something in you is urging you to act against yourself. So when you act against yourself, it is not really yourself at all; We are without knowing it shifted from one 'I' to another according to the prevailing condition; The little 'i' of the moment depends upon the condition that it is identified with for its temporary existence...

Topics covered: A necessary realization along the upward path is that there are parts of you that do not want you to realize the truth of yourself; Although not really aware of it, the question of "Who am I" sits behind every pursuit, both worldly and spiritually; We are told that we are missing something, believe in the absolute truth of that idea, and then search for what we are told to pursue...

Topics covered: The mind believes that it possess what it imagines. However, to be in imagination is to be separate from what you are thinking about; Humanity is spiritually asleep, and the purpose of a true spiritual school is to show men and women that very fact; The fox blames the trap. The real nature of the trap is the nature of the fox that is identified with what it wants.

Topics covered: Everything that you suffer from psychologically is the product of living from an attachment to an ideal that you don't know you live from; The consciousness that reacts violently to events cannot be changed through its own reactions; We cannot change the world we see around us until we change the way we see the world; The pain of resistance isn't caused by the condition or person being resisted.

Student Talks: 4/14/2023 - Key Lesson: We can keep running through our day -- rushing to get to where the next thought tells us we need to be -- or we can work to let these painful impulses pass into, and through us; there is no other choice: either we're awake, and aware of the presence of this "demanding self" -- watchful, and willing to die to its dark will -- or we're caught in its draft...

Classroom Talk: 9/10/2023 - We remain convinced that if we feel like something is missing in our life, then the answer must be to acquire it; this has always been our go-to solution when suffering over some discontent. But as long as our hope for contentment is remanded over to a search for something outside of ourselves, we will never see the fact that this discontent is inseparable from our present level of self...

Classroom Talk: 8/30/2023 - Part 1: Whatever is created in time... is a creation of time; and all creations -- in, and of time -- must pass when their time is up. Part 2: If we ever look closely, we would see that the fear we have of the future is always dressed as a beggar; but if we dared even a closer look, we'd see that not only does that beggar bear a striking resemblance to us...

Topics covered: Love does not appear in a time to come after you get what you want. The Love that we cannot give ourselves is always acting on all of creation; We long to give ourselves to something greater than ourselves, and the longing is placed there within us by what is greater; People are afraid to walk away from things that they think they need to produce for themselves, even though attachment to those very things is the cause of...