Any real intention we set for ourselves to rise above our present level of being is going to reveal a lower level of self that doesn't want to change. This is a powerful spiritual law that creates both challenge and opportunity at the same time. The challenge: agreeing to see how our unconscious nature -- encased and enchanted by its own negative reactions -- is incapable of doing anything other than resisting unwanted moments.

Everyone wonders whether or not there is one great secret for truly successful living. There is. And it is not a secret. It has been quietly, steadily telling itself right in front of us all along. We just couldn't hear it over the clatter and chatter of our own secret demands. Listen quietly for a moment: everything can change right now. Learning to hear this supreme secret is no more difficult than choosing whether to swim against a current or to let it carry you safely...

Too frequently we feel as though our lives are under the power of things outside of us and beyond our ability to deal with: prisoners in one way or another of an unfair social system, impossible work conditions, an unforgiving past, or a failed relationship. Even trying to assemble a build-it-yourself bookshelf that doesn't know it "goes together with ease" can lock us away in the "house of pain."

It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

Real life never stops starting over; it is the eternal showcase of the Divine. Here are three insights to help you make this truth a living force in your own life...

Remastered Classic Talk: 9/09/15 - We live within a dynamic field of celestial energies whose natural opposition to one another ceaselessly creates what we feel as a "disturbance" within us: moments when primal active forces meet what naturally resists them, giving birth to an order of suffering that's part of the process of creation. It is only in the presence of these higher energies -- at the peak, actually -- that the forces needed for our transfiguration become available; for in our dawning awareness that their supernal struggle is one and the same as our own -- and in our willingness to consciously suffer their Divinely ordained union -- it is no longer "we" who are aware, but rather we are brought into that timeless awareness itself... from out of which these opposing forces have come, and back into which they return.

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/16/16 - All of our relationships, in particular the one we have with those we love, exist for a dual purpose, along with its great promise: first, most of us understand that our partner in life is there to help us grow, to awaken and stir in us, accordingly, an awareness of love's highest possibilities. But the other -- and equally important half of this same purpose and promise -- without which the first part can't succeed -- is as follows: our partner in life is also there to help us see everything in us that now stands in the way of our coming to realize this same higher love.

The great gulf between what one knows is true, and one’s ability to be a true human being, is wide indeed; but, take heart...

There is never a good reason to go along with feeling bad about yourself...

Discover the profound truth about emptiness and inner peace—one that may surprise you. The greatest obstacle to the peace of heaven isn’t the world, your past, or your future—it’s what you have yet to understand about yourself. In this eye-opening exploration, we uncover a deep resistance within us, the fear of losing our familiar struggles, and the rarest form of self-knowledge: realizing that we don’t truly want to know the truth of ourselves...

Real success is a fearless state of being in a conscious relationship with an Intelligence that always achieves its ends despite ever-changing conditions. But, if we're honest, this order of spiritual success remains at a distance we've yet to traverse. At our present level of consciousness, our mind is always active, trying to figure out what we need to put together in our life to achieve its desired end.