Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of January 6, 2014. What we must eventually come to see is that much of our thinking is a 'racket' in both meanings of the word: (it is) a noise that tries to silence itself, as well as a game that can't be won by any of the players.

Topics covered: Not one thought you have ever had has brought an end to the compulsion to keep thinking; In the unconditional acceptance of the experience of yourself is everything you need; The mind comes into each moment with a predetermined set of demands, comparing the present moment to what it imagines life should be. The mind does that because it feels incomplete...

Topics covered: The immortal self is like a young child who is able to maintain a fascination with life regardless of circumstances; An imagined outcome cannot be separated from an imagined identity; Pain reveals what must be outgrown; Thinking peace will be found in a time to come vs. seeing the level of ourselves that produces the disturbance; Time for a new understanding of an old nature; O...

Student Talks: 4/22/2022 - Key Lesson: There is a very strange feature as concerns most human beings: we would rather feel anxious thinking about unwanted moments over which we have no power, than to practice placing our attention in the fact of that moment... where no thought is needed to build a bridge between ourselves, and a timeless peace whose Presence all of us seek.

Topics Covered:Real freedom cannot be shattered. What kind of freedom is it if it can be taken away?; The farther one travels, the less one knows; The outer world is not separate from the inner world in the usual way that we think; We usually think of karma in the sense of a painful consequence for having done something wrong. The word "karma" is more closely connected...

Notice your tendency to always be looking down most of the time, even when walking on level ground and with no obstacles in your path. When you're looking down you don't realize that real life is actually being stolen from you. The life that's being handed to you instead is one of sensation born of thinking about yourself and your life rather than actually living it.

Topics covered: Your true purpose has no opposites in it; Nothing the mind will come to through thinking will reconcile it; The mind creates problems because it already has a solution; The Greek story of Daedalus and Icarus; The identity of the dreamer doesn't exist without the characters in the dream; The mind wants to get involved to resolve the disparity between heaven and earth; Transforma...

Topics covered: The reaction to the pain seems to be different than the pain itself; When you try to figure out what your pain is about, you do it from the mistaken position of thinking you're the light figuring out the darkness; You cannot truly know what love is without at least gradually understanding what the love of God is; Real love has no position at all.

Counter to popular opinion, real success is not measured by the amount of our possessions. Simply stated, the truth is that real success -- ultimately the only success -- is determined by how much we are in actual possession of ourselves. And by the light of this great fact of life, we can also see that the person who fears the loss of what he thinks is his success has not truly succeeded.

The first step, and in some ways the most difficult along the upper Way, is the separation of the false from what is real; imagine what happens when someone you think is your friend is suddenly seen as always having been secretly set against you. The shock is overwhelming; and the part of you that felt your friend was a good one is rocked because you can see that your friend wasn't the only on...

The chief cause of why our lives so often wind up in the hands of others is not that they are superior or that the world is too strong for us, but that we don't want to face the uncertainty and aloneness we think we are too weak to bear. ~~~ The conscious refusal to go along with what your weakness wants you to do to escape its uncertainty is what invokes and finally delivers real inner co...

Money seems to always be an issue for me. It doesn't matter if I have a little or a lot - there never seems to be enough for what I want to feel happy and secure. Money matters have been central to almost every important decision I've made in life. If I knew I'd have enough to provide for my family's needs, I wouldn't have to keep a job that I hate, I could get out of debt, and start thinking...