Though we often find ourselves feeling so, in truth... there is no such thing as being powerless. We see how a person who resists life -- who hates or fears unwanted changes -- becomes the instrument of a power that effectively renders him powerless to do anything but struggle. But we've seen the converse as well: the one who realizes that the only power negative states have is to create the i...

Rather than defend our mistakes by finding excuses for them, we can understand that our refusal to learn the lesson at hand ensures we will meet that lesson again, along with its misery.

Classroom Talk: 6/5/2002 - Within us we may incubate, A love or hate, And accordingly we realize, Our chosen fate.

There is nothing in the universe that can stop us from growing, except our habitual, mechanical nature.

One of the most slippery parts of the upper path is the temptation to judge ourselves -- to loath ourselves for whatever "weakness" is exposed to us in the moment. The act of judging ourselves in times like these seems natural and even necessary if we hope to ever "outgrow" our own limitations as revealed. But this kind of self-laceration is a Trojan horse within whose dark recesses lies...

In this life, we have one of two choices when it comes to painful events, past or present. We can either go on hating and fearing what we think life has done to us (or others), and let these negative reactions create our experience for us... or we can learn to use these same dark reactions to free ourselves from them. But just wanting to learn the truth isn't enough...

Remastered Classic Talk: 06/08/16 - The repetition of patterns, even painful ones, is a form of safety to a mind that prefers to remain asleep to itself... because in the continuation of the known it finds a fitful kind of rest, even as it talks to itself about how much it hates being stuck in a rut!

Whenever some dark storm appears in us, we must awaken to ourselves and bring ourselves back into the Now.

In order to have a sunny life on a moment-to-moment basis, you must be willing to let something new happen to you. No one sincerely asks for a new life until they are thoroughly dissatisfied with the old one. Letting go of the old ideas is the only way to really invite something new. Let's look at one example of how our new self-knowledge can turn a painful and repetitive unhappiness into a...

Real spiritual strength is realized, slowly, by daring to drop any self-blinding negative states that we have allowed to define us.

An inner place of safety exists. If we stand in that new position, no dark feelings can affect us. That position has always been there, waiting for us to find it. It is the place where the True Self resides. But we have mistakenly believed that only two options were open to us: to either stand and suffer, or run away and suffer, with our problems in constant pursuit. We always listened to the...

Classroom Talk: 3/2/2005 - Negative thoughts do not belong to you; they are the trash of disappointed gods who -- being powerless to create a sustainable universe in their own image -- can think of nothing better to do than to hate their own imaginings.