Topics covered: Anything that you can imagine cannot be new, because imagination uses the content of the past in order to create its images; Thinking is useless to help you create the life of security that thought pursues in imagination. Thought can't deliver you to an unshakable security; The spiritual solution to your problems is to become properly sick and tired of yourself...

Classroom Talk: 10/13/2021 - Only consistent, persistent inner-work can lead us to the threshold of the "Truth that sets us free." And yet, the following is equally true: the unassailable liberation we seek will continue to elude us until every effort to know the truth of ourselves -- by thinking about ourselves -- has proven useless.

Classroom Talk: 3/19/2023 - It certainly seems true, and (it) definitely feels that way, but the familiarity of our habitual thinking is not safety any more than one might believe some ill-fated creature locked in -- and confined to a cage -- finds comfort in its captivity.

Self-realization is the same as the conscious negation of any form of identification; (it is) inseparable from a higher awareness that reveals what no so-called "spiritual thinking" can see, let alone understand as true: no matter how pleasurable or painful, elevated or excruciating may be any conditional, temporary  sense of self... it is not who you are.

Classroom Talk: 8/26/2005 - Dwelling on any disturbance within you -- with the idea that the more time you spend thinking about it, the less troublesome it will become -- is like trying to knock ants off your picnic table by throwing sugar at them.

There is a difference between thinking about a moment, and being in a kind of relationship with the moment in which there is awareness of ourselves as we actually are. The present moment provides us with the opportunity to see that our experience of an event is not separate from the event that we are experiencing. Awareness of this fact puts an end to blaming the outside world for our experience of life.

Classroom Talk: 10/05/2025 - If we know it’s impossible to put out a fire by feeding it more wood, how do we fail to see the futility of trying to quiet a mind already burning with thoughts…by adding still more thinking?

Classroom Talk: 6/11/2023 - If we would ever be free... this is what we must come to see: our troubled thinking is a "racket" in both meanings of the word: (it is) a noise seeking to silence itself, in a "rigged" search that has no end.

Student Talks: 6/16/2023 - Key Lesson: If we would ever be free... this is what we must come to see: our troubled thinking is a "racket" in both meanings of the word: (it is) a noise seeking to silence itself, in a "rigged" search that has no end.

Imagine for a moment you're driving home from work, or wherever, and that you've just come from having a pretty rough day. As you drive along, your eyes see the road before you, but your mind is in the past. It's very busy re-running all of the day's unpleasant events.

Key Lesson: Awareness of the moment is our consciousness of it. So, the more aware we can be of the whole of our consciousness in any moment, the less there is for us to think about -- let alone try to do, because awareness cannot act against itself. Why? Because the light of awareness isn't divided into what it is aware of, and what it knows about it. It simply sees what is, and that whatever is one with that light is Good.

The biggest problem facing us as individuals is that we have all been caught up in the race of looking for relief. Our time would be spent far more profitably looking for strength. When caught in a fierce storm, why scramble to find a cave at the foot of the mountain when the same energy can be used to climb? There is a choice. You can tremble within the cave, or live above the tempests th...