Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of September 23, 2013. Part 1: The purpose behind working to be present is not to put away what's troubling you; the act of being in Presence is to invite the revelation that the unwanted moment you're seeing (in that same instant) is inseparable from the nature of the seer. Part 2: The sleeping mind is a house of mirrors, and whoever enters into it, fir...

Our present experience of life, for its happiness or sorrow, is nothing more or less than what certain unconscious parts of us tell us it is. This means that before we can hope to change our life experience, we must stop trying to re-write the Book of Life and work instead to awaken ourselves from the dreams of the unseen storyteller within us. *** We cannot change what life brings to our do...

Linger in the great mystery of moments untold. Wait there for the unspeakable invitation to live there.

Freedom, real freedom, does exist. But it is not a condition of events, nor is it found within another person's approval of us. Neither is real freedom ever a mere effect of circumstances, otherwise it is not freedom but merely a temporary pleasure we have mistaken for being the same as being free...

Whatever form your resentments may take, they wreck only you... not the one you resent. So, here's a key thought to help you release this self-wrecking inner state: Holding onto some hurt or hatred -- over what someone may have done to you in the past - makes you that person's slave in the here and now. If you're tired of being a slave to a painful relationship out of your past, this study an...

The strength of any negative reaction cannot be separated from the force of resistance we feel towards that “event.” And where does this resistance begin if not in some form of insistence the moment should not have unfolded in the manner it did?

The secret entrance into the unknowable Divine can never be found in this or that thought, but only within a faith-based action that must be trial-tested before it can be counted on as unquestionably True...

Do you want to be a new person? Well, you're certainly not going to be a new person when you keep repeating the level of consciousness that literally runs itself into the ground... and where, incidentally, at the end of your physical life you have nothing whatsoever to show for your existence on this planet... any more than a lion has something to show for its existence...

Occasionally, for all of us, we accidentally enter into the Now. We could be skiing, skating, doing yoga, playing golf, and suddenly our activity aligns us with the flow of that moment. We can even be in the flow of a conversation, and in that moment we are aware of something sustaining us. Physically we enter into the Now because that flow is part of the Now. Emotionally we can enter accident...

Happiness is elusive! How do I let go of an ever-present feeling of being discontented? If there is one weed in a field of roses, you can bet the weed is what I will see. Is real happiness actually effortless? The inner work I know is needed seems to be a constant struggle.

Shadows are forms without substance that create contrast; thoughts are shadows whose substance -- when identified with -- seduce us into seeing a dark world filled with useless solutions to imagined fears.

If the sky were empty, birds couldn't fly through it. The only way to know the fullness of the nothingness you fear is to launch yourself into it. Do this enough times, and soon you will start to feel -- and know -- the presence of a timeless stillness that binds all things together. And though it touches nothing, and nothing touches it, still it connects all that moves through it. In this...