Measure the extent to which you are set against someone or something -- as in being negative toward a person or predicament -- and you know the degree to which you have forgotten what's true, and how far you have wandered away from what is holy.

At some point in our lives we have all dealt with uncomfortable moments where an unexpected or unwanted change in one near to us brings up some unpleasant reaction in us. Of course we are usually very quick to find fault with this person, but here is the real, invisible story. The reason we fall under the rule of these reaction-driven dark states, and then find ourselves trying to dictate the life direction of the "offending" person, is that something...

Topics Covered: In the moment of realization, something that was disconnected before is integrated; Discouragement is dishonesty; We must be willing to make mistakes for the purpose of revelation; Thought that we identify with that is allowed to run unconsciously kills the possibility of rebirth; We are born with the capacity to see our consciousness no matter what level it is at...

Topics covered: The timeless nature of Presence; We are asleep to the timeless wisdom within; What is in your way is part of the way; Every event and experience reveals me to myself; Love will never hurt itself; Death is actually rebirth; Patience requires that you suffer yourself; Let the light act on you as only it can.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of January 20, 2014. All judging of oneself -- whether of one's own negative characteristics, or that of others -- is the dark effect of a divided mind as it acts against itself. First it gives birth to self-loathing created by an imagined comparison, and then it sits in harsh judgment of both that imagined self and its suffering. In this way it hides it...

Classroom Talk: 11/17/2002 - If we could only see that any self that sits in judgment over us is not the perfected nature that it passes itself off as being, but is secretly an imperfection in us that only appears true to us due to the unexamined contrast it creates in us by its accusations, then we would at last strip off the mask of our accuser and be free to realize the truth of ourselves without self-destructive conflict.

Seeking fulfillment it empties itself. Seeking importance it compromises itself. This is the self that opposes itself.

Topics Covered: It is not our responsibility to balance our own consciousness; That which can see what is out of balance is balance; Awareness is that which makes the sun shine on good and evil alike; Unpractical thought is the never-ending futile attempt to balance a reaction; The world that is raging is the rage I see in me; To try to not have an identity is an identity...

Topics Covered: There is never a moment without disturbance; An unattended mind is a perpetual misery machine; The task isn't to not be disturbed, instead the task is to see the nature that doesn't want to be disturbed; We rarely suspect that psychological fear is a dream; It is awareness that we are after, not a result; There is a level of consciousness that is a world of imagination...

The secret of higher success is to make impersonal those times when we stumble or fall, whereas to take failure personally is to lose sight of the one Great Lesson that Life would have us learn: there is no "self" to fail (at anything) -- only a certain level of understanding not as yet adequate to the task set before it. To know this truth helps us transcend not only the trials we must face...

Ask yourself this question, allow the answer to appear in your heart and mind, and you'll know exactly what to do with the appearance of any painful state that wants to drag you down: What is discouragement other than a dark suggestion offered up to us, from a cruel and negative nature within us, that's encouraging us to give up our wish to be whole, happy, and free?...

Seeking power, it weakens itself. Seeking fulfillment, it empties itself. Seeking control, it abandons itself. Seeking security, it frightens itself. Seeking relationship, it betrays itself...