What power has any painful moment over us save for having become unconsciously identified with our own negative reaction to it. Seen properly, this means the event we blame for our suffering is like looking in a mirror... and blaming the reflection for whatever we don’t want to see in it!

The real reason we stress ourselves over the way others behave -- and are so quick to judge them for their irritating behavior -- is as follows: by blaming others for how we feel in the moment then our negative state is always the fault of someone else.

Refusing to blame others for our pain is the same as asking for an awareness of a dark and unconscious nature that believes the best way to make things right... is to do wrong; that the surest way to get over our suffering is to blame someone for it, as if our healing depends on making others hurt.

If one day you bang your elbow and seven years later the same spot still aches, and now radiating pains are appearing in your fingers and shoulder, you would start to suspect that something in your body's system was amiss! You would conclude, virtually beyond any doubt, that your original injury never healed properly. By the very fact of its continuing presence in our body, we intuitively kno...

Your True Self doesn't win in life by overpowering problems, but by revealing they never really existed as you once believed they did.

Topics covered: You are your experience of life; Events don't happen to you, they happen in you; The spiritual life is 100% unknowable; There's no escaping your nature; Feeling abused and let down by others.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of August 10, 2015. Part 1: We rarely see how, or when we act against ourselves -- or others -- because of how instantly, easily we agree to identify with a legion of sleep-inducing thoughts and feelings that appear to serve one purpose: to justify a dark and self-defeating level of us for which there can be no justification. Part 2: What is the denial o...

Nothing infuriates evil as much as being seen for what it is.

Making excuses for oneself is the anxious expression of a mind so divided that it not only refuses to see how it's accountable for its misguided actions, but that actually denies it has any responsibility at all for whatever problem may have unfolded.

Each person is created with the tools it takes to master his or her own life. But self-mastery remains the ultimate mystery until that day dawns when -- weary of struggling to overcome what he blames for his conflicted self -- he lets go and enters into this darkened nature by becoming completely still. And by this stillness, he tames its wildness; and through this stillness he is given domini...

First comes anger… then what we blame; The match is struck… before the flame.

The real thing that's unwanted in any moment is not the event we blame for our pain. The actual source of (our) suffering is in having identified with a negative reaction, and then mechanically resisting this unconscious state now rooted in the darkness of our mind. In other words: resistance is the source of (our) pain, and not the event we blame for it. Once we see our complicity in the cr...