The ache of any dark moment -- of any discouraging thought or feeling that wants to convince us we’ll never be free... is simply a lie. Ours is always and forever the right to exchange any form of discouragement for the realization that nothing about it -- neither its pain, nor its attending sense of despair -- belongs to who we really are.

The real reason "why" we should “love our neighbor” as ourselves is only answered as we agree to see -- by the Light of the Divine -- that their life is, in fact, the same as our own. It is this Love -- and only this Love -- that frees us from the pain of judging others, as well as the suffering born of judging ourselves.

Imagination, and the daydreams that it creates, act as a kind of a consolation, a buffer between us and the fear we feel as we try to find our way through a dark and often conflict-filled world. But, in truth, such dreams -- all born of unconscious imagination -- are a creation of fear, and therefore can never serve to free us from it.

Classroom Talk: 4/6/2005 - Looking to negative thoughts, or dark emotional states, for the power to help you out of some unwanted moment in life, is like hoping that your own shadow -- cast by the sun setting behind you -- can guide you out of a desert in which you have become lost!

Remastered Classic Talk: 11/2/16 - What we see, and take, as being the meaning of any given moment -- including our experience of it -- is a direct reflection of the level of self being revealed by that same moment. This invisible relationship between the observer and the observed is the "mirror of the Divine". And it is only in this relationship -- in this "mirror" -- that we are able to discover not only the meaning of Life, but what is also our original role within it.

 

Classroom Talk: 04/27/2025 - For us, death – even as we “learn to live” in its fearsome shadow – seems to mark the end of all that we have known; a looming “last show” when the theatre will be closed, and the final curtain drawn. But, there is another kind of death; and it is the end of fear: rebirth realized in the voluntary sacrifice, and concurrent death of the “knower”.

Classroom Talk: 04/13/2025 - Awakening is the (graduated) process of negating all forms of identification; (it is) the realization that no matter how real the feel of any familiar sense of self - for its pleasure, or pain – nevertheless: no sensation does a “self” make, any more than a wave on the sea makes the sea from out of which it rises, and must return.

There is only one limitation all of us, each and every human being, shares in common...

In a very unique form of arrogance (which is really human alone in its nature and appearance), there is a given attitude, a given perception of life--that one is not only apart from everything that one sees, but that what takes place in one's life is something that the individual (apart from what he or she sees) has some control over and can change at will...

Classroom Talk: 11/17/2019 - Part 1: Unconscious negative reactions feel intelligent because they are inseparable from some equally unconscious judgment that lends them their temporary "life." So that, in this manner, the more stress, anger, or pain we feel -- born of having identified with one of these dark reactions...

The true answer to any problem we find ourselves in is not found in our thoughts about it, but rather in our willingness to allow new light to reveal its purpose.

It often feels as if difficult moments in our life are things that we just have to 'go through,' but this is only half the story... and the lessor half, at that. In truth, each life event represents the appearance of a spontaneous set of circumstances created just for us... a unique moment in passing time whose soul purpose is to provide us with exactly what we need to 'grow through.'...