Classroom Talk: 5/31/2002 - As long as we willingly jump on board that dark train of thoughts and feelings called our discontentment, desperately trying to reach the end of the line where we hope happiness awaits us we will never discover that all such discontentment is a lie and that its desire to find fulfillment outside of one’s own heart is a part of that lie.

Classroom Talk: 5/5/2003 - May 5th, 2003 special talk at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, Oregon. Topics discussed include desire, mindfulness, life is relationship, pain, and the purpose of life.

Classroom Talk: 6/28/2023 - Part 1: Hidden deep within every desire there dwells an unseen fire; handle carefully... if you don't want to get burned. Part 2: A divided mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat; not only is it incapable of seeing its own contradictions, but then it struggles with them in a futile attempt to free itself from a conflict that wouldn't exist if it didn't first create it somewhere in the darkness of itself.

Classroom Talk: 5/26/2002 - Whenever we find ourselves having some unwanted experience that is the last thing we desire, we should work in that same moment to recollect that this experience is nothing less than the natural outcome of what we, in our spiritual sleep, have continued to put first in our life.

Classroom Talk: 10/27/2002 - We know the disturbance of desire, as in the pain of when we don't want what life brings. But what we are not conscious of is the disturbance in the pleasure of wanting what we don't have! When we see that the disturbance of pain and the disturbance of pleasure have the same root and only seemingly different fruits, then our nature will begin its transformation.

Classroom Talk: 12/27/2002 - While the desire to be perfect runs through the very fiber of our soul, how to fulfill the longing of this greater love is a question few find the answer to, and here is why: The path to self-perfection weaves its secret way through the land of imperfection, where only the conscious awareness of where we actually are (in this land) changes forever where we stand.

We don't know much about real feelings, and in order to learn more about them, we must first discover what are not real feelings. When a thought suddenly comes to you, such as the thought of eating your favorite food, and your mind begins to go through all of the details associated with that thought, the desire for that food is strengthened by the image that the mind has produced. And also str...

Topics covered: The cost of freedom is letting go of the idea that there is a "you" that is going to find freedom in a time to come; It is not life that is hard, but there is something in us that has hardened itself against life; Your mind will never be able to take you past the point that it cannot go, but your mind can understand that fact; Every desire has a corresponding identity attached to it...

Topics covered:  "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." -- C.S. Lewis; What is the nature of the emptiness that we have never been able to escape no matter what we have done?; Depression is the inevitable outcome of misunderstanding. It is a sin (missing the mark) to fall into depression because life has not given you what you want from it.

Classroom Talk: 5/2/2003 - Our demands that life be what we want it to be do not make life more desirable... they only hide from us just how undesirable it is to be who we are in that moment.