If there's one thing that should be more than evident to everyone on the planet, it's that the level of pain in it is increasing. Human beings are imbalanced, forever teetering. And how do we know that? Because if you just push them a little bit, down they go!
There's a reason why we all love stories about ancient maps, sunken ships, and buried treasure. It's because these tales reflect a deep sensing we all have: that a hidden treasure actually dwells within us -- and if we could just find the way to discover it, our lives would shine every day with life's greatest wealth: the golden qualities of true confidence, unbounded energy, unfailing wisdom...
Our lives are nothing but a series of invitations, a series of moments in which we run into what we don't know. And in this experience of our own limitations, something good and natural takes place. In its constant stirring and seeking, life feeds back to us the boundaries determined by our present understanding.
Have you ever noticed that the more negative you get, the more difficult everything about your life becomes, including being able to do the simplest things? Even your intention to work spiritually in some way -- to develop and transcend yourself -- now sits in the hands of a very negative self, a dense level of self that sees nothing but darkness ahead of it.
We each have ideas about who we are, how the events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy. What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don't give us the respect we deserve.
No anxious state could exist without your false belief that who you are -- your well-being -- is connected to something happening exterior to yourself.
Are failures in life inevitable? Does the Higher Power, once attained, see to it that we only succeed? Try to understand the difference between living from something within yourself, whose nature is contentment itself, and living from those parts of yourself that are forever seeking contentment. For the man or woman who persists with the wish for Truth/God to be first in life, there reall...
When some anxiety comes along and takes over your life, are you an awake, inwardly centered person or are you an unconscious, outwardly driven man or woman? Which are you? That you're outwardly directed is pretty obvious. Why? Because that anxious state could not exist without your false belief that who you are -- your well-being -- is connected to something happening exterior to yourself. And...
What do we need to do to rise above the limitations of our present understanding -- limitations that, seen or not, play a role in our daily dose of heartache? The answer may surprise you! Truth teachings throughout the ages tell us that healing the hidden and hurting places in our heart begins with becoming conscious of them. We are taught that we cannot free ourselves of anything that we refu...
Once something has outlived its usefulness, its purpose for being in existence is no longer needed. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight and then transfers its energy to the tree serves one purpose in the spring and summer and another completely different purpose through the fall and winter. Its form first appears as an agent to help feed the tree and then, as it dies and falls to the earth, the same leaf becomes food for the tree.
When things naturally come to a close in life, our pain isn't so much born of the fact that something now ends, as it is that within this moment of ending, we are forced to meet a certain order of emptiness in us for which we are just not prepared. We are brought face to face with a great void in the center of our heart that we thought had been filled. And then we make this common, but largely unrealized mistake...
The Presence moment can be thought of as a kind of "meeting" place of myriad invisible worlds. It is a timeless space of open-ended possibilities in which your created nature converges and interacts with all that constitutes your original Self. Call this all-encompassing Spirit what you will, but it is... and forever will be a compassionate intelligence whose living light creates, animates...