GF: Welcome everyone. Let me open our meeting with some thoughts about what is required of us to realize the peace of mind for which we all long. No one can come upon this Real Silence without understanding certain truths about its nature. So we will discuss some of these truths now, and again at the close of our chat. Now, let's begin at the beginning with an important point that ought to be...

How would you like to live from a nature where no matter what happens, no matter what comes at you, as soon as whatever it is lands on you, it's changed into something good? "Oh gosh, wow! You mean I could live from a part of myself where it wouldn't matter what it was that came to it -- no matter how dark, fearsome, hateful, worried, angry, no matter what it was -- as soon as it touched me...

If we want new answers to old self-defeating questions such as "Why me?" -- we're going to have to use our mind in a new way. If we want new answers, real answers, we need new questions. First, we must realize that our stressful experiences are not caused by people or events. They are caused by our reactions to them. I know this is different than most of us feel, and yet, we can see that we have changed the people and even the events in our...

There is nothing wrong with being a successful human being. In fact, the purpose of your life is to win. But what if, in your quest for this victory, you were accidentally drawn into a compelling game in which, unknown to you, it was impossible to win no matter how well you performed or religiously followed the "rules?" Where, instead of finding the freedom to run as you wish, you found yours...

Real self-independence is the fruit of an awakened inner life. And just as fruit on a tree must develop into fullness following a certain order of natural events, so too is there a natural order of self-realizations that lead up to winning your own life and living it as you please. Every step along the way to this higher independent life is both the challenge and the reward. The challenge is...

Isn't it phenomenal that we spend our lives trying to produce powers for ourselves to protect and keep in place all the things that we believe are necessary for us to have a life with the least possible worry? And yet, our days are consumed with spending thought and emotional energy trying to figure out how this change affects that, and what that change means over here -- all the time trying to put back together a life we hope to finally have without...

The solution to all stress and tension is a mind that is made aware of itself as being the producer of that stress and tension. Stress and tension are products of an unaware, unawake mind wrestling with its own contents to free itself from struggle. Relief from that tension is not to struggle with more things or to become stronger than what stresses you, but to recognize the relationship between how you are involved in your own mind because of that...

Around the world today, millions if not billions of individuals are being consumed by negativity. The world and our relationship to the cosmos always run through cycles of increased or decreased activity. Right now we are in a cycle of increased activity where many people are stirred up. In such stirring there exists the possibility of increased conflict, but also of increased consciousness -- although it is conflict that seems more prevalent.

We have an essential need to be at peace. Part of that essential need to be at peace is to know that we are in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing -- and to know it in such a fashion that nothing can come along and convince us otherwise. There is only one way that can happen for us, and that is through the idea of being a true individual...

Have you ever thrown your hands in the air and asked yourself "What in the world is going on with me? How come my best intentions and the ability to accomplish them seem to live in two different universes?" We intend not to run off like a mad human being, spending money ill-afforded. We intend not to do something mean-spirited or otherwise self-defeating. Yet that is often just what we do...

The basic core of all true spiritual teachings is that the inner determines the outer. What this timeless idea means to us is that what we receive from life -- our experience of self in life -- is determined by how we perceive events. And how we see life is determined, each moment, by what we are looking at it through.

Whenever we find ourselves in some "unwanted" part of ourselves, perhaps reliving an old heartache or caught in the throes of some irrepressible anger, old fear, or unyielding worry, part of this unwanted moment includes our certainty that we're trapped in this condition. And compounding our confusion over feeling ourselves captive in this way are all of the attending negative inner voices. Th...