Classroom Talk: 11/13/2024 - How desire always imagines a solution to whatever our painful problem may be, often seeming to arrive at what feels like the perfect answer. But, desire itself is imperfect, because it is the incomplete work of an incomplete nature... trying to perfect itself as it imagines it must in order to be free. And yet, as paradoxical as it may seem, it is only through our awareness of imperfection that the light of the Divine reveals...

When we turn on a faucet connected to a hose with a small nozzle at its other end, we know from experience that we have to keep the hose in hand, otherwise we will likely get soaked chasing down the runaway end. What happens is that the water pressure, as it passes through the nozzle, transforms our ordinarily tame garden hose into the equivalent of a tethered rocket. With this picture in min...

Until the peace and pleasure found within you is equal to -- or greater than any consolation found outside of yourself -- then your power to be patient, loving, and profitable in every moment is, at best, conditional; nothing better serves to sustain anger, frustration, and fear than being identified with a level of self whose life is founded, at best, upon the sands of passing circumstances.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of May 4, 2015. That we blame anyone or anything for our suffering reveals our blatant refusal to accept responsibility for our present level of consciousness. That we refuse to see this condition indicates an almost complete lack of conscience on our part; this fact is evidenced any time we agree to embrace a feeling of hatred born of resisting those mo...

Here is the long and short of a very simple, but powerful spiritual truth: it is impossible to measure one's self without using both ends of the ruler.

The only thing ever gained by allowing any psychological pain to tell you what to do about itself is... more of the same.

Topics covered: Freedom is our birthright; Use this life to be enlarged by love; Watching yourself inwardly; Resistance produces the circle of self; Events reveal our inner condition; Thoughts and feelings are the real trouble; Psychological fear doesn't exist; Dying to yourself, rebirth, surrender, letting go; Stop drop and endure.

Classroom Talk: 11/30/2025 - If you find yourself harboring resentment -- filled with angry thoughts or painful regrets -- having surrendered to the suffering induced by your own negative considerations... be warned: in the darkness of that nature is where affliction hides; it abides there, breeding the conflict it has with the natural tides of life, waiting to consume those who consent to enter the hell wherein it dwells.

Topics covered:  "The events that we don't want must return. Above our present understanding is the fact that everything that transpires is the expression of another order of being that is responsible for reconciling the moment; The root of all true teachings, the true basis of religion, is "metanoia," which is the capacity to turn around and experience a completely new order of relationship with life."

What is resentment if not a sustained form of resistance to the continually refreshed content of some negative impression?...

Topics covered:  We can clearly see when other people are harming themselves unnecessarily. But what about the harm that we do to ourselves?; All judgment is blind by its nature; We falsely believe that hiding our pain from ourselves is the same as having escaped from its influence.

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 more falsely wise and alive we assume ourselves to be. Imagine that! Part 2: When it comes to...