Classroom Talk: 8/24/2005 - Once we understand there is no flower, no leaf, no limb or branch that is greater than any other part that grows on the tree of life, then we realize it is more than enough to be just and only what we are in the moment.

Topics covered: Something in me wants to keep me in fear and humiliation; Why do I feel more negative during the holidays; Feeling like a fake; Resisting unwanted moments; How do I take the high road and forgive someone who hurt me; I want to help my family cope with the death of a loved one...

Topics covered: The mind can only approach the meaning of something through thoughts about it; You cannot separate yourself from life without suffering for that separation. We are punished by a nature that is never satisfied with where it is; When you really know the meaning of something, you don't have to look for it.

Topics covered:  Within each moment is that which understands the purpose of its creation; The purpose of real contemplation is to give an individual, according to their willingness, an ephiany, which is a simultaneous glimpse of the opposites, revealing a wholeness that is greater than the sum of its parts; Desperation is born of feeling oneself as separate and apart from life.

Topics covered:  We are not looking for new ideas to understand with the old mind. Rather, we are looking for a new mind that already understands; A moment of beauty is silent because there is no thought involved in it; A mind that is being consumed by itself does not think to itself that it is being eaten alive by its own thoughts.

Topics Covered: Setting out on the spiritual path is not about achieving a result. We want to place ourselves on a path where there is a never-ending possibility of discovery and realization; At their root all negative states are connected to the fear of death. Not only the death of the physical body, but also the death of a cherished sense of self; An epiphany is the revelation of an understanding...

Remastered Classic Talk: 02/28/2016 - The inevitable sense of emptiness that eventually nips at the heels of most men and women is the sudden realization that in spite of having "banked" a billion self-stimulating sensations -- even when all have been added up -- they still amount to nothing.

The life and death of the Christ did not happen two-thousand years ago, any more than the rising and setting of the sun belongs to a particular place and time. Seen, or not, the life of Christ is always now...

Topics covered:  Demands, and the sense of self that come with them, are blind because they mistake the part for the whole, incapable of seeing the bigger picture; Parables and teaching stories are able to communicate truths to us in ways that other means of communication cannot; In the story of the King looking for a new Governor for the Kingdom of Agape, most of the candidates were self-serving motives and full of demands, seeking more power and authority. The one who was selected said, "How can I be useful to you? How can I best serve what it is that you Will for the Kingdom?"

This much is true: all things must pass, and our earthly life along with them. But let that coming day find us having already stripped ourselves of whatever this world, and its fears, would claim for their own.

We who would know a measure of Christ's life – who wish to both witness, and be a conscious instrument of (that) perfect love – must agree to see, and then realize an unseen contradiction in us that first defines, and then confines us to what is a death-bound lower level of being. On one hand – especially in public, and always silently self-pleasing...

If all of creation didn’t share something in common, something invisible... yet in some ways more real than the objects that reveal and manifest that relationship... Then how could the death of a tree bring life to the forest, or the storm-tossed waves that lash the sea cliffs serve to create and sustain the infinite creatures that cling to those rocks?