Classroom Talk: 8/3/2022 - Our need to change, to be made new, is constant; however, so is our resistance to change. The former is inseparable from the freedom it heralds, while the latter ensures the continuation of patterns that imprison the soul. Choose the latter, and living becomes dying, but choose the former and see how dying leads to Life.

Topics covered: Spiritual story about a knight who goes to rescue a princess imprisoned in a cave guarded by two chained dragons; Anything that is created is incomplete because it is connected to all other life; The activities we engage in is this unconscious nature trying to complete itself from the content of itself; All seeking starts on a false premise; What we seek is not the problem...

Classroom Talk: 7/3/2022 - Part 1: Unattended thoughts attract unwanted relationships. Part 2: Identifying with any painful reaction is a form of negative fascination; it is an inverse form of Narcissism where we feel drawn to "stare" at -- to dwell on -- whatever may be that dark thought or feeling we're so sure we don't want to see. Stranger still, the more we resist the...

Classroom Talk: 6/15/2022 - The ever-anxious feeling that life owes us something -- that we're entitled to have our demands met -- creates two problems at once: first, we are unable to see, let alone realize all that Life keeps trying to give us and, at the same time, the more quickly we are to blame life for the pain created by our own impatience.

There is a proportionate and direct relationship between the degree of an inconsolable pain -- some form of suffering that’s pretty much our daily companion -- and our misunderstanding the true purpose of why we have been given a life.

As surely as open skies can't be overcome by any cloud that may pass through them, neither can our True Nature be overwhelmed by any “dark” moment of life, regardless the shadow it seems to cast over it.

Classroom Talk: 4/24/2022 - It is a distinct stage in the development of the aspirant when -- rather than being easily distracted by some imagined consolation for his pain, or by concluding who is to blame for it -- his first and real preference in that dark moment is to increase his awareness of his condition, and not to find ways around it.

No one is free who has an ax to grind with any other person, let alone who grind themselves down with painful self-judgment believing, in vain, that self-punishment is somehow connected to self-perfection.

Classroom Talk: 4/10/2022 - Part 1: The Unknowable Source of Peace in real life far exceeds our reach... because it can't be grasped, let alone taken by hand; it can only be received by a heart that has willingly emptied itself of hope in all things seen. Part 2: To see that our happiness is as the sand in an hourglass that never stops turning itself over sets the stage for realizing...

Classroom Talk: 4/6/2022 - The ability to explain our fears to ourselves -- all the "valid" reasons we have for feeling anxious about "tomorrow" -- is not wisdom. Wisdom is the Light by which we see the following truth: there is no experience of psychological fear that doesn't begin without first having imagined a threat to some equally imagined sense of security.

The more we struggle to fit into this world’s idea of freedom, the more imprisoned we become for having assumed the shape of some fear that we may get left behind, or be otherwise misunderstood.

Classroom Talk: 3/30/2022 - Any resistance to the revelation of some weakness within us, is the weakness; so that contrary to the way we now perceive these painful moments, the resistance we feel to any unwanted moment is not there to punish us, but rather to help polish and perfect the incomplete character within us that it has come to reveal.