Don't Avoid the Emptiness You Feel - Here's Why!

Transcript

You might be surprised, and you will be, to discover that the last thing that you want is peace. The last thing. And I can prove it, if you were willing to look at it, which is our topic this evening. The only thing that keeps you from understanding this peace of heaven is what you've yet to understand about yourself. That's the only thing between you and the peace of heaven. Nothing else. No condition. No person. No past. No future. One thing stands between you and the peace that your heart of heart longs for, but that your mind is terrified of because without the pain that it fights with, that it creates in its own image, it doesn't know who or what it is... what to do with itself. One day you'll be stunned. There's a certain emptiness that a person has avoided their whole life. That emptiness is what happens when a person begins to enter into the peace of heaven. Because the peace of heaven is a time and a place without you in it. That's what heaven is. Heaven is the absence of [your name], not what you have named as heaven, and that you constantly struggle with to try to bring to yourself so that you can be free. The thing about the peace of heaven is that it is, to the one who seeks it, pure emptiness. But to the one who finds it, it is perfect fullness. And therein lies this difficulty that an aspirant faces without knowing it. That they set out every day, much as I described over the last class or so, seemingly running to arrive someplace without knowing that it would never occur to them that they have to be in that anxious, constantly running, agitated state if it weren't that they were running from something they didn't understand about themselves. And that's perhaps one of the most difficult things. I'll ask you a question. I'll put it to you this way. What do you think is perhaps the most rare form of self-knowledge? I'll ask you for a minute. Anybody want to venture it?  I dare say I don't think you know the answer. The rarest -- is that okay, to say the word, 'rarest' -- the rarest form of self knowledge is to know that I don't want to know the truth of myself. That's the rarest form of self knowledge... to begin to see I don't want to know the truth of myself. And the reason that's such a rare thing is because the reason that I don't want to know the truth of myself is because, if and when I see the truth of myself, it flies right in the face of everything that I believe is true about myself. I mean, I earnestly believe that I, and let's not misunderstand that in any true aspirant the love of God is what moves that aspirant to seek the relationship with God, but when a man or a woman actually starts to believe, "I love God, I love the truth", that human being is deceived. And how can they know they're deceived? Because when something shows them the truth of themselves, that's the very last thing that they ever want to see. "That can't possibly be true. It can't possibly be true that I am 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 years old, and I'm still running to prove to myself that I know what 'myself' is and what I need to do to be free in spite of the overwhelming evidence." And it is overwhelming that at the drop of a hat, I'm no freer than I was yesterday, than I was 10 years ago, or will be 10 years from now, because I still don't understand the nature of my captivity. And that's why Truth teachings, forever, are the most unpopular thing on the planet, because I don't want to know about where it is that I'm asleep and a captive of a consciousness set against itself. I want to know that tomorrow I'm going to be something special. I'll have more special stuff and I'll be less likely to suffer because I'll be in a more special situation than I was the day before. "Hallelujah, brother. Pass the plate." But even more rare than the self-knowledge I'm speaking about, which is that I don't want to know the truth of myself, is the knowledge that until I agree to face the truth of myself, I'll never be free.