Talk Takeaways

Between awakening and rebirth there has to be a death. Nothing is born anew that doesn't die to what it was before.

Our lives are presently the experience of our own creation.

Until we are aware of what dwells in the dark of ourselves, we are subject to whatever that nature does in the absence of that awareness.

Imagined security requires an imagined self to keep it in place. Imagined security must always be defended from an imagined threat.

At any moment of uncertainty, the chaos of thought will reimagine a new plan so that there can be a sense of certainty again.

You can't separate a painful psychological state from the reasons that the mind gives as to why that suffering is there.

"The central urge in every atom, to return to its divine source and origin." -- Walt Whitman -- This is the same as the story of the prodigal son, in which he went out from home, followed by a return journey.

Between awakening and rebirth there is unbecoming, the process of liberation from the illusory idea that we have to create our own lives.

All the great teachings say, "Lose your life to find it." Follow these iterations of suffering and the imagination that tries to escape from it:
1. There is no suffering without unconscious desire.
2. No unconscious desires without imagination.
3. No imagination without something wanted or not wanted to imagine.
4. No imagination without identification with what's being imagined as missing.
5. Nothing is imagined as missing without a sense of self in need of it.
6. No incomplete sense of self without time needed to close the distance -- or enlarge it -- an imagined distance within which lives and journeys an imagined self... filling the journey with imaginary victories and losses.
7. And all leading back -- never actually leaving the original suffering --
There is no answer to this suffering in time... The world of time is the source of it.

There is no incomplete sense of self that can exist without time. Time is the imagined distance between the incomplete sense of self and what is imagined is needed to complete it.

"Say nothing more to yourself than what the first appearances report. Suppose that it has been reported to you that a certain person speaks ill of you. This has been reported, but that you have been injured has not been reported... Thus then always abide by the first appearances, and add nothing yourself from within, and then nothing hurtful happens to you." -- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)

The "fallen maker" never stops talking to you in order to bring you into its world.

The more you know the fact that you can't save yourself, the more you realize that there is no self that needs to be saved.

"Unbecoming" is not becoming something else. It is shedding the illusion that you need to become something other than what already is.

In the story of Adam and Eve, they were tempted to become something, when what they already were was what they needed.

Suffering over being in the make-believe world seems to prove that the make-believe world is real.