Part 1:

What is that first, faint intuition of something Greater than ourselves, other than the Herald of the Heart quietly announcing the existence of a whole new level of being above us -- and asking us -- at the same time, if we will prepare ourselves to receive it.

Part 2:

Just as tumbling leaves in the wind makes the wind visible, so does the need of someone -- that stirs the heart of another to answer it -- reveal the presence of a Love greater than either person, yet that lives as one within both.

Part 3:

Real Love does not embrace what is unkind, cruel, and without conscience in human beings; yet it allows for it . . . knowing that all things dark and destructive must one day pay -- by an act of Love -- for their thoughtless expression.

Part 1: The pretense of kindness, of being loving, does not make those qualities real in us any more than an actor who plays the role of a talking tree in a play by Shakespeare is endowed with the strength of an oak!

Part 2: When we finally understand that we can not "prove" ourselves in this world without having first compared ourselves to it -- and that this kind of comparison is the unseen root of conflict -- then we will also know why we find no peace in winning the approval of others, and why no possession empowers us to live without fear.

Part 3: That we should search only our own conscience for confirmation of what is good and true, this is the best definition of integrity. For that which is good and true is not social in nature, but spiritual in need and in deed.

Part 1: To pause in the face of a challenge -- and measure there the possibility of our success by considering the odds against it -- not only keeps us from taking direct intuitive action, but such delays actually serve to make us captives of the same fear that we have taken as our council and guide.

Part 2: The secret of higher success is to make impersonal those times and places where we stumble or fall; whereas to take failure personally is to lose sight of Life's great exercise in transformation through self-discovery -- which is the reason why we are here on earth. In fact, there is no "self" to fail at anything, only a certain level of understanding not as yet adequate to the task set before it. To know this truth helps us transcend not only the trials we must face, but empowers us to drop those painful parts of ourselves that love to sit in judgment of everything!

The clock tells time, but its hands also show that times goes nowhere -- even though it takes a hundred parts in constant movement to impart that truth.

The force "to do" what is Right and True comes to us only as we free ourselves from those forces draining us of our power to perfect the moment. We can dream our lives away -- always trying to make ourselves into what we imagine is "right and true" -- or we can use our lives working to see what is true and, for those revelations, learn to do what is right. Only then are we empowered to make this grand discovery: participating in what is Real grants us a life far greater than anything we could have imagined.

Part I:

To see that the places where we feel stuck in life are really secret passageways -- provided for us to gain vital insight into our own greater potential -- is to no longer perceive these hurdles as a hindrance to success in life. In fact, once we learn to welcome whatever challenges us, we stand at the threshold of a new order of our own being, where never again will we feel ourselves to be a victim of anything!

Part II:

The great secret of getting ourselves "unstuck" -- of being empowered to leave behind us those problems that life sets before us, is to understand that before we can learn to walk through whatever stands in our way, we must take the first step of learning to willingly enter into it.

Part 1

When we go though life giving of ourselves the bare minimum to get by, it should come as no surprise to us that life returns to us the same! Excellence is the child of effort, whose parents are known as Patience and Love.

Part 2

The difference between quitting a task, as opposed to reaching the end of our possibilities with it . . . is this: Whenever we quit our wish to succeed at something, we have first embraced a false sense of hopelessness born of an equally false conclusion about ourselves: namely, that our past failings have formed an inescapable pattern. But, when we will work through a chosen task until we come to the end of our abilities and then remain there -- aware of our temporary limitations, as well as of those fearful parts of us that would punish us for them -- in such moments we stand at the threshold of our True Potential. For in our willingness to journey to what seems the end of us, we are gifted with the understanding that there is no ending to our True Self; and so, each time we dare to tread these unknown lands of ourselves, dawns within us a new and Higher set of Personal Possibilities, along with the will to explore them.

Part 1

Whoever would set blame upon another for feeling misunderstood, or who becomes bitter towards those thought to have let him down, has failed to realize the following self-liberating truth: the first root of sorrow in this life is not for what others have or have not done to us. Our suffering over the "shortcomings" of others is nothing less than the stuff of what we have yet to understand about ourselves.

Part 2

If anything we do in our relationship with another encourages him to feel as though there's something righteous about his anger, or in any way lends substance to his insistence that he has good reason to feel sorry for himself, then we do not help this person but serve only to strengthen his weakness along with our own.

Part 1

Mediocrity is a form of madness, a dream embraced by the masses because it makes just getting by an acceptable -- sometimes applauded -- social art form. What is excellent requires extra effort. To agree to sleep our way through life is to lose everything, because it rules out the possibility of our soul ever being stirred into its awakening.

Part 2

If we will only dare give everything we have to whatever we may be doing at the moment then, when that relationship reaches its natural end, we will always find we have been given more than we had at the start. It is Law: to be filled anew, we must fully empty ourselves of ourselves time and time again.

Part 1

The basis of whatever acts to frighten us is nothing more than a fear we dream without knowing our suffering for this slumbering; this means that the fearless life for which we long is never any further away from us than our wish, will, and inner work to be self-awakening.

Part 2

To speak of how others should change, in order to heal our world of its growing unkindness, without first looking into ourselves to see where we are a part of this pain, is worse than hypocrisy. The voice of this deluded self finds it easier to condemn the darkness spreading out from its own feet than to embrace the Light that lives just above it: a Light that alone is capable of revealing and healing the source of this secret rift in the soul.

Part 1

We spend so much of our time thinking and re-thinking about how to succeed with our personal escape plans that -- for these same dreams of a freedom to come -- it never has a chance to dawn on us that our True Nature cannot be made a prisoner of anything!

Part 2

When nothing seems to be going right, make your world a brighter place by remembering this simple truth: Whatever we resist, persists -- so the wise action to take toward any unwanted moment begins with welcoming what challenges us about it. To reach for this new understanding is the same as enjoying its powers, including the ease with which you can then go on to make whatever changes are still seen as being needful of your touch.

Part I:

Some come upon the truth of things only once they've run aground on the reefs of remorse; others long for anchorage in what endures only after the winds of fortune slack off, leaving their sails full of emptiness. But the Wise seek the Truth of themselves aright; they search moment to moment within the tides of their everyday affairs, and never look back to see if their wish to know what is Eternal and True has taken their vessel too far out to sea.

Part II: Once we begin to consciously suffer for the sake of understanding our suffering (as opposed to unconsciously suffering in the attempt to escape the same), our pain becomes part of a process greater than ourselves: then we are born into a new relationship whose transcendent existence is, itself, the answer to our suffering, and in which our sorrow is answered and resolved.

Part I:

Detect and deliberately drop all fearful thoughts about what "may be" your future and you release yourself from a present torment whose unseen driving force is your consent to consider darkly imagined tomorrows.

Part II:

We should never measure ourselves according to our "possibilities" because all such estimations of self are always based in secretly embraced evaluations of our own past; rather we ought to give ourselves over to what seems impossible to us because we are only truly fulfilled in this life to the extent that we are able to transcend who we have been!

Part III:

We never see what we "can't do" in life without feeling a fear or some form of frustration for our perceived limitation. But what we don't see in these moments is that we have been temporarily blinded by these same negative states, so that all we see before us is some impassible moment whose walls have no reality apart from the illusion created by their unyielding dark appearance!