Save Years of Useless Struggle with One Unthinkable Insight

Talk Takeaways

Struggling to get what you want always sets you against other human beings.

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers." -- New Testament

Not wanting a condition is the same as struggling to control the condition you don't want.

Some moments are as painful as they are because you have an idea that they should not be that way. The real source of conflict is your ideas of what you want and don't want.

In unwanted moments, we are not aware of the resistance itself. What we see in those moments is what the resistance tells us the moment is about.

Resistance seems to prove that the moment is worth struggling over.

The way the divided mind brings you into its service is to threaten that you will lose something of value if you don't follow its demands.

The nature that thinks about the past IS the past that it thinks about.

The time to come that you worry about does not exist until the mind starts worrying about it.

Useless suffering does not prove that you are real. It proves that you have not seen that it is useless.

The useful struggle is to see the consciousness that struggles uselessly with the exterior world.

There is an impersonal resistance that is a necessary component of creation. The impersonal resistance of creation includes necessary suffering.

Impersonal resistance is part of who you really are and can be used appropriately, as opposed to naming and explaining what the resistance is and trying to resolve it with your mind.

It is useless to imagine a world without suffering.

Exercise: Can you think of something that you do habitually that you can see is a useless struggle? Find one thing that you do that you suspect is useless. See that something in you is terrified to live without struggling with what is useless. The new struggle is to be aware of the truth about the nature of useless struggle. Keep your attention inward.

Resistance reveals what was concealed the moment before.

There are two kinds of struggle: The struggle to confirm, and the struggle to clarify.