In the highest parts of our consciousness, there is a living relationship whose meaning is inseparable from the world that it sees and experiences. There is no need to "take thought" in order to know that we are alive. To think for ourselves properly means to be aware of our reactions to the world, and to not allow those reactions to run wild on their own...

We don't typically have much awareness of what is timeless because we are usually the prisoner of a mind that is seeking to become something in time. However, it is possible to see -- without taking thought -- that everything eternal is already in perfect harmony. This means that we can stop struggling uselessly to put the Universe back into order.

The value of finding a true spiritual work group is that the whole body of the group -- together -- can help individuals reconnect with inner truths that they have lost contact with. There is a unity that exists in the consciousness of true spiritual aspirants who understand that the experience of one... is the experience of all.

Whenever there is an unconscious inner dialog going on in our heads, we are actually looking in a mirror that we don't know is a mirror. And what we see in our mind's eye talks to us about what we must make ourselves into so that we might finally find rest and be at peace. Freedom from the dark inner dialog begins by seeing that the "self" that is talking to us only exists as long as we...

Real reactions are wordless, soundless, and even without familiar content. They are just the expression of something timeless touching something in time. The mind talks to itself in order to define these reactions for its own purposes, using its own past content in a vain attempt to reconcile the moment. The true reconciliation of any reaction is built into the very moment of the appearance of it...

We don't usually think to ourselves that we're asleep and that our entire identity is the moment to moment fabrication of what we are reacting to in that instant. Until there is something that rides the waves of these reactions and sees them crest and fall, we will appear and disappear with every last wave. In watching the waves we will not mistake ourselves for being the waves.

What we call "talking to ourselves" is really the action of a consciousness that produces negative assumptions, and then plots how to bring an end to the very storm that it is seeding. We can't stop that level of mind from creating storms, but seeing them changes our relationship to that consciousness, and then we don't unconsciously reseed them. They appear and then disappear. Then you are...

There are so many things for a person to love, but if we ever want to be what it is that we say we want to be, then we must have one love. It is the extent to which we love -- and the degree to which we make the appropriate sacrifices for that love -- that the very thing we love rewards us with the relationship we long for.

Every human being has a longing in their heart to transcend their present level of understanding and reach new possibilities. In order to do that, we are all going to meet the giant of discouragement. We become discouraged when we see ourselves not live up to some idea or image we have when a moment comes along and we can't succeed as imagined in that moment...

Our work is to consistently take pictures of ourselves, to be able to step outside the stream of the mechanical, comfort-seeking, falsely-contented self so that we can start to see ourselves as we are, and not as we imagine ourselves to be.

To make bread you have to bring a lot of different ingredients together. Each ingredient by itself, or even mixed together, does not make bread. The individual ingredients must have heat applied and be married together in order to create something altogether new that is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Human beings walk around in a kind of self-made suffering that is the expression of something in us that is afraid of seeing ourselves as we are. We've come to think that avoiding a unwanted fact about ourselves is the same as escaping the effects. Our lives should be a ceaseless realization of where we miss the mark, because that is the only way to transcend the idea that...