There is a spiritual idea that appears in the New Testament which states, "Ask and ye shall receive. Knock and the door will be opened to you." It is our mistaken belief this idea is saying that all of our desires will be fulfilled simply by asking God, and that our "order" should be filled to our exact specifications as quickly as possible. Most of us have to learn the hard way about what it...

An ember lying in a fireplace cannot do anything to ignite itself. However conditions can be created in which the ember can be brought into a new relationship with its environment and thus be turned into a small flame. The point at which the ember catches fire is its ignition point. There is an ignition point for physical objects, but there also exists a kind of spiritual ignition point. A tru...

We cannot grow spiritually without receptivity, but presently most of us do not understand receptivity in its entirety. As it often happens now, there are moments of being receptive to a higher impression, but then the impression is immediately taken over by the sensation of the impression, so that our minds instantly turn a moment of receptivity into a moment of "my" experience.

The momentum of our daily lives can sometimes make it seem like we are on a runaway train. But for those of us who are tired of going nowhere, it is possible to catch ourselves

To one degree or another we have all forgotten what is perhaps the single greatest gift that can be given to a human being: the power to make anything in creation tell us all about itself. We are intended to be in direct relationship with all of the elements and qualities that live within us. We usually defer to some form of negativity in difficult moments. If we really want freedom from fear...

What is a hypocrite? A hypocrite is someone who professes one thing, but does another. Is there anyone on earth who has not fit that definition at one time or another? We have all experienced firsthand the painful effects of living from a hypocritical nature. A person who is beginning to be a conscious hypocrite is someone who realizes that the right thing to do in a moment of trial is almost...

Spiritually speaking, absolutely nothing stands in our way except what we do not yet know about ourselves. This means that we do not have to look anywhere else. The other side of this idea that nothing stands in our way is that there are many parts of us that don't want us to know about them at all. These parts have absolutely no interest in anything revelatory taking place. It is impossible...

Most of us like to receive a love letter or a letter from a friend. Why? Because the letter represents a kind of relationship that is expressed through correspondence. We naturally long to correspond with real life. We like music, for instance, because it produces a corresponding movement in us. Music is correspondence. We love the beauty of music because there is a corresponding beauty inside...

There is a definitive risk connected to opening oneself up to intimate relationships. Relationships introduce us to not only the light and bright parts of ourselves, but also to interior parts that are unknown and in the dark. Life serves to introduce us to ourselves. Life brings us lesson after lesson, but currently we are selective lesson choosers because we only want to see what we imagine...

Everything is right before your eyes. It actually is. What the eyes can take in, the mind can really wrap itself around. Whenever there is crisis a challenge of some kind, the content of our minds rush in and provide us with a familiar path, which seems to be an escape route but really turns out to be the circle of that self. The road that needs to be taken is one that isn't really seen other...

What happens within us when an unwanted moment takes place? The answer is that we are instantaneously filled with resistance to that moment. What we call the unwanted moment is really a reflection of an order of ourselves that the moment reveals. We never meet anything other than ourselves. When a moment reveals something that we do not like, it is actually something within us that doesn't wan...

How much time do we spend each day in some kind of negative self-absorption? Probably more time than we would care to admit. Negative self-absorption is really a form of unconsciously taking something from ourselves in order to ensure that we will continue feeling the way we do. Whenever we are negatively self-absorbed we are actually absorbed in what we don't want! We must catch ourselves ov...