Talk Takeaways

What if there really is only one answer to every painful question you have ever had about life?

Rumi said, "The antidote is in the venom." Sometimes alongside a poisonous plant in nature is another plant that is the remedy to the poison.

Following right on the tail of any disturbing moment are questions about what the disturbance means and how to resolve it. Rarely are we ever curious about what it is that is asking the question.

A psychological disturbance is always connected to an attachment or one kind or another, where it seems as if the circumstance is threatening to take away something that we think is valuable.

The mind's solution to the question that comes out of the disturbance turns out to be the source of the next problem.

Every disturbance in nature is part of the process of rebirth in nature. The active disturbance serves to bring out something lying dormant that could not be stirred to the surface in any other way.

Unnecessary suffering continues because we have always asked the same questions at the moment of suffering.

The punchline of the detective story was: "The real answer I need in these moments of disturbance appears when YOU (the questions that appear to rescue me) disappear."

If a disturbance were taking place in me and I was truly present to it, then I would not have to ask questions about it.

If I am not apart from the moment of disturbance, then I am part of the awareness of the disturbance and participating in its purpose. However, there is something in us that separates itself from the Will of the Divine.

Revelations are unspoken answers to the prayers of the heart, and not, as they are often mistaken to be, intended to be turned into questions. The stumbling block is that the revelation challenges the very existence of the self that wants the continuity of itself.

Sometimes a question about a disturbance isn't spoken in words, but instead can take the form of a vague anxiety, an unspoken fear.

You are the answer to any moment of disturbance. Everything else is hearsay or a rumor.

Enlightenment is the state of light acting upon darkness. It already exists, and we wink in and out of that reality. We do not gradually become someone who is enlightened. Real 'I' does not reference itself as anything.

Questions that follow resistance are a form of avoidance, not a form of engagement as it seems.

There is no room for imagination in the spiritual life. There is no need for it.