The Secret of Starting Life Over Starts Here

Talk Takeaways

We are the way we are because of what we turn to in unwanted moments. As long as you spend your life not wanting, you will have the life you don't want.

You do not know how to be yourself. All that you have are the derivative images that have been picked up through the years about what it means to be a successful human being.

Our sense of self is based on a fight with life, trying to make it to conform to the images we have about who we are.

What we really want most of all is to have our own life. The problem is that we do not know what it really means to have our own life.

Pain sends us out on a search for pleasure, and that is what we think it means to have to our own life.

"'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.' Nicodemus saith unto him, 'How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?' Jesus answered, 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." -- New Testament

The phrase "born again" is more truly meant to connote being "born from above."

Temptation is to identify with things that we have been deceived into believing will complete us.

We see and experience life through what we understand. Until we are above our present level of understanding, we cannot see or experience anything new. To understand anew is what metanoia is.

What does it mean to look within? It means to realize, moment to moment, what God has made you to be in that moment, where the Divine is showing you the fact of who and what you are.

Stop trying to make life in your own likeness. What you like will always comes with what you don't like.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase 'each other' doesn't make any sense." -- Jalal al-Din Rumi

When something is born from above, it is so new that it does not have a name. Meanwhile, we cannot wait to give everything a name.

All discovery begins with negation. You cannot enter into something new without first departing from the old.

Resistance seems to create a distance between yourself and what you see.

Your conclusion is your tragedy, because the fact is that you are never not being created. The process of being born from above is never not happening. In order for something to be born from above, something must give itself up.

Every reaction knows what is right and what is wrong. Every reaction comes with judgment.

Exercise: Return to the beginning. Only the beginning can reveal false conclusions. Move your attention from what the reaction tells you is true, and instead place your attention on the awareness of the reaction.