Talk Takeaways
In order to realize what awaits us, we must understand the nature that interferes with that realization.
It is a misunderstanding to get lost in misunderstanding.
As paradoxical as it sounds, life is found within the season of emptiness just as it is found within the season of fullness when everything is in bloom. Everything that is born anew comes out of emptiness.
Life for us now seems to be one long exercise is trying to stay one step ahead of anything that threatens to disturb us.
Nothing ends without something beginning, but you avoid the end of things due to a misunderstanding of the true nature of endings and beginnings. The night does not exist without the day; the end does not exist without a new beginning.
What if the rain that seems to come out of nowhere is exactly what is needed for the soul to have a new flowering? You have to find out what happens when you stand in the rain long enough. God is Good, and God only gives.
We don't understand the darkness because a part of us thinks it is the light when it resists the darkness.
Death is perfect emptiness, and fear is afraid of it because it cannot see beyond it. Fear cannot find a familiar 'I' beyond death, beyond the darkness that it resists.
On the other side of the emptiness is a new understanding. A new order of self cannot be born without the end of the old order of self.
When something ends, what we really fear is not the object that fear points to. What it really fears is the loss of the identity that it is protecting.
"Hope in things seen" is fear attempting to restore and keep in place the identity, the sense of self, that it fears losing.
The roots of a tree are in darkness, while the trunk, branches and leaves reach for the light. But ultimately the tree owes its existence to the union that takes place when those two worlds meet.
You never suffer more than when you imagine your future.
You are not meant to invent a life for yourself. You are meant to participate in the larger life that has already been prepared for you.
What is it that the self needs to win? It needs to win the freedom that it believes was taken from it.
Darkness nor emptiness are not the hearlds of the end of life. Rather, darkness and emptiness are the heralds of a new understanding about God's life. Within you is the unexplored territory of God's life.
We are intended to use the lives we are given in order to realize that we are created as a bridge through which the opposites -- light and darkness, emptiness and fullness, time and timelessness -- can be united in the now.
In avoiding moments that we don't want, we are avoiding the very purpose of our existence.
Don't try to stop talking to yourself. Instead, see the compulsion to talk to yourself as an avoidance of emptiness.
Being present includes awareness of what it is that pulls you out of presence.
Do what is in your power, and refuse to do what is not.
There is no unnatural tension without demands. There is no anger without demands. There is no judgment without demands.
Key Lesson 
