Talk Takeaways

It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions.

The greatest prize hidden within our inner life is victory over death. Uncovering the treasure is a matter not of intellectual knowledge only, but of awareness, relationship, participation and understanding.

The desert in spiritual stories represents the endless useless struggle to escape from conflict, not seeing that the attempt to escape is the perpetuation of the conflict.

The true inner struggle is between the sense of self that seeks continuity, and the higher understanding that the sense of self is the captivity.

The consciousness that is responsible for the conflict suggests ways to bring an end to the conflict. It is an endless struggle with outside conditions that are blamed for the pain.

The natural energy that is inherent in resistance can be used for revelation of yourself for the intended purpose of self-transformation.

The mind's reaction to the registration of resistance is to fight against it -- fight against what is blamed for the pain of it -- which ensures that the prevailing sense of self will remain in place.

See the futility of trying to fix unwanted moments by denying them. The divided mind's solution to fix the unwanted moment IS the unwanted moment and its continuation.

Without awareness, the consciousness that denies unwanted moments reincarnates itself, rather than the natural change that could take place through the revelation of that consciousness.

The resistance that we feel is trying to bring us into an awareness of the consciousness that does not understand that the appearance of the resistance is the ground of a new beginning.

As long as we resist the end of something, we are simultaneously denying the new beginning that is hidden within the end.

Being aware of yourself is not the same as going into thought about yourself as someone who is aware.

The true teachings are not outside of you. Anytime you hear something true, you are simply remembering something that you had forgotten.

You won't have to ask what to do when you see who you are.

Don't try to not react. Instead become aware of the reactions, and see that the only problem is identification with them.

There is no such thing as separation between the spiritual and the practical. The truly spiritual IS the truly practical.