Talk Takeaways

The cost of freedom is letting go of the idea that there is a "you" that is going to find freedom in a time to come.

It is not life that is hard, but there is something in us that has hardened itself against life.

Your mind will never be able to take you past the point that it cannot go, but your mind can understand that fact.

Every desire has a corresponding identity attached to it.

The problem is never with what is seen outside of yourself. The problem is the nature of the seer. The observer is the observed.

The only problem that you have with life is what you want from it.

We believe wanting or not-wanting is the solution to our suffering, when in reality our suffering is caused by wanting and not-wanting. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want."

Freedom is the end of our present unconscious relationship with desires that imagine and pursue freedom. In the pursuit of imagined freedom, we are forever passed off from one desire to the next.

Not-wanting something cannot appear without a corresponding want.

Mountains disappear as being a problem when the mountain-maker disappears. The mountain-maker cannot see itself, but it can be seen by the awareness that understands it.

The divided consciousness produces the fear of the mountain it perceives, and at the same time it pursues freedom from the very fear it has produced.

Spiritually speaking, there is no such thing as a time to come. In reality there is only the awareness of the experience of yourself in the present moment.

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and to know that place for the first time." -- T. S. Eliot

Oftentimes the evidence of having refused a lesson does not appear until years later. You just have to go through these stages.