We can't really know love's power to free us, to fulfill us through our relationships, until we gain some totally new ideas about how to see, and then interact with others. Not just a rehash of our past failed viewpoint; we know that path is powerless to heal the aching heart. An altogether higher view is called for. We need to be able to see others through the "eyes" of a completely fresh understanding...

Can you see that there is something inside of you that immediately begins to tell you what any event means and what you need to do about it? You've been with this storyteller for so long, it's an unquestioned presence in your mind. It's just part of what we call our life. But this storyteller isn't really alive. Its story is to ensure the continuation of its life...

No moment can be different than it is. We can't change a moment that comes. The moment (and its content) appears from within us, before us, and we are relegated to being able to see it but not to change the very thing that we're looking at as it appears. So that whether we like it or not actually means nothing.

Question: I live as if things are coming to an end. No matter what good thing is happening in my life, I am looking at it as just temporary. This is horrible for me, and I don't want to miss out on any more of life! Answer: If you want to be free, I'm going to explain "how." Why would any of us want to meet every moment of our life with a certainty that, "Nothing's going to work out...

Any time you are sitting at home and a thought comes and says, "What about this? What about them? What's going to happen if this?" you are burdened. You are carrying on your back, in your heart, in your mind, the weight of a set of thoughts and feelings you believe have the right to ride you to where they tell you to go... as if you were saddled by a donkey!

We live in a stream of a living light that never stops pouring down upon us, even as it ceaselessly wells up from within us. The first part of this opening comment is obvious: sunlight streams down moment to moment upon our earth, vitalizing and nourishing all that it touches. And while this order of light allows us to see all the marvelous forms and colors that our physical eyes behold...

The next time you run into some familiar blockage or begin to feel unsuited to face some new and difficult personal challenge, don't do what you've always done before. Don't try to think your way around it. You no longer want a way around your troubles because what goes around, comes around! What you want is to grow beyond the level of that disturbance. And to do that, you must not act from it.

There is nothing that takes place in life, including all the ugliness in it, that isn't part of our preparation for discovering within ourselves the eternal ability to transcend what has been disturbed. And the way in which the eternal process of transcending what is disturbed takes place through an act of Love.

There is a simple, self-evident truth, a certain kind of insight that is the ground of self-realization. It is actually the ground of a person's gradual entrance into a new level of being. Using a simple analogy, the more still the waters are in a lake, the truer the reflections from that body of water. If the surface is rippled, you see nothing. If it's just barely rippling, you see just some of what is being reflected from above.

Every time you get negative, you drain from yourself something vital to the development of your soul. But every time you catch yourself in those dark waters that carry you away, you add something to your development by working to understand them. The source of those dark, raging waters is an illusion. It is the illusion that is part and parcel with the present activity of your mind...

One way or another, we all suffer over things that we can't stop doing to ourselves or to others. Adding to the conflict inherent in self-compromising behaviors is the fact that it's frustrating beyond belief since most of us (in some way) have built a business, worked, and succeeded in some place - won accolades, impressed our friends - and we've weathered storms.

Can you think of a way in which you regularly sabotage yourself? You sabotage yourself when "something" in you acts against yourself. Now, for most of us, we have a passing understanding of an idea like that because we recognize that we don't want to hurt ourselves. We don't want to hurt others. We don't want to be a burden to this planet. We don't want to do a lot of the things we do.