Special Lessons

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.

It's there... and then it's not, The shadow of the sun. You can neither control the moment it appears, Nor the way it runs to hide itself, Mingling in the shadow of dusk... Until it simply just disappears.

If you were empowered to change life -- in order to give yourself whatever is always good and true for you to know and have -- would you ever make any other kind of changes? For example, would you fear unexpected events, such as a loss of some kind? No! Even though they may come as a surprise, you already know that they herald a new beginning of something better.

We love to be shown qualities within us that are positive. But love often shows us what is un-loving within us, much as the light of the sun creates shadows. To understand this is to realize that even in the darkest moment of some unwanted revelation, we are never without love; it is always there, even if -- as clouds sometimes hide the sun...

There isn't an instant in which you and I are not being touched by life for the purpose of life being changed by its own touch. Creation is never not happening. But to take part in it, to be a participant in it, requires that we understand that presently we are meeting life from a mind that is fast asleep in itself because it is intimately connected with desire that imagines a way to resolve itself.