Special Lessons

Have you ever noticed how the more negative you get, the more difficult everything about your life becomes, including being able to do the simplest things? It's like suddenly sinking into dark molasses, where not only can't you move, but everything you don't want seems stuck to you!...

Wouldn't it be a real relief to get outside the limitations of negative reactions? But how do we get there? How can we be certain we're headed in the right direction?" Here is a great secret known only by those who have made the journey before us: Walk away from the mental "how" into the spiritual Now. And here is one of the keys to this special instruction: The journey outside of yourself doesn't...

Our present level of Self -- with its accumulated fears, compulsions, and doubts -- knows only one way to deal with the disturbances that upset its precarious balance. It thinks about them. It calls on the body of its collected past experiences, compares them to its current situation, and then concludes both the nature of the problem and what must be done to "deal" with it...

The universe is a work being continually perfected; though unseen, it is justice, compassion in action. Those who resist and resent what comes their way -- who fight with its unending waves that rock their contrived sense of reality -- are actually the ones who live without real choice. They must serve their struggle to resolve the sense of loss that comes each time the world changes without first having consulted them.

Whenever the right two stones are struck together, a spark will appear; there is a flash of light. This same principle holds true whenever we "collide" with life. In that instant parts of us that we've never seen before are illuminated. For instance, who hasn't crashed into that dreaded moment when we realize that someone we love has had a change of heart toward us?

It seems natural to fear moments we don't want, to avoid any knock at the door of some untimely event. But it's not these moments themselves that we are afraid of: what we fear is our reaction to them, so that we can't see that this experience we don't want... is actually the pain of a negative reaction as it unfolds within us.

Our work, in terms of reclaiming our right as human beings to be in relationship with what we choose to be in relationship with, begins with being able to see that we suffer because choices are made for us. And it's an unnecessary suffering.

All the wisdom you and I will ever need already lives within us. It's just that we are not where the wisdom is. Why? Because we want to be smart! Because we want to know, we want to prove, we want to get, we want to be seen as something special. All human beings with that mindset are fated to suffer themselves, until one day they see this doesn't work. In that same moment the...

The mind that wants to know the truth of something, and that's willing to do the work required for such a discovery, will inevitably find that for which it is searching; our highest aspirations are reflections of unrealized possibilities. All scripture, from the east to the West, confirms this timeless truth: We need only ask, and it shall be given.

There is an unseen source of daily suffering that is the constant companion of humanity. It is in one respect one of the great driving forces behind the darkness that encompasses this planet -- the unremitting wars, the violence, the greed, the fear, the desperation -- all the things we see in the world around us...

There is an unseen source of daily suffering that is the constant companion of humanity. It is in one respect one of the great driving forces behind the darkness that encompasses this planet -- the unremitting wars, the violence, the greed, the fear, the desperation -- all the things we see in the world around us...

One of the most slippery parts of the upper path is the temptation to judge ourselves -- to loath ourselves for whatever "weakness" is exposed to us in the moment. The act of judging ourselves in times like these seems natural and even necessary if we hope to ever "outgrow" our own limitations as revealed. But this kind of self-laceration is a Trojan horse within whose dark recesses lies...