Special Lessons

Any real intention we set for ourselves to rise above our present level of being is going to reveal a lower level of self that doesn't want to change. This is a powerful spiritual law that creates both challenge and opportunity at the same time. The challenge: agreeing to see how our unconscious nature -- encased and enchanted by its own negative reactions -- is incapable of doing anything other than resisting unwanted moments.

Real success is a fearless state of being in a conscious relationship with an Intelligence that always achieves its ends despite ever-changing conditions. But, if we're honest, this order of spiritual success remains at a distance we've yet to traverse. At our present level of consciousness, our mind is always active, trying to figure out what we need to put together in our life to achieve its desired end.

The two great commandments -- that we should love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves -- are the necessary germinating forces that ultimately give flower to the potential for a human soul to not just reflect what the Divine has made, but to actually participate in the process.

The basic core of all true spiritual teachings is that the inner determines the outer. What this timeless idea means to us is that what we receive from life -- our experience of self in life -- is determined by how we perceive events. And how we see life is determined, each moment, by what we are looking at it through.

Little by little, the purpose of life for men and women has become directed to one thing: I want to get to the point in my life where there are no more disturbances. The purpose of this life is not to avoid disturbance, or to find a disturbance-free existence! If you examine this, you can see the fact of it for yourself. Are you getting more relaxed in life when it comes to people and problems?

Everyone wonders whether or not there is one great secret for truly successful living. There is. And it is not a secret. It has been quietly, steadily telling itself right in front of us all along. We just couldn't hear it over the clatter and chatter of our own secret demands. Listen quietly for a moment: everything can change right now. Learning to hear this supreme secret is no more difficult than choosing whether to swim against a current or to let it carry you safely...

If there's one thing that should be more than evident to everyone on the planet, it's that the level of pain in it is increasing. We'll prove this in a number of different ways before we're done with our talk, but we always want to move away from what's planetary and get personal right away. So let me ask you a question, and I'll state it in simple terms. How many of you suspect you're imbalanced? Human beings are imbalanced.

Too frequently we feel as though our lives are under the power of things outside of us and beyond our ability to deal with: prisoners in one way or another of an unfair social system, impossible work conditions, an unforgiving past, or a failed relationship. Even trying to assemble a build-it-yourself bookshelf that doesn't know it "goes together with ease" can lock us away in the "house of pain."

If you haven't noticed this yet about yourself, it's easy to see in others: we each seem to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. The nature of this burden may change with age. When young, we feel the weight of having to choose a direction in life. As adults, we feel encumbered by all the perceived requirements of an active life: trying to control events, win acceptance, maintain relationships, on and on, with each new self-shaped solution...

Have you ever gone through a crisis of some kind, and after 20 or 30 years of the same lesson coming back, you realize you have been walking along the same dark road? I know that it gets tough sometimes, but those of us who have any love whatsoever for what is true, good, and Divine should be encouraged. Because you have no idea what's on our side, how much is trying to be given to us at all times.

It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.

Do you want to know what tears the heart apart? What dries up the mind and kills the soul? It is the lies that remain inside of human beings because we have been duped into protecting something that secretly punishes us. And we mistake the idea of being protected for the same as being whole and complete when, of course, we can't be protected without a fear being protected by that lying nature.