Special Lessons

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.

There is a Love that transcends every experience that a human being can have of the sensation or the emotion that we call "love." It isn't the love we have for our family. It isn't the love we have for nature. It isn't even the love that we feel when we're thinking about a truth and we feel uplifted by it. It is a Love of a completely different order.

One day an announcement was posted. It said there would be an open series of marathons and foot races comprised of various distances and degrees of difficulty. All who wished to test themselves against course, clock, and each other, were invited to compete for fabulous gifts and prizes, as well as for national recognition for being the best in their class.

As we're about to discover, the little phrase, "I see myself," describes a single action that has the power to change the heart of whoever is willing to embrace its practice. But, before we examine the exercise, let's take a closer look at what it means to "see ourselves" -- as we are -- especially when someone else has failed to please us.

The fact that we always want something from the moment -- even if it's to not want what it offers or has otherwise come to reveal -- blinds us to the fact that every moment is always giving us... showering us... with the Light of a Life that wants for nothing.

It is no stretch of the imagination to say that many days most people wrestle with some form of discontentment about their lot in life. Add to this an equal if not greater amount of time spent searching for the solution they think will "cure" this confliction, and it might surprise us how pervasive runs this human pastime of trying to dodge these feelings of being discontent...

No gulf exists between your life and God's life, except for your awareness of yourself. No time, no space exists between you and God's life -- only the level of awareness from which you live determines whether you understand this unity or not. That means the task is not to try to change things in time and space, but to bring yourself back into the moment where the possibility of this relationship already exists, and where your realization of it...

Why do we limit the impression we have of any given moment? We never limit an impression when we're sitting in front of a nice plate of food. Can't get enough of that! We never limit the impression of the idea of some beautiful place to go where we're going to have a marvelous time. There's no limitation to the impression produced by imagination. We want it with every bit of our being!

When things naturally come to a close in life, our pain isn't so much born of the fact that something now ends, as it is that within this moment of ending, we are forced to meet a certain order of emptiness in us for which we are just not prepared. We are brought face to face with a great void in the center of our heart that we thought had been filled. And then we make this common, but largely unrealized mistake...

We are created to know ourselves not by what we think about, but to know ourselves within God's ever-present, perfectly changing Life. The challenge for us is that we are habituated to thinking about ourselves and deriving a sensation of ourselves based upon the images that we consider.

Where is the border between conscience and unconsciousness? The reason the world is beyond repair is because it is populated by a race of beings that now believe that they are conscious. They are not conscious; you are not conscious. The proof that you are not conscious is that you hurt one another, that's the proof of it. And that you hurt yourself, that's the proof of it. Every time you talk to yourself, every time you punish yourself...

Our attention is precious. Our attention may be the most important thing that we own, and almost none of us own any of our own attention. Anybody can take it. A phone call can take it. The news can take it. Look in the mirror and it can be stolen. I'm looking in the mirror and I don't look anything like I'm supposed to look, and if I look in the mirror and I don't see what I like, where does my attention go?