Special Lessons

When you think of a single beautiful flower in springtime -- while it may stand with petals and leaves that look a certain way -- you'll never find a single flower the same as any other flower. Can you understand that the life of that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you say is beautiful.

Unconscious desire is the root of corruption. What I desire, what you desire -- whatever it may be -- we can find a way, as surely as the sun will rise, to justify what we want. And because we can justify what we want, it means, at any given point in time, the end will justify the means. "I need this because I was treated like this when I was growing up;" "I need this because I'm not as attractive as someone else;" "I have to have this because I'm getting older"...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Isn't it phenomenal that we spend our lives trying to produce powers for ourselves to protect and keep in place all the things that we believe are necessary for us to have a life with the least possible worry? And yet, our days are consumed with spending thought and emotional energy trying to figure out how this change affects that, and what that change means over here -- all the time trying to put back together a life we hope to finally have without...