Special Lessons

To be able to see any life event -- good or bad -- as a vehicle to help transport us from our present level of understanding to a higher one requires that we develop a new relationship with these unwanted events in our lives. Instead of trying to protect ourselves from them, we must become willing to see what they are revealing to us about ourselves in that same moment. The difference between these two paths and their attending possibilities...

Even though we all have our natural preference, no season of the year is greater than any other. Each plays an indispensable role in a cycle of life greater than its individual parts; and each one serves the season that follows on its heels, enabling it to fulfill its purpose in a procession as timeless as the earth itself...

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance...

Most of us don't understand the nature of time and our place within it, and so we know nothing of timelessness, save for those rare instances when we encounter transcendent beauty and are transported out of our usual train of thought in time, into the timeless.

What is it that makes us feel powerless when someone does something and it punishes us, or we hear some unwanted news? Let's examine it. Something happens that I don't like, and what am I looking at in that moment? I'm not looking at the thing that I don't like. What I'm "looking at" is the whole condition of myself that feels challenged, threatened by, overcome through whatever it is that it sees. But what does it see other than something that it resists?

Why do I ever get frustrated with someone or something? Why am I frustrated with them? Because they're bringing up inside of me what I don't know what to do with, because they are making me aware of a pain that was part of my life before I sat down to have the pie with them -- that's why.

It's crucial for us to understand that the thrust of our habitual thinking lives with its attention fixed, not on beginnings, but on the end of things. Don't we always wonder what our lives will be like tomorrow? Aren't we forever dreaming about how different things will be once we win this or achieve that? Don't we, in our mind's eye, perpetually walk towards a brighter moment to come, thinking about how good we'll feel once we're able to resolve some...

The perfectly present moment is both the seed of who you are and of your experience of now. And just as you can't separate who you are from your experience of now, neither can you separate now from the real moment of change. They are the same. You can't end conflict later. You can't stop being sad, or cruel, or angry, or scared, or anxious later. Later does not exist in reality. This self-created, false concept of time allows it to create yet...

Perhaps you've worked hard to be more aware of yourself in the Now, and that for this effort you catch a glimpse of how quick you are to judge others, to criticize them for their "failings." This pain that strains you -- and those you touch with it -- is itself a creation of a false sense of your own perfection. But your awareness of its punishing presence within you is the same as your invitation to transcend the negative nature that is responsible for it.

What is one of the most limiting ideas that our physical senses report to us? The idea of time. "Time! Where's it going? I can't hold onto anything, try as I might: what I won; how you felt; the way she looked; the things I love..." Like the torrent of a strange river that vanishes from view as it rounds an impassable bend in a shadow-filled gorge, what is past just disappears, leaving only memory in its wake, itself subject to the ravaging passage of time.

The easiest thing in the world is to walk around unconsciously feeling superior to everyone we meet. But with what do we measure? A critical spirit? A judgmental mind? What kind of eyes have to look down on another to convince themselves of up?

This world we live in is filled with increasing conflict. And the question is, is there any way in which we as individuals can become something that is not a continuation of this suffering so that by our own work we begin to be a different kind of human being? The answer is most assuredly yes, but to do so, we must first work at new understanding.