Special Lessons

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

Can you remember that when you were young, you had a certain sense that there was a greatness about life and somehow or other you were related to it? We are born seeking something through which we know we matter. But little by little, this need to know ourselves through something is taken over by a nature that only begins to understand who and what it is by looking outside of itself for that confirmation.