Special Lessons

Compassion for others starts with the understanding that every human being on the planet looks different from us -- because physically we are different -- but inwardly we all live in the same pool. We all have pain and pleasure, we all share emotions that move in waves through that pool. People may live on the east bank of the pool so that the waves they know are different from the waves we know on the west bank, but if we look close enough...

Whether in a simple truth tale, or in a moment of great personal crisis, don't fear what life is trying to show you about itself and about you. Don't be afraid to let the truth strike you. Welcome it! Yes! Don't resist anything that threatens to pull the rug out from under your feet...

When we are "driven" to succeed in this world, it is always to arrive at some point wherein we will no longer feel as though something is missing in us. All such drives in us are doomed at the outset. Here's why...

Love exists. She is never not present although her life-giving presence is rarely perceived, much in the same way as we breathe in air moment to moment barely noticing the gift of life it sustains. Nothing exists without Love. She is the secret Heart of all. These are not just words. They are an introduction to an Invitation created when Time began. To what are we invited? To know that we are already a measure of Love's Timeless Life...

What if you actually understood there is no death? Think for a moment what your life would be like. And I'm not just talking about the incessant human fear of their mortality. I'm talking about those moments in which it feels like you're dying because something has happened to you that you don't like, and how you struggle to keep alive the very thing caught in that crisis -- that nature struggling, suffering instead of understanding that the moment has come...

Almost every day I receive a letter, an e-mail, or phone call from an aspirant who wants to know, essentially, the following: "What must I do to succeed spiritually?" Or, in a slight variation on that theme: "What's the right way to do what I must in order to awaken?"

Within each of us lives a tireless, latent longing to touch -- and be touched by -- life's invisible celestial forces. For instance, whenever we stand as a silent witness to the endless expanse of a dark night sky, we are inwardly moved by this outer display of timelessness spread out above us...

As difficult and shocking as it may be to consider, within us dwells a certain level of unconscious desire that loves... to not want. It has but one purpose: This part of us "lives" to resist anything that doesn't live up to its expectations. Why would anything want to live like that? Because what this dark nature likes most of all is being negative!

I am always surprised by your strength -- by how happy I am to be too weak to do anything except completely accept you. What is this power of yours? How shall I understand it? 

Are you a Gathering Force? When you come, do you collect all the parts of me that have wandered off high and low looking for you... somehow drawing them all into one place wherein their deep peace is that they once again know that they need never look for anything...

The truth is that letting go is very simple and, above all, natural; as natural for you and I as it is for a tree to shed the heavy, sun-ripened fruit that clings to its branches. Why? Because both man and tree, in fact all living things, are created to drop what is no longer needed. For the tree, the falling fruit carries its matured seed to the ground. No unnatural force is necessary. In a similar fashion -- that is to say, under higher but equally exacting laws...

Our experience in life is what it is teaching us: that the whole business of reaching for what we do and the way we do it is incapable of producing the perfection that our heart is looking for. What is it about seeing a great performer, a great athlete, a great mind that makes them seem so special? Is it what they have been able to bring into their lives as a result of what they love? Or is it the love itself that the person has become an expression of?

There are three ways to get what one wants from life: industry, cunning, or love. Industry is good but at best conditional, for it is subject to the passage and ravages of time. The "crafty" inevitably trap themselves. Love, on the other hand, liberates those who seek its company, and it is timeless. When all is said and done, this order of love has the last word because it is its own reward: whatever we are willing to let it make of us, it fashions from itself.