Special Lessons

There is only one way that any of us will ever know the real meaning of Christ's life, and that is... to share in his death. This means we must give up what he gave up if we would know, from ourselves, what was gained through his deliberate sacrifice.

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!

Why is it that peace of mind is so hard for us to stay in, to keep as our own? Why is being calm in the middle of a storm virtually the last thing that most of us are able to do? What is the source of real composure? And how do we work to develop it within ourselves? This is why we must have new self-knowledge as follows.

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...

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.

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?

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...