Special Lessons

We are born hungry. We not only require food that we take in with our mouths, but we all have an innate need to take in impressions -- to take in the nourishment that stimulates our mind, that moves our heart, and that works to give us a sense of satisfaction in life. When we're young, we have a natural appetite for life, and we are educated by going out and engaging in the world...

Anxiety is torment. But we never suspect that the mind that is anxious is anxious because it is trying to bring an end to its own pain... and it can't, because there is no peace in the world of a mind set against itself. The problem is that we are born into a world where, within a very short time, we each have our own inner "personal attendant." This attendant has two things in its hands...

We each have ideas about who we are, how the events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy. What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don't give us the respect we deserve.

What is behind the fear of unwanted change? The uninvestigated mind says that I'm going to sustain a loss: "he's going away," "the business is slipping," etc. The fear of loss is connected in our mind with the image of what had previously given us the feeling of succeeding. So now here's reality, and it's pretty different than our image of what should be, and we'd rather live with the image...

Have you ever been drawn into a fight with a loved one where - by the time you got knee-deep into who's "right" and who's "wrong" -- maybe over the most trivial of matters -- it felt as if, somehow, your very life depended on the outcome of that fight We've all had moments like this, perhaps too many times; which is why it seems strange that we've yet to see the following...

We are always trying to build a self that won't disappear out of the things that are coming in the stream of time, never understanding that nothing we find floating upon this temporal stream can ever be timeless. And if this is true about the nature of the world's ever-becoming events, how much more impermanent is our sense of identity derived from them? But we're slow to learn!

When a wave of negative reactions comes along, something in us that believes itself to be apart from the wave, steps in and tries to mitigate or resolve it... and it never works! As long as we run into the wave, try to fight with it, change its direction, or evaporate the ocean, there's only one possibility. What's the possibility? The continuity of conflict. That's the only possibility there is...

We must recognize the almost endless cycle of pressure, anxiety, anger, and regret that always appears with the promise that if we follow that branch of negativity, it will lead us back to the source of understanding where we'll be free at last. In fact, that branch we're tempted to follow belongs to something that can never complete itself, and that requires our energy to sustain it.

We have lost the relationship between what we see with our eyes and the registration of it as an aspect of our own True Nature because we don't see what we see; instead we think about what we see. And when we think about what we see, what we receive is the content of thought that has stored that experience. We don't receive what is real, alive, changing, creative, and forceful.

Many of us have come to believe that being a good performer in life is somehow the same as fulfilling the purpose of life. Here's the strange logic behind the self-created misery that follows it: For each successful "performance" we pull off around others or within ourselves, it feels as if we've won, for the moment, what we've imagined will make us whole and happy -- but the drawback here...

No one really wants to talk about it, but the truth is, there is a kind of "evil spell" hanging over each of us and our world as well. In fact, part of this global spell is our denial of its existence. It is called suffering. Everyone does it -- and, like hypnotized captives, everyone believes that their suffering somehow benefits them. That's how the spell works. Why else would anyone punish...

All of our life experiences have been trying to teach us a certain grand lesson: Liberation from our captive condition (whatever that may be in the moment) cannot come by further deliberating it. We can see the wisdom in doing nothing toward our own troubled thoughts and feelings when we realize that the only way not to be dragged under by these negative states is to stay...