Talk Takeaways

When we try to avoid the consequences of our choices, we believe that the best thing to do is to make more choices that lead to more unwanted consequences.

Conflict in consciousness is always a war between what it wants and what it does not want, along with its identification with those desires.

You can't have a fear that isn't born out of a desire that you have identified with.

There is nothing wrong with natural desires. You cannot escape them.

We are always trying to stop life, to bring an end to what we don't want through imagining something that we do want.

Every desire produces the illusion of a time to come in which there will be freedom from what is not wanted. All desire (image, and identity) is about becoming, trying to arrive at a place at which there will be rest.

We all receive, every moment of our lives, exactly what we deserve.

We look to reactions to reconcile moments of disturbance that we don't want, when it is identification with those very reactions that prolong the disturbance.

What we need to see is that no matter how hard we try to come to a new understanding, to find a better time to come, as long as we are acting from what is known, we are acting from the past.

You cannot find freedom from yourself by turning to yourself, by relying on what you already know, because "you" and what you "know" IS the captivity.

Everything that we imagine will free us from what we don't want only serves to lay the groundwork for the next thing to not-want, from which we will need to imagine yet another new freedom.

Identification with desires leads to dependency and reliance upon those desires to lead us to the heaven that they promise.

Only the awareness of the relationship between want and not-want -- the relationship between those two masters -- can free you from being a slave to the consequences of misunderstanding that relationship.

We look to desires to refresh and revitalize us, but in fact it is following those very desires that leave us exhausted.

The world has gone berserk trying to satisfy every desire, but it will never work because desire cannot reconcile itself.

Don't be an authority. Be an explorer who wants to learn.

That which reconciles active and passive is a third-party, awareness, that sees both opposites at once.