Talk Takeaways

The moment that a reaction gets named you have been set up to have a painful moment, because that consciousness resists the very reaction that it has named.

Revelation of resistance is the release from the captivity of that resistance.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- William Shakespeare

An object or a condition cannot exist as it does for us, for the pain or pleasure of it, without prior knowledge of it.

Every name that is given to any moment has a history. In fact, there is no name that isn't history. No name has life.

If you name it, you are a captive of it. But you would never deliberately make yourself a captive. It's an unconscious, mechanical operation.

The consciousness names what is happening in an attempt to gain some kind of control over the condition.

You cannot avoid having a reaction. But you can either be aware of the reaction's quality, or resist it and therefore serve it.

Avoidance is trying to escape something that the consciousness has remembered. Awareness of that process leads to no longer being caught by it.

Humanity spends almost all of its time distracting itself from awareness of its own consciousness.

"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." The thinker suffers over its own knowledge, descriptions, explanations and interpretations that it identifies with.

No moment of real life has a name. The reaction to the moment does not have a name. So what is needed is awareness of the consciousness that makes names. We are tempted to name things.

Goodness becomes known when the observer and the observed are no longer separate from each other.

Before any moment can be judged, it has to be given a name.

What is this moment like, what is the energy of any reaction like without the name that is given to it?

Watch the temptation to name the moment and observe the sense of self that is produced as a result.

A name itself has no memory, but memory makes the name.

Don't think... live. Don't remember... be. There is no being in thinking, but being allows for thinking.

We are addicted to knowing, and yet who we really are is unknowable, beyond knowledge, beyond a name.