Topics covered: There is nothing that you can do in a dream to wake you up from the nightmare of being a human being who is spiritually asleep; Unlike all other creatures, you have been given the gift to be aware of your own consciousness, as opposed to being asleep within it and a captive of its own movements; The mind creates a dark drama and then struggles to find a way to escape from the very scene...
Topic: The Courage to Face and "Erase" Whatever You're Afraid to See in Yourself (Classroom Talk 4/26/23)
Topics covered:There is no struggle in seeing. The struggle is in trying to get life to conform to what something in you wants to see, and avoid what it doesn't want to see; The problem is not what is seen. What creates the problem is the nature that is seeing; Within the sleeping human consciousness, there is something that is already awake, and its presence in that consciousness produces momentary glimpses...
Topics covered: The hope of this world rests in innocence. No innocence, no goodness. No goodness, nothing good, and when there's nothing good there's only that which pretends to be good; It is inevitable that there will be suffering each time you try to hide from the truth of yourself; A real man or woman never blames anything or anyone else for his or her experience of life.
Topic: Transform Hurtful Arguments Into a Healing Space (Classroom Talk 4/19/23)
Topics covered:We get into trouble because we keep putting ourselves in the hands of an unconscious part of us that says, "Now I know what I have been doing wrong"; The first step of going beyond what is false is to recognize it as being false; What makes us so sure that we are right? What we KNOW. Our certainty. This is what sets us against other people and against life itself.
Topics covered: There is no such thing as the winning side of an argument, because the reason we argue with others is that we are in distress; The mind complains, "You are giving me an experience of myself that I don't like." And so we argue because that part of us is sure that we must change others in order to change our present experience. But our experience of life is nothing but the experience of ourselves.
Topic: Step Over the One Great Stumbling Block to Self-Liberation (Classroom Talk 4/12/23)
Topics covered:A true teaching shows an individual where he or she is complicit in their own unnecessary suffering; A new "body" is necessary in order to move from a lower, limited world into higher, more inclusive world; The acronym "SBARAAHP" in the doctor story stands for "Stuck Between A Rock And A Hard Place"; If you feel like you are stuck between a rock and a hard place...
Topics covered: When you are afraid and you listen to what that fear tells you to do, then fear is your guide and your god; Until you know what is beyond fear, you will not know what is beyond death, because there is a connection. If you live in fear of death your whole life, then you do not have a life; Human beings are the very source of the thing they say makes them suffer.
Topic: Wade Into Real Life and Leave Fear Behind You (Classroom Talk 4/5/23)
Topics covered: New meaning is the same as new understanding is the same as new possibility; You must have patience with your inner work, but it must be a persistent patience; What we trust will lead us to an imagined liberation ends up leading us to the exact opposite; "I was born when all I once feared, I could love." -- Rabia of Basra (713 – 801); A false sense of self imagines and believes in a false sense of security.