The proof that every moment - including the most painful of them - is unlimited in its Divine possibility is that one soul perishes for the fear of them, while another (soul) is perfected, and liberated by the same.

Simply put, that means that every single moment of our life holds within it, if you will, a kind of fork in the road. "I came upon a fork in the road and I took the one that was least traveled." Every moment of our life offers what we could call the possibility of either further realizing the fulfillment of the purpose of our life on this planet, or deepening the sense of futility most of us have all the time that we are not fulfilling the purpose of our existence. 

This talk -- which is basically intended to help us cultivate this garden of the soul, this garden of faith -- is based in the idea that we know in our heart of hearts we're meant to live a more complete life. Or let's say it the other way around, as it most likely is experienced by us -- a life that isn't so full of conflict. 

I don't know how adept you are at being able to see it, but most of what we call waiting for moments to take place - e.g. waiting for this chat to start, waiting for the meeting we need, waiting for the announcement about our finances or about our family -- most of those moments, if they're not filled with some form of expectation of a fearful kind, then there's a tension in them because we're hoping that what we want to take place will go down the way we want it to go down. And there's stress in that!

It's almost incomprehensible to us that there is the possibility of a life where our familiar stress, fear, anxiety, or frustration, where all of those familiar states no longer serve as they've always served -- which is to provide the feeling that we're stuck in another situation that we have to struggle our way through -- and instead of that constant stress, there's the possibility of a completely different relationship with it. 

There is no moment in life, whatever its nature, that isn't designed to be part of our preparation for discovering in ourselves this Divine ability to take whatever the moment brings to transcend it. And in transcending what that moment brings up in us, to realize the possibility of living in a relationship with every moment by which our proper understanding of it lifts us above that moment.

What is the nature of these moments that disturb us? How many of you know that life is mostly disturbance, not delight? At least that's our perception of it. How constant is the disturbance... even getting ready to go out for a good time. I don't know if you've noticed it... packing to go someplace is full of anxiety! What is it in us that's so readily disturbed? Have you ever wondered about it? Or do we just take the reaction to be the proof that there's something in us that needs things to be other than they are? 

What is disturbed in us is the past. You could call it expectations, but what are expectations other than identification with something we're hoping will happen, or hoping doesn't happen. Moments that we don't want, we don't want them because they disturb the past. And what is the past? The past is who and what we have been up until that moment. And I would add: not just who and what we have been -- not just what we are identified with and have brought forward with us into the present moment -- but when I say "who and what we have been" I'm talking about human consciousness. Because you and I do not exist, we do not have a consciousness outside of human consciousness. 

That consciousness is so rooted in the past, so identified with the images that have given us and this human nature its identity - politically, religiously, financially, environmentally, socially, across the board - this body of thought which has been so crystallized. You and I are so formally locked into its rigidity that when something comes along in the present moment and brings into that crystallized consciousness anything that causes it to have a tremor - it does so because it's resisting whatever that moment is revealing. Why? Because it's not part of how things should be - meaning, not the way I have been and need things to continue being. 

In that moment we discover that that moment that we ordinarily want to avoid, that disturbance, is actually a moment in which "when the student is ready, the teacher appears." What is the student? The student is the part of us that aspires to awaken and to become a truer, more kind human being. And what is the teacher other than the moment that shows up, that unfolds the way it does - and as it does, it brings to light within us the fact that the image we have of ourselves as being someone who is good and kind and loving is just that - an image, not the thing itself. It's a sensation of self that we delight in when nothing is challenging it.

But the moment that any condition comes along that's contrary to this "consciousness" past, this body of thoughts and feelings, the moment they're triggered, everything that lies latent in them -- which is our identification and our dependency upon these images -- now suddenly it goes into the protective mode. It starts to push and pull in one way or another.

In the moment of that revelation of who and what we have been, we can understand the reaction that we have to any moment we don't want is actually the revelation of the consciousness that doesn't want it. And any part of our consciousness that doesn't want what is present and acting upon us as part of the fulfillment and movement of life, any part of us that resists that obviously lives outside of that movement, and therefore is in constant conflict with any part of that movement. We don't see this because we're so instantly identified with this protective consciousness, trying to make sure that what it wants and believes it must have and possess is necessary to it.