Topics Include:
- appreciate the power of the mind
- create an ego that will serve you not you serve it.

One of the finest instruments given to us at the start of our life here on earth is our wonderful and complex mind.
From the point of view of our meditation life the mind can be a blessing, but, if not properly trained, a profound hindrance.
Its main feature is its malleability. This is also its problem. It can be made to believe anything. Indeed, it can even believe that it is in charge. It is programmed by its own thoughts, its own creation, and the more a thought is repeated the more likely it is to be believed.
The mind is a master of habit. A habit is a thought pattern that requires no decision making process. For a computer this would be called a program. We program our mind by repetition. Just reflect for a moment how powerful this is. Just by repeating a thought pattern over and over, firstly it becomes a habit (so we no longer make decisions about it) and most often it becomes a belief, no matter how wrong it might actuality be. It is as though the mind is on ‘automatic’ and it programs itself by the things we repeat to it. It’s actually amazingly ingenious.
With this very same process it creates an ego, which is really nothing more than a bunch of habits and repeated thoughts about what has happened - our past, and what might happen - our future. The ego exists only in the mind’s past and future. Whenever we observe the mind we see this play of time. The ego does not understand what exists in the now.
The mind has very little to do with the flow of love in the present moment. However, the heart is completely in the present moment, which also contains within it the entire universe and all of time, i.e. eternity. From the present moment the heart in the flow of love projects out through the mind in intuition, inspiration and creativity.
The mind and ego should really be a mouthpiece of the heart, but most often it gets so carried away with itself and its own noise that it completely shuts the heart out. It tries to make us believe that it is the only reality, and attempts to do this by always keeping us thinking about the past or the future, and never experiencing the present moment where it does not understand who it is.

Read more:
Class 30 - Free Your Mind

Topics Include:
Understand the relationship between charity and oneness.

Roger walked into what was sometimes known as ‘The Lost City’ and was immediately struck by the level of suffering. This was not one or two homeless and hungry, this was tens of thousands of lost, lonely and painful souls. There were those bankrupt, those ostracised for their colour, religion, their weight or lack of weight, their ugly faces or scars or criminal record, their sexuality, their violence, their mental illness, their lack of education. There were people everywhere, in everyone’s faces, most were barely conscious from a cocktail of alcohol and drugs and petrol and paint cans. Everyone was on top of everyone and all they seemed to want was distance.
A mess of urine and faeces littered the landscape but mostly it choked Rogers breath. He could barely breathe without feeling he was going to vomit. Involuntarily already he had dry wretched but had been able to hide it feebly behind a movement of his hand.
He stared away not because he meant to, but because he physically could not get his eyes to look. He had never seen anything like it. This lack of human dignity, lack of human self-worth.
Then he recognised a face, a shining light, a nerdy, gawky looking girl he recognised from high school. She caught his eyes immediately and smiled. There was nothing at all attractive about her physically but in this place she exuded warmth and presence. All the suffering people around her seemed to gather another breath as she walked past.

Read the original here:
Class 29 - Charity & Oneness

Topics Include:
Understand how blissful life actually is.

For many to live in bliss is a fantasy.

To be happy is not seen as a permanent state but as a kind of fleeting moment, a gift that fate might offer from time to time. Some people even think of too much happiness as being slightly delusional or uncaring for those that are suffering. It is simply unimaginable that a person could live free from suffering, free from the occasional nightmare, free from anxiety or pain, free from any or all negativity.

But to live in bliss is possible.

It is not length of life, but depth of life. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not only possible but inevitable.

Our most natural state is actually blissful. Many of us think we naturally are in a struggle with life, that we have to fight against fate, that we have to take what we need or we will be left behind.

The opposite is true. We are naturally really happy beings. Our experience of fate is dictated by our choices, by our thoughts and intentions. The universe is actually incredibly abundant. It is only that we have created a series of illusions that stop us from experiencing our real blissful nature.

You can never be happy at the expense of the happiness of others. - Chinese Proverb

To be very simple about this, the universe is love manifest. Stop for a second and get that. Make sure you understand that sentence. The universe is love manifest. When we experience this, we are blissful. When we are caught thinking the physical images that love projects through are the reality, we are not. It really is that simple.

Our problem is complicating our lives. With every complication we give more credence to the illusion than to the reality.

Go here to see the original:
Class 28 - Living Your Bliss

Topics Include:
For the last few classes we have been talking about ‘so-called’ negative qualities. To summarise all negatives are really just the bludgeon of change. Every negative quality is actually just a wall we hit as the last stop before we learn and grow. It was the Dalai Lama that said that there isn’t a big problem that did not start as a small one.
This is true of all pain. Believe it or not, there is not a thing that happens in the world for no reason. Just as if a child was about to burn himself by putting his hand into a flame, an adult would yell and grab the child from harms way. The child might cry with the shock of being yanked to safety but most of us would say that that pain was necessary so the child would learn and grow.
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” Anonymous
So it is for us exactly the same. Each so-called ‘negative’ that we experience remains negative while we experience it as a negative. For the child, we all say to the child ‘look you were so lucky, we saved you from being burned’. We try to teach the child that the pain was actually a positive experience because now it has learned and it will act differently. If this works the child will forget the pain of being saved, he will act differently and the lesson will be learned. If it did not get the lesson properly – it might feel angry or resentful at the pain the adult that ‘saved’ it inflicted and not learn a valuable lesson. In effect, the child would allow the pain to be swallowed down and fester inside the child, in resentment or anger.

Read the original:
Class 27 - Learning from the Negatives

Topics Include:
Many times people with depression will feel helpless to change their current state, as though there is no point or that no-one can help. Depression often follows anger and helplessness. We quite often are literally beating ourselves up. Many times people that suffer from depression are extremely intelligent, very sensitive and compassionate people. Their sense of helplessness parallels the same spiral people suffering from anger travel into resentment and stress related illnesses

See the rest here:
Class 26 - Depression