When you realize that suffering and discomfort are the call to inquiry, you may actually begin to look forward to uncomfortable feelings. You may even experience them as friends coming to show you what you have not yet investigated thoroughly enough.

Who would you be if you didn’t believe this thought?

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.

Rather than understand the original cause—a thought—we try to change the stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.

The pain shows you what’s left to investigate.

I like to say that no one can hurt me—that’s my job. This is good news.

When you run in fear, it’s square into the wall.

Self-realization is not complete until it lives in action.

Nothing outside you can ever give you what you’re looking for.

Since the beginning of time, people have been trying to change the world so that they can be happy. This hasn’t ever worked, because it approaches the problem backward. What The Work gives us is a way to change the projector—mind—rather than the projected. It’s like when there’s a piece of lint on a projector’s lens. We think there’s a flaw on the screen, and we try to change this person and that person, whomever the flaw appears on next. But it’s futile to try to change the projected images. Once we realize where the lint is, we can clear the lens itself. This is the end of suffering, and the beginning of a little joy in paradise.

If our thinking is clear, how could work or money be the problem? Our thinking is all we need to change.

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Alexandra Jaye

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