Well, it’s pretty obvious to most of us that we can’t entirely trust in the world, in people and in appearances. The world of appearances is filled with the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Sometimes, our closest people have betrayed us. The world as it appears in conditioned reality and ordinary life, is filled with unpredictable and often unexplainable occurrences that definitely go against how we wish things would be. Because of our unfulfilled desires, we suffer. When I was teaching recently at the prison sangha, The Unpolished Diamond Sangha, one man laughed at me and said, “You might be able to trust out there, but in here, that’s seems almost impossible. There is almost nothing and no one that can be trusted.” That has stuck with me. How to respond to that? Is there something unconditioned that we can trust in?

Luisa: Yes, and that's when it had come out. Right when I had graduated high school was when DACA came out, and my mom said no. She made me feel extremely selfish for wanting it. She let me know that, "You know what? Yes, you're going to get what you want, but you're going to affect all of us." But in my mom's mind and I think in every single Mexican or undocumented person's mind is that distrust of the government. That they're going to have you in this database and they're going to know exactly where you live and who lives with you and where you are. I don't want that, and she did not allow that. I know. I know. I could've, but I didn't.

Luisa: Yes. There came a point. We were in the [Pause] process of getting our permanent residency card in order to be able to go to school, and the lawyer let my mother know that me and my sister—my other sister—were not going to make it because once you hit eighteen, you're no longer under the case that you originally filed, so the best option for us would be adoption. We would be adopted by an American citizen in order to get our American status fixed, and that was something my mom and I contemplated for a long, long time, and she was going to go through with it, but my dad put a huge stop to that and was like, "That's not happening. You're stupid. That's not a thing. These are my kids. You're not letting that happen."Luisa: It was going to be a family member, not a close family member, but these were the lengths that you go through to try to get through this. I didn't have a normal childhood. I never got to learn to drive. I didn't go to drivers ed. I didn't get to travel with my best friend to DisneyLand because my mom was so scared of—

It would be if he knew he was wrong. I can’t put my finger on it, but I sense something strange about him.

Combine this with a deep distrust of media sources. If the media is reporting on something, and you don’t trust the media, then it is your responsibility to question their authority, to doubt the information you are being given. If they expend tremendous effort bringing on “experts” to argue that something is false, there must be something there to investigate.

narratives that pit students, teachers, and publics against one another

Students require little in the way of special messaging

You see, Paul, the flaw in the Power of Positive Thinking lies in the fact that it assumes that, if one does not engage in positive thinking, the Universe will not unfold Itself in a positive manner. So, this theory and practice creates a fundamental distrust of the Universe Itself, of Being Itself. This, of course, puts one at odds with his Self, with his Being, since any distrust in the basic Nature of the Universe is a basic distrust in one’s own Nature and Being. This is basically why you are having trouble letting go and simply being. The world literally is not going on “out there” at all, but within You, as your Being. More correctly, your Being is unfolding Itself and is seen and experienced by Itself (your Self) as conscious experience. As I have said before, the difficulty you are having is because you flip-flop back and forth, in and out.