The Great Lesson of Self-Liberation

by Guy Finley

Key Lesson: Until we learn the one Great Lesson that what we want from life must play a secondary role to what Life asks of us -- which is to grow in the timeless qualities of selflessness such as self-sacrifice, kindness, and love -- then we will remain unable to share in the abiding sense of peace and freedom that comes to us only as we realize the true purpose of our being.

What Must Be Done

What are you trying to teach me?

I feel like a child held captive in a college -- attending lessons that are not only beyond his comprehension, but as though these instructions themselves pertain to life on some other world . . . where nothing I learn of it has any application to this one in which I dwell.

Must I be taught so? Must I understand these Laws of Love before I can enter their realm? Is it that no one walks through the world of Love without first being cleansed of his former world by the active principles of the New One? Could this dilemma of the heart -- its unwanted education -- be the mysterious enactment of that death said to precede Love's Real Life?

Yet for one who was once as dead, cut off from Life and blinded by self-love -- whose eyes have been opened only to find themselves unable to see their unknown Redeemer -- what choice is there but to walk where one is being led?

And so I follow. My only hope is your Goodness . . . for I know now, clearly, if there's ever to be any hope of my love mattering to you, then I can no longer dream of attaching any value to it myself. And this, of all your unknown ways, is by far the most difficult lesson to bear:

I am required to see that without your love my life is, in its entirety, nothing -- a fact that brings the original lesson home, completing the circle. After all, how can someone who is nothing place value upon anything he has? For surely this value must be as imaginary as the thing it values. And yet, if this understanding is the cost, if this humbling of the heart is what you ask before you enter it, then I will do what must be done to pay the Price.