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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
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Breaking Dependency: Freedom from the "Compulsive Self"
Posted: Monday, May 24, 2021
Meeting: Sunday, May 23, 2021
Duration: 1hr 25min 25sec
Key Lesson
Since no desire can complete itself -- by itself -- through anything it imagines -- its only recourse is to imagine “more of” whatever failed to satisfy it the first time around. This unseen cycle is the mainspring of all forms of addiction, as unconscious desire keeps trying to fill a bucket with no bottom by pouring imaginary water into it.
Supplemental Material
Talk Takeaways
There is no such thing as a compulsive pleasure.
We are not meant to spend our lives compulsively defending and justifying ourselves. Those things are addictions.
Physical hunger and thirst are natural, but being hungry for approval is not natural.
Every day we go compulsively looking for what our mind says we need in order to find fulfillment. What we long for most will not be found in this world. Seeing that changes the way in which we see the world.
We want to be true to ourselves, but we do not understand who our SELF is.
The struggle can no longer be with what we want or don't want. The new struggle has to be to understand our complicity with an unseen level of self that imagines the thing that is going to set it free.
Everything that stands between ourselves and our imagined liberation is seen as an enemy.
All compulsion and addiction has its root in an identity that imagines what freedom is. That compulsive self is not the true you. It is not a "who" that is addicted to something... it is a "what."
Not wanting to be a certain way, or not wanting an event, is identifying with what you don't want, and identification animates whatever is being identified with.
No pattern can change itself. The only thing that is not part of a compulsive pattern is awareness of the pattern.
The very seeking of security is done by a level of consciousness that is insecure by its very nature.
Three Minutes to Freedom Exercise: In the moment that you catch the temptation to do that harmful thing one more time, say inwardly to that compulsive part of yourself: "Sure, no problem. But before we do this thing let's just sit here and watch for three minutes so that I can learn more about you and what you want me to do." Stop saying, "I'm never going to do that again!" because that has never worked.
Each new fact learned about the compulsive self is the seed of the next awareness.
Do not be afraid of the necessary discovery of how unfree you presently are.
No desperation for freedom leads to freedom. The desperate self that is seeking freedom is fashioning its own prison bars through its actions.
An addiction does not exist without the consciousness that derives its identity from the addiction. Mutual dependency.
There is no answer outside of your awareness of yourself.
God's life is the revelation of a ceaseless changing.
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