Have you ever noticed that when you're under the cloud of some negative state, what you do to try to "make things better" actually makes the situation worse? Struggling to free yourself from your own negative reactions is a bit like throwing gasoline onto a fire, isn't it? Recognizing that you get trapped in this pattern of taking action that neither relieves nor rescues you from...

In this short talk, bestselling "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about how we can understand painful tension in a new way so that, instead of being tormented by it, we use it as a source of revelation and release from the false self that blames everything outside of itself for its pain.

Human beings walk around in a kind of self-made suffering that is the expression of something in us that is afraid of seeing ourselves as we are. We've come to think that avoiding a unwanted fact about ourselves is the same as escaping the effects. Our lives should be a ceaseless realization of where we miss the mark, because that is the only way to transcend the idea that...

There are unique challenges for the human being who wants to have a relationship with the source of his or her being. We try to control events outside of us in a futile attempt to find a fearless life, when our energy would be better spent attending to our inner lives. Yet at the same time we are in a body and we do need to take care of our basic householder responsibilities...

Topics covered: It is wise to seek immortality because time defeats all other ambitions; The greatest prize hidden within our inner life is victory over death. Uncovering the treasure is a matter not of intellectual knowledge only, but of awareness, relationship, participation and understanding; The desert in spiritual stories represents the endless useless struggle to escape from conflict, not seeing that the attempt to escape is the perpetuation of the conflict.

Topics covered: Genuine prayer is connected to something you have genuinely seen about yourself. The wrong kind of prayer, the selfish kind, is connected to the avoidance of seeing something true about yourself; Ongoing psychological pain is always the product of having mistaken who you are. "Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind..."

Topics covered: There is nothing in the universe that can stop you from learning the truth of yourself; Every moment of our existence is the expression of, and the possibility of completing "our" karma. There is no such thing as bad karma; Our consciousness sows the seeds of its own suffering, and then sets out to resolve the very conditions that it sets into motion...

Topics covered: Everything that you suffer from psychologically is the product of living from an attachment to an ideal that you don't know you live from; The consciousness that reacts violently to events cannot be changed through its own reactions; We cannot change the world we see around us until we change the way we see the world; The pain of resistance isn't caused by the condition or person being resisted.

Topics covered: Blame is the denial of the manifestation of your nature. Be responsible for your own nature and for its manifestions; It would not occur to you to look for an answer unless there was also a feeling that something is missing; The perfect answer to your pain has been with you all along, but you have not been able to see it because the pain itself is what has been looking...

Topics covered: Plans to escape from unhappiness come from a consciousness that is arranging events for the very purpose of making you unhappy; Beauty is not something that a human being imagines. Beauty is a relationship with reality that already exists in consciousness waiting to be revealed; When you really see something, then all questions about what you...

Topics covered: There is a ceaseless exchange between what is celestial and what is common, and to be where that exchange takes place is everything; Human beings are always running and pushing so that they can get everything they need in order to rest. That day will never come for that divided consciousness; Your humiliation is your salvation. "Humility" may be the least loved word in the world today.