Topic: How to Awaken and Practice Immaculate Compassion (Classroom Talk 1/25/23)

Topics covered: All true spiritual teachings have a singular purpose, and that is to call human beings into another world that already exists within them; An unconscious nature within us believes that it is superior to everything that it judges; The love that lifts a person above the loveless world of thought has an infinite capacity to recognize perfect similarity...

Classroom Talk: 1/25/2023 - Nothing makes us more common and unkind -- more like everyone else we judge -- than identifying with familiar painful negative reactions that seem to prove we're somehow different, superior to those whose character we hold in contempt.

Topics Covered: Anything you imagine can't be new because it comes from thought, and all thought comes from the content of the past; There can be no new experience of the moment without being in a new relationship to that moment. Experience is relationship; You can't change your relationship with the moment until you see the nature that is producing the experience of the moment.

Classroom Talk: 1/2/2022 - Much as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it holds true: our experience of any given moment - for its light or darkness - its joy or sorrow - is cast in the image of the consciousness momentarily awakened to reflect upon itself.

Topics Covered: Be present to the parts of you trying to pull you down; Don't stop and pick the flowers... smell the flowers, but keep going; The depth of the illusion is nothing to the light that reveals it; There is no such thing as compulsive pleasure; The very action of thought separates us from what it wants to acquire; Without thought everything is clear; Thought is the disturbance and not...

Topics Covered: If you are against something you cannot change; The opposites are secretly complimentary; You can't win freedom, you can only be free; You can't judge without resistance; Avoidance is the continuation of the consciousness that resists; We are not our thoughts and feelings; No one is free who worships an image or an icon; All understanding is in scale...

Student Talks: 2/1/2019 - Key Lesson: It is through one's awareness of imperfection that the Divine reveals the possibility of realizing -- and then manifesting -- its endlessly eternal perfection.

Guy Finley explains that the part of us that tries to feel better about itself -- by seeking approval from other people -- is itself the source of the disturbance that we feel. Awareness of this fact allows for a natural separation and release from this lower nature within us that looks outside of itself for consolation.

The degree to which we judge others, and would make them pay for their shortcomings, is inseparable from the false belief that our nature is somehow different, superior to those seen through the eyes of our disdain.

Guy Finely explains that looking for the approval of others and trying to live up to their expectations are the seeds of a cultural trap. Learn to do what's right in spite of what the world says, and you will flower into a truly profitable human being.