Enemies

When this sensory mind of ours perceives life, it mistakenly sees things as happening to it from the outside in. How does this error in perception affect us? It means that we perceive life as a series of things coming at us. Everything about us is oriented outwardly, and it appears to us that our lives are being determined from the outside in.

It wasn't that long ago that men and women understood that the purpose of prayer wasn't to bring things into their lives to make their lives better. It was so that through prayer, they could bring themselves into a completely different order of their own consciousness.

In this answer to a viewer's question, "letting go" author Guy Finley explains that it is possible to know and experience higher forms of love only when we allow everything we come into contact with -- including our so-called enemies -- to introduce us to the parts of ourselves that we would never discover otherwise.

We each have ideas about who we are, how the events in our lives should go, and how other people should treat us. We believe that if everything goes according to our plan, we will be safe. By the same token, anything that threatens the fulfillment of the plan is seen as an enemy. What might some of these enemies be? Other people who don't give us the respect we deserve.

Anytime you blame someone else for how you feel, you avoid seeing your pain is self-inflicted by a level of consciousness that lives to have enemies.

The real adversary in our lives, that proverbial thorn in our side that leaves us aching and angry, and then sends us looking for someone to blame, is not what we have always believed. It is not something "out there." It's something "in here": an intimate enemy.

Classroom Talk: 12/28/2025 - We do not become prisoners because we fail to escape some painful pattern. We become prisoners because we imagine there is a “someone” inside the pattern who must escape it. In truth, the sense of self that feels trapped is a creation of an unconscious nature struggling to escape the experience of itself. Once realized that the suffering inherent in this conflict is not yours…it no longer needs to be transcended; it's released without effort because it simply has no one left to belong to.

Remastered Classic Talk: 06/26/2016 - What is True is quiet; it is at peace with itself, whatever it silently reveals. What is untrue has no such peace; it is unable to be silent. What is True has no need to think about, let alone talk to itself about any lie it may see. What is untrue can't stop talking to itself in order to cover up what it doesn't want to see, ceaselessly telling itself that it sees truly.

Classroom Talk: 01/19/2025 - Awakening is the (graduated) process of negating all forms of identification; (it is) the realization that no matter how real the feel of any familiar sense of self - for its pleasure, or pain - nevertheless: no sensation does a "self" make, any more than a wave on the sea creates the sea from out of which it rises, and must return.

Classroom Talk: 8/28/2022 - Who is to be counted the most dangerous of all my enemies other than the one I see as being a "friend"... who is not.

What is any form of true art - whether expressed in verse, through action, or by a sublime vision revealed - other than the heart, having awakened, stretching its wings and rising into worlds yet known...and where, upon arriving there, claims them as its own...as does the eagle the open skies through which it effortlessly soars.