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: 4/3/2024 - When it comes to conflict between us, and any other -- let alone a person we may love -- anytime there's some kind of painful drama being enacted... each of us is responsible for whatever continues to be played out on that stage.

Classroom Talk: 9/9/2020 - The strength of my enemy is no greater than the fear of my weakness.

Classroom Talk: 7/15/2020 - The real reason "why" we should "love our neighbor" as ourselves is only answered as we agree to see – by the Light of the Divine -- that their life is, in fact, the same as our own. It is this Love -- and only this Love -- that frees us from the pain of judging others, as well as the suffering born of judging ourselves.

Classroom Talk: 10/21/2018 - Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of October 29, 2018. Part 1: It may be said one finds freedom from suffering over oneself in direct proportion to one's realization that there is no separate self whose suffering is to be resisted. Part 2: All unconscious suffering is... consensual.

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of March 5, 2018. The unconscious "self" that lives in the dark of us has no shape or form of its own... other than the one it creates -- and then identifies with -- as it weighs and measures all that moves in and out of its temporary existence. Its false -- and always alternating sense of superiority and insecurity -- is the unnatural byproduct of an eq...