Enemies

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.

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.

Topic: Make This Your First Action and Be Forever Free (Remastered Classic Talk) (Classroom Talk 6/17/26)

Remastered Classic Talk: 2/15/17 - 

Part 1: Behind every expectation that we have for how we should be treated by others lurks the inevitable sense of feeling betrayed by them any time they fail to hit their assigned mark. Behind this disappointment in their character or demeanor -- in fact, its partner in this kind of discrimination -- dwells an unseen sense of righteousness based on a false assumption that we are nothing like what we are so easily moved to judge.

Part 2: It's always the right time to discover something new and true about our present level of being, even if, in that same moment, what we uncover seems altogether wrong.

Topic: Hatred Hides in This Unseen Hell (Remastered Classic Talk)(Classroom Talk 7/16/25)

Remastered Classic Talk: 07/13/16 - The false self, ever-pursuing or struggling to protect the dream of its imagined sense of importance, doesn't care who or what it picks a fight with; all that matters to this divided self is that it finds someone or something to be against, as this is how it validates its insatiable need to feel significant; (it is) the absence of love, incapable of humility, compassion, or remorse.

Topics covered:  "You do not see at all, but you think you see. You are identified with every thought that passes by, and the sense of self that comes with it;  Anything that you imagine, and then identify with, has no life in it at all; It is impossible to have a lingering negative reaction unless, in the moment of the reaction, you have met a moment like that before."

Remastered Classic Talk: 3/23/16 - Being responsible for our negative reactions begins with becoming aware of them. For instance, until we can observe and learn what it means to be consciously passive to our own negative reactions then what else can we do but go on identifying with them and embracing, by default, the false perception that someone or something else is responsible for our pain.

Student Talks: 1/24/2025 - 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 makes the sea from out of which it rises, and must return.

Topic: Transform Any Painful Relationship into a Spiritual Triumph (Classroom Talk 4/3/24)

Topics covered: When does the world change? When you change the way you see the world; The blessed ones through the ages have tried to convey the idea that you need new eyes to see what is in front of you all the time but that you don’t currently see. And the reason you don’t see is because the impressions that are intended to produce a real change are deflected by all kinds of buffers — beliefs, conditions, longings.

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.