Enlightenment / Awakening

In this short talk, bestselling "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about what it means to wake up from spiritual sleep, which does not include comparing ourselves to what the world says it means to live an awakened life.

Anybody can do what everybody else does. And what is it that most of us do, whether we want to admit it or not? We usually do the minimum to get the maximum. We can see it everywhere in the world. It's part of a culture today. But we can do so much better than that, and we must if we're going to change our destiny.

Long before it's possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves. Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world. Because the way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me.

Have you noticed yet that wherever you go, the thing that you don't want the most seems to know where you are? Seriously. It doesn't just know where you are. The Divine has created the conditions under which a reaction will be stirred and brought into your consciousness so that you can finally realize that running from it doesn't change the reality of it. Only bringing it into the light...

In this answer to a viewer's question, Guy talks about how we suffer uselessly every time we attempt to be seen as someone special, which is the same as avoiding awareness of ourselves as we are.

It feels like I have been a seeker forever, but have not yet found the enlightenment I have been seeking. Is enlightenment something that happens, or is it just an understanding?

To succeed spiritually, to discover the new man or woman waiting within us, requires going beyond being the thought-based, self-conceived creatures we are at present.

Everything in this life is made to be impermanent, so that by the action of time, it can be changed into something new.

Real spiritual strength is realized, slowly, by daring to drop any self-blinding negative states that we have allowed to define us.

Our experience of each moment -- for its pleasure or pain, peace or trouble -- is a direct reflection of what we are in relationship with in the present.

For those who aspire to know the immortal Self, the dark night of the soul is a required time of "unknowing."...

It is a certain level of miracle when, for a person's willingness and work to understand the truth of themselves, something begins to formulate within them that will start to be there for them without them having to ask for it. It is an aggregation of a certain kind of energy that finally forms a certain kind of memory, a certain substance, that begins to be the center of your gravity.