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.

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.

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.

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.

Imagine how different life would be if we understood that nothing happens to us that isn't sent our way to help us learn more about the eternal nature of love.

Part of our possibility of growing into another order of being, of having a relationship with what is more celestial than earthly in nature, is that we're capable of seeing the world around us through eyes that are not just connected to our response to what we see but are connected to the reality behind what is seen.

The untold great spiritual secret concerning self-transformation is that we grow in proportion to our awareness of what we can no longer be.

Guy Finley explains that if we wish to know God's life, then we must be willing to meet and walk into our limitations so that real faith can be born in us.