In this answer to a viewer's question, "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about the painful deception of fighting for one side in a conflict because we feel threatened by the other side. Nothing will ever change in any meaningful way by struggling on the level of the opposites. It is useless to try to change a world that is not interested in knowing what is useful to the soul.

In this question and answer session, Guy explains that we are not meant to be the servant of a mind that believes conflict is the way to solve any problem. Seeing the part of us that finds a peculiar enjoyment in conflict is the beginning of separating ourselves from it.

Most of us like sitting by a river and watching the water or anything else come downstream and then disappear in the distance. When watching a river, we don't usually focus on one thing in the stream and then resist it as it floats by. We are intended to be the observer of the stream of our interior life in much the same way that we would enjoy watching a river.

Topics covered: Discussion of Guy's new book Relationship Magic; What good is a spiritual practice if it can't be applied to my day-to-day life; People are brought into our lives for our mutual perfection; We don't really know much about real love; We bring unseen expectations into each moment; No one is perfect, but we can use our imperfections to help one another; We don't know how to use di...

Topics covered: Part of your spiritual work is to see that you do not know what your best interests really are; The conditions in life that seem to oppose us have actually appeared in order to help us realize our best interests; A negative reaction looks outside of itself in order figure out what condition or person should be blamed for its pain; The very act of blaming the condition you don't want strengthens the consciousness that created those conditions...

Topics covered: The real secret of letting go is to discover for yourself that there is a completely different order of understanding in which there is necessary practical struggle, without the useless struggle of trying of bringing an end to your pain; The world believes that it is natural to worry. There is another order of being that does not have in it any lingering negative states like worry...

Topics covered: To say that these are unprecedented times is to forget the fact that human consciousness repeats itself over and over again, which means that the world has been in its current state many times before; Notice that whenever you are thinking about someone that bothers you, you are at war with that person; Whenever you struggle against the clock, in a rush to get somewhere and get things done, you are at war with time...

Topics covered: There is no such thing as the winning side of an argument, because the reason we argue with others is that we are in distress; The mind complains, "You are giving me an experience of myself that I don't like." And so we argue because that part of us is sure that we must change others in order to change our present experience. But our experience of life is nothing but the experience of ourselves.

Topics covered: The reason that life has stopped being precious to us is because we live in constant judgment of everyone and everything; When you really want to understand something, you don't try to understand it with thought only; Our lives are presently shaped by incessant thinking and judgment, which is why our lives are misshapen; Have you ever found freedom from...