In this answer to a caller's question, Guy explains that the true purpose of interior storms, trials and challenges is to shake us loose from the painful illusions and sense of self that we unknowingly cling to.

The attempt to "save" ourselves -- to rescue and release the troubled "me" -- without first understanding just who and what this nature is that would save itself from its suffering, is the first real threshold over which the sincere aspirant must pass... since the presumption on the part of the seeker here is that he or she knows what's wrong with their life...

Topic: End the Pain of Always Feeling Apart from Life (7/22/20 Classroom Talk)

Classroom Talk: 7/22/2020 - Higher Life lessons that reveal and help us realize our True Self are not the effect of passing events; rather, life's events serve these teachings of the timeless kind. This proves that these lessons are, in fact, eternal in nature, and that they exist before any moment calls them to our attention!

Classroom Talk: 2/5/2020 -Part 1: Effortless contentment appears as unconscious resistance -- along with its "partner in conflict" -- involuntary insistence, disappears. Part 2: Spiritual freedom is not found by avoiding what disturbs us, but rather by the deliberate interior work of illuminating whatever still dwells in the dark of us that is...

We have a nature that thinks about itself -- a nature that weighs itself on a scale that our culture has created and our thoughts have unconsciously adopted. Unexamined, this mind is a virtual torture device, keeping us locked within its own limitations. In the absence of practical thought (the only right capacity of the mind), there is always some painful reaction...

Student Talks: 9/13/2019 - Key Lesson: We learn to "pan" the gold out of unwanted moments by seeing that identifying with any form of troubled, or otherwise fearful thought that has appeared to protect us is, in fact, fool's gold.

Topics covered: The Friday Meditation exercise to "see all, sense all, feel all, be all"; Nothing can begin in your work until you have the capacity to feel yourself; We are working to see from a different order of ourselves; Each moment in time is a water drop as compared to the ocean of what is eternal; A human being feels all; Change takes place when I no longer try to change...

Topics covered: Ebb and flow of the work; Using something that has been stolen from you to discover something that can't be stolen; An order of being that can't be diminished; Uncovering what is hidden; Nothing will remain hidden; Self-judgment; Letting go of the old; Natural reactions vs. identification; We can't stop the reaction; The reaction is never personal, but it belongs to a person...

Student Talks: 4/26/2019 - Key Lesson: Our impatience with others does not prove that we are better than they; what it does show, however, is the depth and breadth of how unaware and identified we are with some flattering, but false image we have of ourselves. This imagined self must constantly work to keep its imagined...

Classroom Talk: 4/10/2019 -The only real problem we have with any unwanted moment in life -- regardless how stressed, or conflicted may seem its temporary character... is that we have yet to see our unconscious involvement in its creation, and subsequent appearance.

Classroom Talk: 3/3/2019 - The "power" we need -- the grace of higher awareness -- to transcend the conflict and stress inherent in a troubled, lower level of consciousness -- is granted in direct proportion to our realization that there's only one true solution that can end its suffering, as well as our own: we must become an impersonal witness of it.