In this short talk, Guy Finley talks about how we would rather hold onto old convictions that are connected to images that we have of ourselves rather than allow natural changes to take place as they are intended.

We don't know much about real feelings, and in order to learn more about them, we must first discover what are not real feelings. When a thought suddenly comes to you, such as the thought of eating your favorite food, and your mind begins to go through all of the details associated with that thought, the desire for that food is strengthened by the image that the mind has produced. And also str...

There is a requirement of a spiritual student that most are not willing to satisfy: it is called true sensitivity. And no one is truly sensitive who is identified with something. Human beings do not want true sensitivity, even though it might be said that people today are extremely "sensitive" in terms of being easily offended and touchy. The reason people are so wrongly sensitive is because o...

Ultimately, all of our searching in life is for what we believe will release us from something that presently restricts us. If a man or woman is genuinely earnest, he or she will go down a countless number of different roads in order to find freedom. But you can't set out to find something without you being the one who is going to find it, which means that for each different pursuit, you assum...

Topics covered: Anxious thoughts about what to do in an unwanted moment IS the unwanted "moment" that you are struggling with; To know better than to not-want what you are experiencing is to see that all of the actions involved in not-wanting are futile. To know better is to recognize that you have been there in that same place, not-wanting your experience, a million times before...

Topics covered: How long do you want to live a life in which you can be carried off at any time, beaten up, and then released whenever your captor is done with you?; The beginning of the end of useless suffering is in seeing that, at present, you do not really know why you suffer. There is not one solution that you think you know that is going to save you; If you ever want to stop being thrown into a prison whenever conditions seem to conspire against you...

Topics covered: Each time a different sense of self comes to the forefront, that self cannot remember that it is reliving the same old experience of itself, all the while believing that they are new experiences; When there is no awareness, your identity is inseparable from the quality of the reaction that is going through you. Your sense of self is determined by any reaction that becomes your guide...

Topics covered: The sleeping mind convinces us that something outside of us is to blame for whatever feeling -- "good" or "bad" -- is coursing through us at any given moment; The sleeping mind is always trying to find itself in conditions outside of itself; Resistance nullifies all of the higher qualities and faculties that we have the potential to be in relationship with...

Topics covered: The mind believes that it possess what it imagines. However, to be in imagination is to be separate from what you are thinking about; Humanity is spiritually asleep, and the purpose of a true spiritual school is to show men and women that very fact; The fox blames the trap. The real nature of the trap is the nature of the fox that is identified with what it wants.

Topics covered: Your experience of life cannot be separated from what your consciousness is attending to in each moment; It seems natural to give our attention to whatever it is that asks for it. This is how we so often end up experiencing so-called unwanted moments; The unattended mind never stops looking for something to judge; Familiarity breeds contempt as the mind revisits and resists...

Topics covered: The vast majority of what we think about is driven by fear, only we don't notice it because we believe it to be the normal way to live; How many things do you not see because of fear? Because you are thinking about yourself? Thinking about yourself and fear go hand-in-hand; Fear drives all forms of self-judgment and judgment of others; Ask yourself: If I know that...

Topics covered: There is no more important time for you to do your spiritual work than when you least want to do it; The whole of this work is being willing to remember, when you don't want to remember it, that you had set an intention to be a certain type of being now and not later; Spiritual work begins when the question dawns on you: Why are there so many things that can so easily make me negative?