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Articles
Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Inspirational Quotes
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Guy's Letters
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Guy's Blog
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
This Week's Topic
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
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If you have a few minutes, and want a burst of enlightenment, watch or listen to these brief talks by Guy, filled with concentrated wisdom.
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Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Student Reports
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
Sacred Music
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
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Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
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Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
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Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
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Dive deep into a subject on your own! Work at your own pace with a series of talks by Guy on topics critical to your inner development.
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You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
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Guy regularly holds open Q&A sessions. Often members of our global community send in questions, or speak directly to Guy online.
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Student Q&A with Guy on "The Unimaginable Cause of Stress, Fear, and Other Unwanted Moments" (8/23/23)
Posted: Thursday, August 24, 2023
Meeting: Wednesday, August 23, 2023
Duration: 26min 5sec
Topics Covered
Our lives are currently predicated on dealing what is unreal, the pursuit for answers to suffering that is blamed on outside conditions that seem to be responsible for the suffering but in reality are not.
Every image that comes into your mind to lend you a sense of security also comes with a second force built into it that will prove it is unreal.
A false sense of self, a false identity, is not separate from imagination.
When we rely on conditions for a sense of self, then our identity will change whenever conditions change.
The prodigal son turned around because he could no longer believe in the promises of imagination.
A spiritual shock is a moment of seeing the falseness of something you always believed to be true.
There is a completely different world that thought and imagination cannot touch.
All complaints are imagination that you are owed something other than what life is giving you in the moment. Your conviction that you are owed something is born out of imagination.
When you have a false foundation, every room built upon that foundation will fall when the foundation collapses, which it always will.
We don't want to see our reliance on the unreal because it would mean seeing that our identity is also unreal, which is the last thing we want to see.
Only something that is unreal could be in denial about a real fact that is revealed to you about yourself.
Anything that threatens the end of an imagined life -- like death, for example -- is seen as an enemy.
You imagine a time to come because something in your doesn't want the moment as it is. But your negative experience of the moment, in which you imagine a better time to come, is the result of imagination about how the moment should be.
Start to disbelieve in the validity, reality, and necessity of your suffering, which is inseparable from imagination and the sense of self that comes along with it.
There is no psychological suffering without identifying with something that has been imagined.
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