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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.
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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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Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
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Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
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Student Q&A with Guy on "Discover the Quiet Joy and Peace Born of Just Being Yourself" (9/22/23)
Posted: Saturday, September 23, 2023
Meeting: Friday, September 22, 2023
Duration: 21min 31sec
Topics Covered
We believe that thought is somehow one and the same as who we are, but that could not be further from the truth.
In taking thought, everything about our relationship with the present moment is divided.
"We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident." -- Simone Weil
When the observer is the observed, that awareness reveals that you have the capacity to be in relationship with much more than you could have ever imagined.
"Thou shall not want" means that you are always being given exactly what you need, even when you cannot understand that. It is to live above the opposites of want and not-want. There is another life altogether above wanting and not-wanting.
We are not a captive of conditions. We are a captive of the wants of the consciousness that seeks freedom from what it does not want.
We will never stop running into conditions that challenge what we are identified with, which means that the identification is the root of the suffering, not the conditions.
When you are experiencing what seems like a condition that you do not want, the pain in that moment is that you are experiencing a "you" that you do not want to be.
The only way it is possible to not want to be where you are, or who you are, is to think that it is actually possible to not be you.
It is not 'I' that believes it is possible to be separate from it's experience of the moment. See that the "me" that you don't want to be is not really "me" after all.
If something in you does not want to be you in a difficult moment, and if in reality it is indeed impossible to not be you, then the inevitable outcome will be a painful state of conflict.
Resisting what is revealed about your own consciousness produces an identity that is certain that it is not supposed to be like that.
Humanity is in such a state that you do not know how to be yourself, because you have been conditioned to imitate what imagination says it means to "be yourself," looking for yourself in the world.
You don't know how to be yourself because you can't bear to look at the truth of who/what you are.
You could not feel inadequate unless there were a consciousness that compares itself to what it imagines it means to be adequate.
It is impossible to be yourself until you know what it means to see yourself.
Here is an exercise that is also a kind of prayer: "Here, now, all accounted for... I am present." Don't let thought take you anywhere. See thought come and see it go. Watch yourself squirm.
The mind looks ceaselessly for something to give its attention to, so that it can have the corresponding identity.
Already within who you are, awaits who you are to be.
When whatever isn't pure and precious, And the remaining dross removed, Then what is priceless appears on its own Revealing itself as always having been there ...Just waiting to shine.
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