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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.
Short Talks
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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Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
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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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Join a lively online discussion with other members each week of “This Week’s Topic” – a new Guy Finley talk selected for in-depth study.
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You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
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Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
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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 "Take a Vacation from Yourself and Leave Your Troubles Behind You" (1/31/24)
Posted: Thursday, February 1, 2024
Meeting: Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Duration: 14min 3sec
Topics Covered
Without clarity there can be no self-command.
The real "evil" is the thought that I have to complete myself, because it separates you from discovering you are being given everything you need, moment to moment, to be a complete being.
I don't have any trouble without a desire. All troubles and painful situations are born from hidden desires.
What is behind every last troubling moment? The experience of myself. I think I'm separate from what I'm blaming.
We are in a constant form of being identified with a memory.
The divided, unconscious mind looks outside of itself for a condition that is responsible for any unwanted moment. The mind blames the condition for the troubling thoughts, when it's the thoughts that have created the condition.
Memory is conditioned thought. It's the past coalesced into a pack of associations that come up to tell you the source of the problem.
You can't have a troubling thought without a desire that is there with its expectation and demand.
This consciousness needs to be regenerated, but it can't do it itself.
We're involved in a useless struggle that doesn't exist apart from the memory-based thought that says, "This needs to be fixed."
It's not "you" talking to you. Those thoughts that you hear with your own voice are not "you" - they come from the past.
You talk to yourself because it feels like you care about yourself when you talk to yourself.
The pain you feel in the now is born out of resistance to something from the past.
Troubled thoughts tell you to gather this or that outside of you in order to free you, but they actually scatter you. The thoughts tempt you with a time to come when you will be released from the trouble.
Troubling thoughts are always rooted in unseen, lingering demands. The condition we blame for the troubling thought is actually karmic grace.
Exercise: Each day, for a minimum of 5 minutes, no matter how busy you are, sit quietly someplace and put the first last, and the last first. In that 5 minutes, my sole/soul attention is to quietly listen to and be attentive to my own thoughts, instead of letting them draw me into their dream that is forever promising the end of whatever is troubling me. The task is observation with identification. This is what remembering yourself is. You are not trying to be stronger than those thoughts, you are only trying to discover something about that nature. Your only task is to see.
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