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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 "Use Your Struggle with Life to Liberate Yourself from Yourself" (2/18/24)
Posted: Sunday, February 18, 2024
Meeting: Sunday, February 18, 2024
Duration: 32min 42sec
Topics Covered
Our struggles to find freedom have not done anything other than set up the next series of conditions that we will find ourselves struggling against.
Freedom has nothing to do with overcoming the conditions that we blame our pain on. What we must overcome is the level of consciousness that feels itself to be apart from the conditions that it perceives to be outside of itself.
Useless struggle is battling with conditions that seem contrary to what you want in order to validate the self you think you need to be.
The proper struggle is to be awake enough to see the level of consciousness that struggles uselessly to change conditions.
"And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin." -- New Testament
It is within the conscious meeting of active and passive forces, the meeting of yes and no, that transformation (rebirth, change) takes place.
No choice made in the attempt to avoid the proper struggle of being aware of yourself leads to a change in the consciousness that uselessly struggles against conditions.
"If I'm not for myself, who will be. If I'm only for myself, what am I. If not now, when." -- Hillel the Elder
The opposing forces of want and not-want require that the third-party of awareness be present in order to reconcile the struggle that takes place in the absence of that awareness.
This third-party of awareness, that sees the opposites at once, is the "Good wolf" that must be fed (from the well-known Native American story mentioned in this talk).
The present moment is the awareness of the opposing forces that are always stirring in the heart and mind.
The nature that wants what it wants does NOT want to go through anything that upsets its familiar sense of self. Therefore disturbances are shunned and avoided.
Don't struggle to not be negative. The proper struggle is to watch negativity snarl when it appears, leading to more understanding of the nature of the negativity. Then, within that understanding is contained the right action or non-action.
The new struggle is to die to what you imagine you have to be, instead of struggling with events in order to add to something to yourself.
Fight to stay in the Light, and then the Light does the rest. Ask to see, and then have the courage to stay there.
Freedom is not a time to come and it has no cause. So any search for freedom, based on what you want to find, is the very captivity that you are seeking to find freedom from.
You cannot feed something, like the sudden appearance of thoughts about your past, without expecting that it will want to be fed again and again.
The way out is through... through is in... in is clarity... clarity is sanity... sanity is freedom.
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