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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
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.
Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
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.
Catch Guy Finley’s weekly message that focuses on spiritual and personal breakthroughs. This is updated weekly and is available in video, audio and text.
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.
You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
Guy regularly holds open Q&A sessions. Often members of our global community send in questions, or speak directly to Guy online.
Access to all our private Facebook updates, student Facebook discussions, and our LIVE Saturday lunch roundtable discussions.
This member forum is where you can write in your observations and experiences, and receive feedback from fellow members. Read-only access for Free and Basic members. Full access for Premium & All Access members.
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Shop eCoursesThe New Life you seek is within you; to look for it anywhere else is like trying to enter your home by going out the front door.
We pray -- in one form or another -- for something that we think is either connected to what we want or to something that's greater than the condition we perceive as punishing us. But what we don't yet understand is that within these prayers, whatever form they may take, we're praying for something that we don't understand, and this is why life continues to bring us the very things we say we don't want. What we really are praying for, the still secret purpose for our prayers that we don't as yet understand, is to be able to possess ourselves.
The person in denial of his or her own condition continues to ask for more of what didn't help the last time around: more money; a better body; a new relationship; a better position at work; increased social prominence... on and on it goes, going nowhere. This person hopes against hope that somehow this time he or she will find that missing anchor that will keep them from being bowled over by the waves of life's events. And in one way or another we've all stood and fallen upon similar ground as this -- trying to add ballast to ourselves through acquisitions of one kind or another, only to find that rather than anchoring us, our desires -- and their seeming fulfillment -- only tend to make us top-heavy and easier to topple.
If we receive from life what we're asking for, which is always the case, maybe it isn't so much that we're unable to ask for the right and rescuing realities as it may be that we don't know how to request what we really need. Most of us think that prayer is primarily asking for something: "Oh please do this for me," or "Would you just do that?" or "Why won't you intervene?" We think prayer is somehow connected to all these wishes centered, one way or another, around ourselves. But, what we're attempting to reveal is the spirit itself inside of us that is first necessary in order to receive the request that we've asked for.
The New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son tells of a new order of request. This powerful parable is about a young man who, as the story unfolds, originally lived in a pretty good place. All that he needed was provided. But, like many of us, he saw greener pastures outside of his given life and so he leaves it and eventually squanders everything his father had given to him.
Then, one fateful morning, he awakens to find himself having slept in a pig sty and having only corn husks to eat. So he looks at himself and his surroundings and he says, "I'm an idiot. Why did I leave home?" And at that moment he turns around and he goes back home.
The story continues that his father sees him heading back home from this great distance and calls to his eldest son that his younger brother returns and that he's to go and kill the fatted calf. With this, the older brother becomes enraged, saying: "I've been with you all these years. I've given you everything I have, and now this good-for-nothing comes home after squandering everything you gave him, and you're giving him the feast! Why?!"
Now, the answer recorded in the New Testament that his father gives him is, in essence: "Because my son was dead, and now he has come back to life. He was lost and now he's found." But let me reveal to you the secret answer within this answer.
What the father of the prodigal son has really said is: "I'm doing this (preparing a welcoming feast) for him because he asked for it. By his actions your brother has requested my renewed love and loyalty. You've been with me all along, so there was never any question of your fidelity. But your brother, he was gone. He was lost to me, and his wish -- along with his action of turning around to come home -- is a special request to be once again a part of this, my kingdom."
The "lost" son asked for his New Life by seeing that he was wrong and then deciding to return to his home. Incidentally, he did not know what was going to happen to him. And I'll tell you that it didn't matter to him because here's what was going through his mind as headed back home: "I've been a fool! All I possess is my own mistaken self." And he knew it. Which brings us to the key point: the understanding of his true condition -- and the subsequent action he took based on this knowledge -- was a form of Higher Request.
Until you understand how to ask for what you really want, you will continue to ask in the ways that you think are appropriate. And you will continue to ask from a nature that doesn't know the difference between what's genuinely good for you and what's not. This is a huge question for all of us, because presently, the way we're constituted, our lives are nothing but a series of requests, whether they're done in a "spiritual-religious" sense or whether it's just out-and-out greed or ambition. We are always asking, and then not understanding, why it is for all the things we've asked for, our lives still seem to be this proverbial leaf in the wind.
As this (at first humiliating) new self-understanding grows in you, what happens is you naturally start asking life for something New. As slow as it may have been in coming, you're beginning to get the picture. You're now able to see, albeit "through a glass darkly," what it really is that's missing from your life. And your new request reflects this realization.
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Start Asking Life for Something New
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