Suffering

In this short talk, Guy Finley talks about how we would rather hold onto old convictions that are connected to images that we have of ourselves rather than allow natural changes to take place as they are intended.

Your True Self doesn't win in life by overpowering problems, but by revealing they never really existed as you once believed they did.

No human being is a victim of any punishment outside of their own undeveloped life-level from which their inner reactions are seen as outer attacks.

There is a kind of "evil spell" hanging over each of us, and our world as well. In fact, part of this global spell is our denial of its existence. It is called suffering. Everyone does it -- believing that their suffering somehow benefits them. That's how the spell works. Why else would anyone punish themself with unhappy feelings unless they had been tricked into somehow perceiving self-hurt...

We can begin to free ourselves from negative states when we understand the truth about their power over us.

I'm sure we can all agree that no intelligent, conscious person would ever intentionally hurt themselves. No one would choose to ache. Yet the fact remains that all of us do hurt ourselves every day with bursts of anger or fits of depression or anxiety. Even at the simplest level, there can be no doubt: fear and worry take an immeasurable toll on our health and well-being. So, then, knowing in...

The wish itself -- to be a higher person -- comes to you from a higher place and is received in its inner equivalent within you.

We are at our core a creature of the stars: beings whose original and celestial stuff is not only born of light, but also intended to live unbound.

When you begin to doubt everything you believe about your suffering, you will see that you never had to remain in the path of those destructive storms at all.

Trying to resolve the pain within us by holding others accountable for it is like looking out at a field we have planted on our own property and wishing, every day, something other than what grows there would take hold and flower. If we wish to have true harmonious relationships with others, then it is we who must change. We must assume responsibility...

Nothing seems harder to accept than the fact that we are responsible for so much of what proves to be unnecessary suffering. But we must challenge this involuntary, often intractable refusal to consider such ideas. The truth is that we are actively involved with unseen thoughts and feelings that compromise us. Without the self-knowledge we need to nullify this conflicted condition in our psych...

When we're in pain most of us will do whatever seems necessary to bring relief. Almost any behavior can be justified when pain pushes us far enough, but we need not, and must not, handle it as we've always been directed to in the past. What we do need is to grow in our understanding of it. There are many things that have happened and that are happening in this world that are, at best, diffic...