The anticipation of something desirable is always sweet in conception, which would be great if it weren't for a certain fact about the nature of longing itself: it appears within us, at first, by itself, bringing with it the promise of just what we need to make everything right. But appearances are not always what they seem; for standing directly behind it, as it were...

We have a nature that thinks about itself -- a nature that weighs itself on a scale that our culture has created and our thoughts have unconsciously adopted. Unexamined, this mind is a virtual torture device, keeping us locked within its own limitations. In the absence of practical thought (the only right capacity of the mind), there is always some painful reaction...

Surely we've known certain "perfect" moments in our lives. But who hasn't been in the middle of a dream vacation, without a care in the world, when--kaboom! In spite of the abundance around us, we're suddenly negative, deeply distressed simply because something or someone fails to please us according to our expectations! Or how about those moments when--regardless of how many of our friends...

Guy Finley explains that the path to a quiet mind is not through battling with what we think opposes our peace; it is by remembering what we love, and giving our attention to self-observation so we can instead be a witness of the moment.

In this short talk, Guy Finley discusses the importance of understanding the idea of "levels and scale" inside of our own consciousness, so that we can gradually begin to break our identification with the familiar sense of self that is produced by the level of mind that unconsciously talks to itself.

Darkness, in whatever form we experience it -- from a simple black, starless night, to a depressed thought or feeling -- only exists in the absence of light.

In this short talk, Guy Finley talks about how real revelation of the truth of ourselves transforms the character that has been revealed.

In this short talk, Guy Finley talks about how we are not meant to be held captive by thoughts and feelings that do nothing but repeat themselves over and over again.

Much of our time is spent identifying the so-called cause of our discontented states, and the rest of our time is taken up trying to change our unwanted situations into what we imagine will better suit our pleasure. Of course this description puts a kind of positive spin on what amounts to one's never-ending whirl of wishes, but the facts are that these dreams of a better time to come do not o...

There is one essential reason why there is so much constant heartache and war on this earth, and why conflict has continued as it has down through the ages. The answer may surprise you. We do not understand our own pain -- our suffering. Six-and-a-half billion human beings live in ignorance of their pain. But this is not to say that we live pain-free. In fact, without exception, human beings...

There is a lot of conflict inside of an aspirant's heart. As an aspirant of a true spiritual life, you will run into many inescapable contradictions. Please read following sentence very carefully. There's no difference between not wanting a reaction that punishes you, and wanting to have a reaction that does not punish you. Wanting something and not wanting something are opposites that cannot...

There is an order of being that already exists as a possibility in the consciousness of humanity. This order of consciousness never gets caught up in trying to repair things the way our minds currently do. Because our minds are always busy trying to fix something psychologically, we automatically assume that what the mind is working on is worth fixing. The divided mind believes that there is...