Our experience in life is what it is teaching us: that the whole business of reaching for what we do and the way we do it is incapable of producing the perfection that our heart is looking for. What is it about seeing a great performer, a great athlete, a great mind that makes them seem so special? Is it what they have been able to bring into their lives as a result of what they love? Or is it the love itself that the person has become an expression of?

There are three ways to get what one wants from life: industry, cunning, or love. Industry is good but at best conditional, for it is subject to the passage and ravages of time. The "crafty" inevitably trap themselves. Love, on the other hand, liberates those who seek its company, and it is timeless. When all is said and done, this order of love has the last word because it is its own reward: whatever we are willing to let it make of us, it fashions from itself.

In this answer to a viewer's question, inner-life author Guy Finley talks about doing the right thing in our relationships with others, and how unconditional love does not mean unconditionally tolerating people who repeatedly refuse to see where they are hurting themselves and others.

Which would you rather have: a treasure room that is filled with an old potato, a worn-out shoe, and a dented can of Spam... or a room filled with precious stones, rare silks, and a chest of gold? It seems like a silly question, and yet... why do you choose a mind and heart filled with dark thoughts, anxiety, anger, and self-doubt when you could have a mind and heart...

Topic: To See or Not to See (Classroom Talk 3/27/24)

Classroom Talk: 3/27/2024 - New, true self-knowledge re-orders the world we see because, for one thing, the way we experience each moment of life is inseparable from how we understand it; so that just as a fractured mirror can only reflect back an image that seems shattered, so is it true that a divided mind can't see what is holy.

Student Talks: 12/2/2022 - Key Lesson: Reactions are not actions, any more than an echo is the cause of its own sound... which means: we cannot escape moments we resist, any more than it's possible to outrun our own shadow.

Topics covered: Life contains a mystery that you're drawn to -- it's the mystery of yourself; Agape is a type of love connected to giving yourself up as a higher form of sacrifice for the love of another. It doesn't add something to you, it costs you something - only then do you find yourself being given something in return you couldn't have received any other way...

Student Talks: 5/27/2022 - Key Lesson: Part 1 – That we should search only our own conscience for confirmation of what is good and true, this is the best definition of integrity. For that which is good and true is not social in nature, but spiritual in need and in deed. Part 2: Here is an enigma wrapped in a paradox: we cannot buy the love of the Divine; no good deed can produce the Presence...

Topics covered: The original meaning of the word "profitable" pertains to the concept of "ascending." And the original meaning of the word "sin" pertains to "missing the mark"; There is not one moment of the day that you are not experiencing what something in you loves, both on the so-called positive side and the so-called negative side; Only love makes us an authentically profitable...

Student Talks: 2/25/2022 - Key Lesson: Before we can see that "love is the answer" we must learn to be present to -- aware of -- and above all else willing to go to the heart of the one question that life never stops asking us in 10,000 ways, each and every day.

Topics covered: The truest answer to any question that life asks is not an intellectual answer; Every discovery we make in the world around us is really a discovery of the world within us; We are drawn to nature because the qualities in nature are first and foremost already existing within consciousness. Everything nature will ever show us is already a part of our True Self...