All of us know what it's like to be dogged by parts of us that want to drag us down. Call it what you will: some compulsion or obsession seems to follow us into all our relationships, only to wreck them in one way or another. We struggle as best we can to free ourselves from these dark states but invariably find ourselves short of the mark.

One of the most slippery parts of the upper path is the temptation to judge ourselves -- to loath ourselves for whatever "weakness" is exposed to us in the moment. The act of judging ourselves in times like these seems natural and even necessary if we hope to ever "outgrow" our own limitations as revealed. But this kind of self-laceration is a Trojan horse within whose dark recesses lies...

Guy Finley explains that success in your spiritual life follows the understanding that "in my weakness is thy strength made perfect."

Topics covered: When does the world change? When you change the way you see the world; The blessed ones through the ages have tried to convey the idea that you need new eyes to see what is in front of you all the time but that you don’t currently see. And the reason you don’t see is because the impressions that are intended to produce a real change are deflected by all kinds of buffers — beliefs, conditions, longings.

Topics covered: There are parts of us that do not want anything to do with the truth of things; Why is it that human beings have not known what to do with their suffering for all this time? Human beings are the captive of a suffering that they do not understand; Regardless of how conditions have changed as a result of our ability to change them with technology, etc., we are all still absolute captives of the suffering we don't understand...

Topics covered: Each negative state that we currently act from comes with an incredibly strong sense of self whenever that weakness appears. The real root of the weakness is the identification with the state; We draw a strong sense of self from the very weakness that we say we wish to be from from. There is an addiction to resisting the weakness; There is nothing real that happens when we revisit the past...

Topics covered: The spiritual journey involves discovering the genuine need to be awake, and seeing where presently we are led around by weakness; There is no kindness in any power that a person attributes to him or herself; What is the real source of weakness? The fact that we have no permanent 'I.' Rather, our current sense of self is produced by identification with whatever...

Topics Covered: There are almost an infinite number of ways that people excuse their way through life. Everyone walks around with a false friend named MOE, which stands for "Master Of Excuses"; We are not supposed to prove our perfection. Instead we are meant to be perfected through using the moment and its relationships for revelation and self-knowledge; All things in nature...

Topics covered: Real love isn't selfish; Our minds are undeveloped; We start every moment from an assumption of strength; Everything you can see going on within you is beneath the self that can see; Who and what you really are is out of the ordinary, but we live from an ordinary self; You're so anxious because you're always trying to prove yourself; Nothing in you needs to be protected....