ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a "Fireside Chat" with bestselling inner-life author, Guy Finley. Today I thought we would talk about a bad habit that many people have, including myself, and that is comparison. We compare ourselves to other people, we compare ourselves to an image we have of the way we should be, we compare an event with other events it's just endless. A great...

GF: Good evening. Before we begin our chat, I want to give you a few insights that are intended to help you put together (in your mind) a few pieces of that never-ending puzzle we know as “pleasure and pain.” It is impossible to overstate the importance of being totally honest with ourselves about our lives. Spiritual progress is impossible for anyone unwilling to be truthful about him- or he...

GF: Welcome to our chat tonight. Before we begin, I want to give you some things to think upon that are vital to true self-victory. No one can hope to grow in Spirit who ignores the truths about to be told. We begin with a short story: Two men who have worked for the same company for years, and who share an office, are having a conversation over lunch. They are in the company cafeteria with o...

In a moment of crisis, would you say that you're easy-going? Are you wide-open and joyous to be with? Or, in a crisis, would you say you're about as tense as a human being could possibly be? Isn't that true? The more tense you are through resistance, the more negative you become. The more negative you become, the more resistance resists itself. And the more you resist yourself, the more tense you become. So you run left, you run right...

When you think of a single beautiful flower in springtime -- while it may stand with petals and leaves that look a certain way -- you'll never find a single flower the same as any other flower. Can you understand that the life of that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you say is beautiful.

Our sense of self, the way we experience ourselves, is very much connected to the widely varying states of emotional energies that come into us and that seem to shape the nature of our individuality. But the fact of the matter is, there is no such separate self, at least not the way we presently experience it. There are just these ceaseless states of energy and the fleeting sense of self they...

How many times in your life have you acted not just against yourself, but perhaps against others because your actions were uninformed, and you were moved prematurely into a conclusion? Too many times to count really. And most of these premature conclusions had some negative taint to them -- judging somebody, arriving at some insistence based on incomplete information.

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein and I'm here with inner life author, Guy Finley, to talk about letting go. Guy, some years ago you wrote a bestseller called The Secret of Letting Go that had a tremendous response all over the world, and you've just come out with a new book, Let Go and Live in the Now. There must be a lot of people all over the world who sense that they're hanging on to some...

GF: Welcome everyone. Let me open our meeting with some thoughts about what is required of us to realize the peace of mind for which we all long. No one can come upon this Real Silence without understanding certain truths about its nature. So we will discuss some of these truths now, and again at the close of our chat. Now, let's begin at the beginning with an important point that ought to be...

GF: Welcome everyone. Before we begin tonight I would like to help shed some light on a subtle but significant idea concerning what I call the "circle of self." We will examine the secret mechanism in us that drives us through certain unconscious life cycles where, in moments of crisis, we think we are making wise choices, only to realize we have chosen against ourselves once again. To begin,...

Our usual reaction to any event not of our choosing is to fear it, so that our tendency is to see these experiences as being adversarial. These unwanted moments are seen as threats to our present happiness, as well as being a thorn in our tomorrow, because with any unwanted event comes the fear of not having the right answers to address the flood of new questions arising out of life's sudden t...

It always seems that in the face of any crisis the best and the worst of humanity is revealed for all to see. On one hand there are thousands who suddenly become aware (perhaps for the first time) of the pain and loss others feel and, foregoing personal interest, dive into the challenging waters of self-sacrifice and other charitable works of selflessness. At the same time these crises -- esp...