When attention is directed, it has the ability to invest an idea with energy and life. Wherever you place your attention, you give life to that seed of thought. We've all experienced how the power of attention almost seems to have a magnetic pull. This power can be used for good or bad. When we use it for practical work, or for honest self-observation, we use it to our own benefit. However, w...

In this answer to a viewer's question, "letting go" author Guy Finley talks about the difference between observing a particular psychological condition -- such as feeling a lack of energy -- and resisting the condition.

There is no "self" without relationship. In reality, the observer and the observed do not exist apart from one another. However, in the absence of higher awareness, the lower level of self believes that it is separate from what it sees as being outside of itself. This is the source of suffering. The gift of being able to see that the observer is the observed is the reconciliation and the end...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of August 8, 2016. Part 1: True humility -- the higher state of being born only of agreeing to see, consciously, one's own helplessly-conflicted mechanical self -- is the holy humus required for one's rebirth. Part 2: What is any psychological suffering -- that always unexpected shockwave of anguish in some uninvited moment -- other than the agonizing ef...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of March 17, 2014. When there is no one and nothing left within oneself to blame for one's weakness, it's also pretty clear that turning to one's 'self' for help is like asking a donkey for the directions to heaven.

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. Slowly but surely, one thing becomes clear: we start...

What very few men and women ever come to realize, spiritually speaking, is that life is a ceaseless series of inner choices about where they want to live.

Topics covered: Discussion of the live-streamed series on Authentic Change; Having an intention isn't enough to make authentic change; Trying to escape what you're feeling versus really feeling what you are experiencing; A ""new you"" doesn't happen later, it's now or not at all; Being present to the movement of fear, anger, and anxiety within us; Learning to see that you are acting from an ""old...

Topics Covered: We realize what is timeless by dying to the nature that is in time; Thought is time; Timelessness holds all of us; Reactions belong to a part of us, but are not the whole of us; If you change, all of consciousness changes; The right to be present cannot be stolen from you; Remembering is entering into an order of memory that already exists; True helplessness is seeing...

In one respect, at the heart of our predicament as a species of beings -- because it negatively impacts our possibilities -- is that we do not see the big picture. For most of us, the big picture is our problem, our heavy heart, our irritation with somebody else, or our own sense of inadequacy. The big picture is the weight of our past. And that's not the big picture at all. That is a self-pitying picture. It has nothing to do with what it is that we need to understand.

Topics covered: When you are overwhelmed by multiple feelings at once, do you observe the feelings separately or collectively; Do you have plans to write a book on the deeper meanings of Christ's teachings; Can we turn around the negativity that has been perfecting itself within us; What do we do about feelings of superiority towards others; Can you tell us more about your background; How do I...

Why is it that one must, daily -- in as many ways possible -- remember oneself, observe one's interior life, and take in the impressions born of dispassionately witnessing one's own thoughts and feelings? Here we find the great paradox that underlies the path to authentic self-realization...and in it the promise of a new order of wholeness that can only be perceived by those "with eyes to se...