In this excerpt from an hour-long seminar, Life of Learning Foundation founder and director Guy Finley explains that we must work to harness the energy of negative forces instead of allowing those forces harness us. The full replay of this class is available in Life of Learning Foundation's online community, GuyFinleyNow.org, where you can join other true spiritual aspirants from around the w...

The real reason why life tests us as it does -- trial by trial -- is so that the strength we are yet to know can be slowly forged within us, as it is with steel, blow by blow.

Trying to outrun or, in any other way, distract yourself from the presence of a punishing state within you is like hoping to find shelter from a sweltering day by hiding in a steam bath.

The more we dwell on something we wish wasn't so, the more we soak ourselves in negative energies created by our own resistance. The longer we soak, the more we suffer; the more we suffer, the more we resist what seems to be the unwanted event when, in truth, what we are really drowning in are the dark waves of our own uninvestigated consciousness.

It is the nature of resistance to reject any form of stillness, because all it can "see" in it... is the unwanted reflection of its own negative face.

The only way it's possible to be consciously indifferent towards a painful negative state is to understand, thoroughly, that it has no existence apart from your resistance to it.

Psychological suffering is born of an unseen, “mechanical” resistance to life; it is the dark offspring of an unconscious nature...

Resistance recreates and then reinstates whatever it opposes, including the sleeping level of self that tries, in vain, to escape the pain of the opposing forces that created it.

Topics covered: Struggling to get what you want always sets you against other human beings; "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers." -- New Testament; Not wanting a condition is the same as struggling to control the condition you don't want; Some moments are as painful as they are because you have an idea that they should not be that way. The real source of conflict is your ideas of what you want...

Classroom Talk: 6/28/2023 - Part 1: Hidden deep within every desire there dwells an unseen fire; handle carefully... if you don't want to get burned. Part 2: A divided mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat; not only is it incapable of seeing its own contradictions, but then it struggles with them in a futile attempt to free itself from a conflict that wouldn't exist if it didn't first create it somewhere in the darkness of itself.

Topics covered: Any day that goes by without see something new about yourself is a wasted day; You cannot be receptive to new impressions when you are talking to yourself. But it is not really YOU that is in engaged in the conversation; Talking to yourself is the activity of a divided mind that is trying to reconcile the conflict that it created in itself; Anything that engages in a conversation about "what if?"...