Classroom Talk: 9/27/2023 - You can't learn how to be; it's impossible. But you can see through the futility of the endless struggle to make yourself (feel) real. So, yes: it's hard to die to the hope that some time yet to come holds the key, but it does get easier the more you realize that whatever freedom you've imagined... doesn't exist without the fear that it doesn't.

Student Talks: 5/8/2019 - Key Lesson: When it comes to being free, there is no such thing as the "next best thing." Therefore, it is the far wiser soul that agrees to "die" to her imagined freedom, than it is to live as a fool who realizes, too late, that he traded his soul for a servitude made comfortable by compromise.

Key Lesson: Starve a fear and feed your freedom. Key Question: How can we be devoured by any thought? Might as well believe that a shadow can consume the light that creates it! Second Key lesson: The more any painful thought or dark feeling asks of you, the less you must give it.

No one succeeds in realizing real freedom who -- when life seems to conspire against this wish -- is turned round by this trouble and starts defending the reasons why he must live as a captive for yet another day.

Classroom Talk: 6/11/2003 - Here is one of the great spiritual mysteries of all time. Freedom is either found within one's suffering or not at all; the only thing one escapes who runs from his or her pain is the possibility of discovering its purpose and how to transcend it.

If we are to know the truth of ourselves, then we must test ourselves, for in no other way can we discover that boundaries belong only to those bodies to which they apply; and that our mind, at last unfettered by fear and from other false apparitions, may know freedoms as unattainable to the flesh as is the open sky to the starfish that dwells at the bottom of the sea.

Topics covered:  A "winner" according to the world is someone who gets what he or she wants. These "winners" then have to protect what has been won; Real freedom is to no longer feel the need to protect what you believe you have won; A real winner, in the higher sense, is someone who exits the moment with more understanding than when he or she entered into it.

Guy Finley reveals what we must do to change our experience of life and enter into a relationship with freedom itself.

Topics covered: We seek fast relief from our problems. But what we really want is freedom from the consciousness that is the problem-maker; Get tired of your own explanations for the pain that you are in; The only thing that troubles you about other people is what you want from them; The solutions that the unconscious nature prescribes are designed to ensure the continuation of the nature that is prescribing those solutions.

Only by our deliberate interior work to realize a world within and yet beyond our self do we make this glad discovery: the freedom that we long for is not the product of any experience; it precedes it -- going before both the purpose and product of our plans.

Part I: Each moment of this life is whole in its presentation. It is not for a treasure hunt but is a Treasure revealed. The self that searches for treasure is tormented by the unseen fact that it can never realize the reality it imagines because the dream always outruns the dreamer. Part II: Any attempt to change your sense of self-discontent by striving to increase possessions, or ot...

Until we learn the one Great Lesson that what we want from life must play a secondary role to what Life asks of us -- which is to grow in the timeless qualities of selflessness such as self-sacrifice, kindness, and love -- then we will remain unable to share in the abiding sense of peace and freedom that comes to us only as we realize the true purpose of our being.