Long before it's possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves. Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world. Because the way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me.

What do we have to do to change the balance sheet of our lives so that for every measure of impatience and intolerance there may be at least an equivalent sum of compassion and consideration? How do we learn to use our relationships with others to realize a new kind of relationship with ourselves wherein we are able to discover that who we really are is all we need to be? Your willingness...

No anxious state could exist without your false belief that who you are -- your well-being -- is connected to something happening exterior to yourself.

What is it, then, that balances? What is that which allows this nature -- this divided nature, this nature that works in opposites -- what is it that would permit it the peace it seeks? What is it that creates balance in a human being?

When some anxiety comes along and takes over your life, are you an awake, inwardly centered person or are you an unconscious, outwardly driven man or woman? Which are you? That you're outwardly directed is pretty obvious. Why? Because that anxious state could not exist without your false belief that who you are -- your well-being -- is connected to something happening exterior to yourself. And...

When this sensory mind of ours perceives life, it mistakenly sees things as happening to it from the outside in. How does this error in perception affect us? It means that we perceive life as a series of things coming at us. Everything about us is oriented outwardly, and it appears to us that our lives are being determined from the outside in.

Of what use is our endless struggle to adapt and even achieve some of the more common culturally-valued prizes, knowing (as all of us do) that nothing we can ever possess has the power to stave off our own inevitable passing? The following quotation that I just love is from Vernon Howard, a great twentieth century mystic, that really not only helps to put this idea that we're...

Featured Study Group Topic for the Week of July 10, 2017. Part 1: The longing to be present -- to live in Presence -- is the path. The "steps" are made up of all the discoveries one must make as to what prevents one from being properly attentive to the Now, the indwelling home of the Holy.

Topics covered:  You will never be in command of anything that you don't want to understand. A new understanding changes your relationship with what you want to understand; You serve what you do not understand, and you presently do not understand pain; If we knew that we were inwardly at war all the time, then we would be more attentive to each moment that we enter into.

We have a nature that thinks about itself -- a nature that weighs itself on a scale that our culture has created and our thoughts have unconsciously adopted. Unexamined, this mind is a virtual torture device, keeping us locked within its own limitations. In the absence of practical thought (the only right capacity of the mind), there is always some painful reaction...

As we all know, there are trying times when states of discouragement literally dog us -- following us around as if they're waiting for us to fall down, never to rise again. On these days, our own lackluster emotions are hounded by thoughts barking at us that nothing is right with our lives. Sound familiar? On these same days, even our smallest wish to part ways with these painful states gets p...

ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein and this is a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I thought that today we would explore the topic of regret. Most people have things in their life that they regret. Memories come up of embarrassing experiences or lost opportunities, or maybe mistakes that they made or things that they're sorry over... and these things that may have h...