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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
If you have a few minutes, and want a burst of enlightenment, watch or listen to these brief talks by Guy, filled with concentrated wisdom.
Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
Dive deep into a subject on your own! Work at your own pace with a series of talks by Guy on topics critical to your inner development.
Catch Guy Finley’s weekly message that focuses on spiritual and personal breakthroughs. This is updated weekly and is available in video, audio and text.
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Shop eCoursesED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. I'm here with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today we're going to talk about how to use inner storms to find perfect peace.
Guy, it seems like there are a lot of paradoxes in the spiritual life, but I think they are paradoxes just because we don't see the big picture. One of them that you talk about quite frequently is that we can use inner storms, negative states -- things like anger, depression, fear -- to find peace. But when we're in one of those negative states, it doesn't seem possible. So how can we use these states to find the peace that we want?
GF: Have you ever been to a lake or been around a big pond? A lake or pond, by definition, is a pool of water, and as a rule it is concave, like a bowl. I think everybody has seen it who has been up in the mountains or anyplace natural, and as the earth part dropped away, there were certain things you could see in the water. And the clearer the water was, the deeper you could see. What you can't see with your eyes when you look at something like that is that usually the deeper the water is, the more still it runs.
The reason that I'm calling on this picture for our minds to look at is because the storms that we can't figure out how it would be possible for us to use remain unusable to us because of where we approximate ourselves in the moment of the storm. In other words, in the storm I'm the cork bobbing on the water. Here's all this turbulence, and I'm being tossed around. When I'm being tossed around by negative thoughts and feelings, the "me" that is being tossed around by them must have something similar in its substance to those very states that are causing that disturbance. If you throw paint into the air, the air doesn't get painted, does it? Because the air and the paint are different natures. Shine a spotlight from a beautiful lighthouse, and it goes right out into that deep ocean storm water with waves crashing, and everything passes through it.
So the first lesson about storms is that if I'm in a storm and I'm fighting with the storm, there is no way I'm going to be able to use what I'm fighting with if I'm a part of that disturbance, meaning if I am myself identified with the condition -- that angry, fearful worry. If I'm caught up in thinking about the condition, there is no way I can do anything other than be its opposite. There is the storm and there is "me." Commonly we think that the "me" that is in the storm is different than the storm I'm in. This is the big spiritual lesson that we all have to learn, and we do, gradually, but it takes time.
A crisis is a storm, isn't it? When does the crisis pass?
ED: When I no longer see the situation the way I did before.
GF: Exactly. The crisis ends when whatever the lessons were behind it become evident to me, and therefore I'm no longer a fighter of the condition but I transcend it by my understanding of it, so that the storm of that crisis actually gives birth to something new.
ED: Somehow being in that crisis transforms the individual that is in relationship with that crisis.
GF: When the individual knows how to use the storm, which is what we are talking about.
Let's back up a little bit. First of all, real life is a storm of creative energies. That is what real life is. Real life is not your magazines stacked up perfectly on your coffee table. That is not real life. Real life is not the butler and the maid and everybody standing in perfect service waiting to handle things. That is not real life.
Real life is a vibrant flux, a storm of these energies that are themselves always reconciling themselves. Now we're talking about a storm so we're going to draw a parallel here and then we'll come back to how we can use the moment of a storm in our life.
First, Ellie, when you think of an innocent child, what makes the child innocent?
ED: They seem to be open to everything. They aren't judging. They're curious about everything.
GF: They're not apart from what they're in, so whatever there is in the moment becomes a world, and they have a deep fascination with it.
ED: They give themselves to it.
GF: Yes. A child doesn't relate to the world around it through something -- an idea about itself or a belief about itself. The child is just in a relationship with life as a natural energy in response to a series of energies transpiring.
Then something happens, and the mind begins to formulate images in order for that child to navigate, to reconcile, to know where it is, who is what, and what is taking place. Images are formed in the child's mind that it then begins to take as being the thing. So when it thinks of mom, if she's a good mom, then the thought of mom brings a smile to her face. The mom is not there, but the thought is, and the child takes the thought for being the same thing as mom.
If the child has a bad moment with Aunt Mary, and then fashions an image of Aunt Mary, every time someone looks like Aunt Mary, the child has a negative reaction because the image is formed in the child's mind.
The point here is that the child doesn't have storms born out of collisions with life until images are formed in that child's mind that then collide with what that child thinks it wants in order to have more of that image or to get away from it to save themselves from that content.
ED: It's really a process of comparison.
GF: Yes, and the point that I'm trying to make is that the first thing we need to understand about these storms is that they're produced by what we'll call "unnatural" opposing forces.
First we're going to talk about natural opposing forces. When there is a big storm, the reconciliation of those forces which are opposing systems cause them to be resolved through releasing their energies. The reconciliation of a storm is caused by those systems colliding and those systems being reconciled/resolved through the natural release of their energies.
The beauty of the natural release of those energies is that it is all positive. Everything that comes out of the natural reconciliation of those energetic forces that cause the storm in the world produce a new life, a new form, a new possibility. They clear the ground. They add purity. They wipe clean.
Here is how we can see that storms in real life are beneficial. You can't find a bad storm (unless you're an insurance company!). Now, as above, so below. Why on earth aren't storms welcomed by human beings? When someone doesn't agree with the image we have of ourselves, that person is an idiot of course. We know immediately they're an idiot because they don't see our glory.
ED: And they don't appreciate us.
GF: Right. Is the person really an idiot, or did they just not get clued into the fact that in your mind you're seated on a throne, and they're supposed to bow down in front of you? So the image collides with the behavior. Do you know these moments, Ellie?
ED: Yes. Quite well.
GF: That's a storm, isn't it? Now with human beings, these opposing forces don't get reconciled. They do release a host of energies, but everything is worse. Somebody doesn't approve of me and I try to prove that I am what I am. If I'm not trying to punish them, then I'm punishing myself.
ED: And then I remember everybody who ever said anything to me who made me feel not right about myself.
GF: So all this material inside of us, this content floods in, and creates more of an opposite. Now, incidentally, it's opposing the thoughts about itself. The mind is actually dividing and colliding with itself. But still, here's a storm why doesn't that storm in the human heart, in the human mind, produce exactly the same outcome as does nature in her life when she brings these forces together and produces clarity, purity, niceness, freshness, something that wasn't there before that is there now because these energies have been reconciled? This is a beautiful question to ask, because if we can even intuit the idea in a small way, then we can see a certain amount of hope. Most people are so beat up by storms that they think the only way they can get past the storm is to go on vacation, to do something towards the situation that is causing them pain.
ED: So the answer to the question is that in nature, the reconciling force comes through and everything clears up in preparation for the next storm that will come through, whereas in a human being, because of this thought structure that you've described, we don't allow a reconciling force to come through. Instead we just keep brewing further storms inside of us.
GF: Yes. That's exactly right. See, the thing that is hard for us to understand is that if we ever want to be really new, that newness can't be created. Peace cannot be created. Love is not a creation of human beings. These essential elements are eternal. They are revealed by the qualities of these energies and interactions, but they are not subject to it. We are subject to these storms because there is a part of us that has to do with imagination, with a part of ourselves that forms these ideas, forms these images, and believes that unless these images are held intact, that anything that threatens them is attacking them. That's the storm.
Anything by which I measure my worth, that I consider myself to be of X, Y, or Z value, that very thing itself turns out to be the seed of conflict. I can see that I hold myself in a certain esteem, and nobody is going to be talking to me like this, and everybody should just do whatever. Those are the very things that over a period of years we may have thought to ourselves that life is about. "I'm going to make a certain name for myself." "I'm going to do certain things and acquire an education." "People are going to respect me, by God." That may have been the best we understood, and we went and did those things. But what we do in the moment by which we define ourselves confines us if we don't let life release us from the identity that those images have formed.
ED: So the very things that we think are propping us up, that we think are valuable and make life valuable, are the very things that are preventing us from living a true and valuable life.
GF: Yes, and the "paradox" isn't that there is anything wrong with this work to achieve, to be excellent, to want to develop my mind. There is this natural upwelling inside of a human being to pursue excellence. It's natural to want to be known, meaning how can I know myself if not through the world around me? But at a point in our lives we can start to see that there is an inherent limitation in wanting to know myself by that which is outside of myself. And with that, the limitation begins to become clear because of all the storms connected with it. Then one realizes that the way in which I've known myself outside of myself is through these images, these thoughts that I have about myself. So a storm isn't coming to take something from us. It's the evidence of a moment in which it's possible to transcend the very nature that was the seed of that storm.
This storm of life and these creative energies are always producing forms. We can see that, can't we? All this energy producing form after form. All that same energy is then taking forms apart. And when these forms are taken apart naturally by life, then the energy is released to become a new form, only a higher level because of the way in which the universe is expanding and, by the way, becoming by a certain action of Light (potentially for human beings) more intelligent, more compassionate. Everything is under those laws if we understand that and put ourselves under them.
ED: So, when we begin to see that we limit ourselves and put ourselves in a position where we suffer from these storms because of all these ideas about ourselves, and we realize that being in a storm, if we deal with it properly, can actually begin to wash away these images and give us something new -- not our own images but a self that life wants to give us -- then we can actually begin to welcome storms.
GF: Yes. Here's a strange sentence: It takes two to thunder. What does that mean? How many of us know what it's like to be sitting at home, or doing our work at the office, or driving a car, and all of a sudden (and it's quite literal), someone says or does something and we can actually feel a kind of crash? Something slams into us. What we do incorrectly now is that in the moment of that slam, we blame the person or the thing that we say has caused that crash. That part of us that defines us in that moment separates us out from the storm and says "I'm not part of this storm." What we are learning is that those moments where opposing forces run into one another are produced because of what life brings us and that touches what has been formed in us. We are not meant to live from a solid state.
You've heard that passage: "I live and die daily," moment to moment all of these things point to a completely different order of relationship with life, where instead of fighting with the storms and solidifying that self that was the object it ran into, we begin to wake up in the moment. Instead of solidifying that self, we expose the whole of the self to the whole of the storm, and then let the natural, beautiful Intelligence that actually produces these storms, do what it was intending to do with us, which is to let us go through a process of transformation and change us so that we come out a new creature and that is quite literal.
ED: You've said that every storm passes, and it's true. Even in the unconscious person, eventually they get worn out and the anger goes away (until it comes back again). The real issue is, what am I doing in that moment of the storm to allow it to do its work of transformation?
GF: That's the whole thing, Ellen. If we can learn to be storm watchers instead of storm fighters, we have a chance to let that storm do in our soul what it was always intended to do, which is to produce inside of us a whole new life.
ED: Thank you, Guy.
You've been watching a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.
How to Use Life's Storms to Let Go and Live in Peace
Posted by Guy Finley in 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532 on , and updated on .
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