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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
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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.
Join a lively online discussion with other members each week of “This Week’s Topic” – a new Guy Finley talk selected for in-depth study.
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Shop eCoursesED: Recently here at Life of Learning Foundation, Guy, you gave an inspiring talk about the benefits of self-knowledge, and I thought it would be nice for this chat if we went down the list of these benefits and talked about each of the items.
GF: Let's start at the beginning. One of the oldest, truest axioms in all spiritual life is "know thyself." We don't know ourselves, Ellen. What we have is a whole lot of ideas about ourselves that when we think about ourselves through those ideas, it generates a certain sensation for us, and we call this sensation that we have of ourselves "knowing" ourselves.
Self-knowledge means that a man or a woman has begun in a tiny way (and it always starts in a small way) to realize that who they really are is not the thoughts and feelings they have about themselves. This in itself is a step, a leap literally, in the soul of a man or woman, because for most of our lives we live similar to animals. I see a predator, I respond, and I believe that my reaction is born out of my understanding and there is no recourse.
There are squirrels in the woods where I live -- I call them little monkeys -- and you would be surprised how much one can learn about himself by studying squirrels. Did you know that squirrels never greet each other? There will be five or six grey tree squirrels on the ground, all filtering through the seeds that have fallen from the various feeders, and they are always at least three feet or more apart from one another. If one of them happens to move a little bit closer, the dominant one will leap towards the one that has encroached, and the one who has encroached -- I don't know how they do it -- goes straight up in the air about three feet. The one who attacks runs underneath him, and then they get back to their equal distance. Then, when they're all in this little party, here comes a new squirrel, and nobody stops to say, "hi"... I know this sounds silly, but they are completely disassociated. They don't choose to be aggressive or isolated from other life around them; that's all they can do. There is no choice for them.
Now, I don't know about you, but I watch human beings at a party, and they stand about three feet away from each other unless they know each other, and if somebody walks into that three foot circle, the person who is more dominant will move forward and the person who is less will back up. When you're in an elevator and someone walks in, it's like magnetic repulsion -- you go to one corner and they go to another. When a third person comes in, now the space is equally divided into three, and no one is choosing to do this.
Now Ellen, if I can't choose what I do, if I don't know the forces that are making me act towards you or anybody else in my life, do I have my own life? Or, is my life an expression, an extension of a series of unconscious forces, all of which apparently have their own life and guidelines that I must serve and be a slave to as long as I remain unconscious of their presence in me? Self-knowledge is the gradual awakening to these elementary, elemental forces that are connected with thoughts and feelings that elicit behaviors in us that, without our knowledge of them, produce an experience of life for us that we then either resist or embrace, but without any choice to do so.
Self-knowledge is the birth in us of a beginning understanding of what it is that makes us what we are. Without that self-knowledge, nothing is possible. No one can do anything other than what the instinct of their animal nature does, whether its courageous, recalcitrant, or frightened as a general pattern. There is no choice.
Having outlined that, now we can talk about these individual principles, because I want people to understand that self-knowledge is the door. Any moment you want to, you can acquire some new understanding about yourself by coming awake to yourself in the moment. The problem is that most of what we learn about ourselves in those moments when we're awake, we don't know what to do with because there's a part of us that always wants to put what we see someplace so we can know ourselves that way. Self-knowledge is not like that. Let's get started with your list.
ED: The first of the benefits of self-knowledge you listed was: When you see something in yourself, you recognize it in others.
GF: Here's an example: I'm sitting someplace and I'm frightened because there's a new possibility. I can move into a different position and assume new responsibility, and I'm afraid to do it. I look over and I see someone else who is willing to step into the situation. Or, I see someone like myself, and they're not. It's impossible for me to make the choice to go against this instinctual fear until I recognize it is a fear based in a sense of myself that as long as I only have that to go on, I can't make any other choices than that fear allows me. So, if I meet another person and they're exhibiting a behavior, and I don't like them because they're exhibiting it, my usual reaction (just like the squirrel) is to punish them or try to push them away because I believe that the way I feel is due to their behavior. But, when I start to recognize that whatever it is that's active in that man or woman that's making me feel this way is active in me too -- and maybe that person is feeling towards me like I'm feeling towards them -- that person ceases to be someone who controls my behavior.
I don't know if people understand this. When you resent someone, do you know that they control your behavior? We think, because I resent somebody I'm more powerful than they are. I'm the one making the choices here. No, if I resent or fear someone, what I call "them" is making a choice for me. The fact is they are not making the choice. That part of me that I'm not conscious of (that I can see in them) says: "Look at that guy. He's always kissing up to somebody." Don't we all despise people who fawn in front of other people? Well, how do you know they're fawning? The way I know they're fawning is, by God, I have a fawner in me.
There's an old axiom in this work: Weakness always pounces weakness. So, whenever I see something in another person that I don't like and have a negative reaction to, it's a sure-fire indication that I have that quality in me. Now, as long as I don't know I have that quality in me, I can go on hating people that have those qualities. The split second that I become aware of the fact that this is in me or I couldn't respond to that person, then lo and behold, in that self-knowledge I gain a certain control -- not over the other person but over my reaction to that person.
ED: Yes, I was thinking that other people often surprise us. We're shocked at what they do, and then that puts us in a position where we don't know how to respond. We should never be surprised at another person, and if we knew ourselves, then we would know them too.
GF: Absolutely. I make a promise to anybody who is interested: "Know thyself," and when you do, you know every human being that you'll ever meet. You cannot meet someone in this world that you do not know once you know yourself. You cannot meet a state in a human being that surprises you, or punishes you, or takes you off-guard once you understand that state in yourself. It is impossible. So, we're talking about true safety through self-knowledge.
ED: Yes, it's perfect protection. The next point you made concerning the benefits of self-knowledge was that self-knowledge always leads to compassion.
GF: We were just touching on that, weren't we? Usually if someone comes up to me and they're in a negative state because they're frightened, or they're anxious, or they made a mistake, the first reaction we have is born out of a certain pressure that comes into us and says, "If this idiot wasn't doing what he was doing, I wouldn't be so angry." Well, "let the one who is without sin cast the first stone"... you know that old saying? What happens, slowly but surely, is that it's not that you don't have the reactions that you normally have, but you begin to recognize that under similar circumstances, you have something in you that does the exact same thing. It just wants to get done, get it over with, and do whatever it does. Then, because you start to recognize that, it isn't that what the person is doing is correct, it's that you begin to recognize that he is doing what he's doing because he is the slave to the same state that you've been a slave to your whole life.
Then, instead of punishing him, you can maybe show him something. You can help him, correct him. But the key thing here -- believe it or not -- is that you don't punish yourself first. All negative reaction towards aberrant behavior in other people is first a punishment to the person who perceives that as aberrant behavior. Always, the first punishment is to yourself. So, self-knowledge is gradually I become aware that I'm an anxious person. I like to rush. I've got to get things done. That's all in me, but if I can recognize that I'm driven like that, then when I see others who are driven, I don't have to punish them for it. There is a compassion that is born out of self-knowledge, because who is going to punish themselves?
ED: You said in your talk that part of the reason why you feel compassion is because you know that person can't help himself.
GF: I suppose this is where a great gulf appears, because self-knowledge is really something most of us don't want. We'll say we want self-knowledge, but what we really mean is, I want to know what a good person I am.
ED: I only want the good self-knowledge.
GF: Exactly. I want all the knowledge in the world about my positive aspects. "Lay it on me, God. Show me my glory." That's us. We don't want to know about the aspects of ourselves that are self-destructive, punishing, ignorant. We don't want to know that we're susceptible to violent thoughts and feelings. We don't want to know that there is a hatred that exists in us that doesn't need an object outside of itself to exist, and because we don't want to know it, we'll push it away.
One of the ways that we push it away is by having the enemies or the conditions outside of us that we blame these states on. But, as we begin to recognize that "I've changed partners four hundred times in my life and I still have the same anger, so it can't possibly be the person. That anger must dwell in me," that beginning glimpse of the fact that there is something in me that I can't explain away (and that frankly I don't know what to do about) is a moment in which I see a kind of darkness in myself.
There is something in us that when we see these dark parts, can't wait to say, "Oh my God, look at this darkness. You're the worst thing that ever lived. You would have been much better off if you'd never seen that about yourself... let's go have a drink." But self-knowledge includes the understanding that anything in us that is afraid of darkness, itself must be part of that darkness, so that even though there is a reaction to seeing myself as I am, my understanding of the whole process liberates me, lets me realize: Of course there is something in me that doesn't want to see that I'm an irritable grouch, because my image of myself is being the all-patient one. So, when I run into the fact of myself versus an image of myself, the image is always going to try to keep itself intact by blaming the condition on conditions outside of myself.
Little by little, as I gain this self-knowledge, Ellen, and I'm willing to see myself as I am... "know the truth and it will set you free"... what I do know about myself sets me free from the fear of it.
ED: And this compassion we have for others doesn't mean that we excuse them. It means that we know how to deal with them properly.
GF: That's right. Certainly, if you see someone and they're on fire, the wrong reaction to their fire is to get mad at them because they set you on fire. A fire runs into a fire and you get a bonfire, right? That's the whole point. You come awake. You realize there is a tendency in you when somebody is negative to get equally negative, and then hate them for their negativity when you're negative too. Instead of that, just like a toreador, we can learn to let the bull run by, and once the bull has run by, you recognize that it wasn't a real condition of yourself. There was an emotional force, there was a power there, but you let that thing go by, and now you're standing there free of it, and you can help someone see themselves instead of making that person convince themselves they have a right to feel that way when you get negative back at them. When we're angry at somebody because they're angry with us, all we're doing is justifying their reason to be angry.
ED: This is related to the next point you made, which is that self-knowledge leads to forgiveness of oneself because we no longer punish ourselves for things we couldn't have done differently.
GF: I'll ask you: Why do we cling to an anger, resentment, or hatred of another person?
ED: Well, for one thing, we think we have to. We don't realize that we have a choice in it. We get a sense of ourselves from it. It's such an important part of who we feel ourselves to be.
GF: Right. So when I think about the person or the event that hurt me so badly, I feel all of the pain that I felt when it happened the first time. By revisiting it, I relive it, and when I relive it, it re-stokes the fire, and when the fire is re-stoked, the suffering returns, and when the suffering is there, I have to have someone to blame for it. So, there is this very dark, negative spiral that is connected with blaming others and hating them for the things that we have felt, including (and this is not separate from it) when we ourselves have done stupid things. "I made the most blatant error. I hurt somebody so badly. I am the worst human being that ever lived." A person will spend his or her whole life, Ellen, reliving what they were and what they did, believing that if they could simply resolve that, they would escape it, never realizing that by revisiting it, they revitalize it.
ED: Right. They're strengthening the self that made that mistake.
GF: They strengthen the whole of that nature. So, self-knowledge begins to show a person how these opposites in us work, and how this cycle drives itself. When I actually recognize that there is something in me that is perpetuating the very punishment that I habitually blame on someone else, the knowledge of that allows me to begin to step back from it and realize the only reason I'm feeling this punishment is because I'm participating in a self-lacerating nature. As hard as this is to understand, it isn't until we begin to see things very clearly like: That man was the most cruel man I've ever known in my life, and he did the most cruel thing another human being could do to me, but I have now seen, in another relationship with someone else (or maybe in the way I treated him) that I have that cruelty in me. I've seen it. There is no question in mind that if I could or would have destroyed him, but he had more position or power than I did, so I couldn't do anything, and I accepted it so I could live with this hatred of him.
When you see for a fact that the very thing that you despise in another person sits in the elements of your own soul, how can you hate anybody? It's impossible, because you understand they could not do any differently. But Ellen, the reason we don't want to get to that point is because when we do, when we see ourselves and the self-knowledge is apparent, we collapse. We come to the end of a certain stream of time. We come to the end of our past and the present that it produces as we are punished considering it, and the future we would have if we could escape the punishment that we cause ourselves. So, when one gains self-knowledge, the whole stream of time that this sense of self is vested in begins to melt away.
ED: As you've often said, there comes a point in your life when you see yourself about to do something you've done before, you know what it means, and you say, "I'd rather die than do that again."
GF: That's right... and here's the flip side. Let's do a little role acting... tell me that you've noticed I'm not suffering like I used to over something, and ask me why.
ED: Guy, I've noticed that you're not suffering like you used to over what just happened. What's going on?
GF: I just don't care about it anymore.
ED: Why not?
GF: I found something better... real life. Wholeness. Present moment. Intelligence. Participation.
We only cling to the things that we cling to -- particularly the things that cause conflict -- because of a certain kind of ignorance that we have as to what we could participate in. So, in the larger sense of this, to tie back to the beginning, self-knowledge is the gradual discovery that who I really am is a participant in a much broader life. As we gain this self-knowledge, we are liberated from the false sense of ourselves that is always connected with identifying with passing things. And as that freedom from identification falls away, so the stream of time disappears, and a person finds that they're part of the ocean of this life instead of a little twig being bounced along...
ED: ... being broken by the waves. OK, let's go on to another one. You mentioned integrity. You said that nothing that we try to get from life can free us from feeling incomplete. Only spirit makes us whole.
GF: Yes, that's right. It would surprise us how little integrity we actually have. There's a passage, "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?" We sell our soul for approval, so that someone will see us the way we want to be seen. We sell our soul so that we can somehow or other collect a round of things that make us feel like our lives have meaning. There is no integrity in a person who fears the loss of something. Self-knowledge educates the soul to realize its spiritual nature, and that spiritual nature is connected to something that has no beginning, no end, and can't be lost.
So, as one is connected to that broader life, then they don't have to look around and be a beggar around other human beings, or in life itself, hoping it's going to give them something they've imagined will make them whole. They live in wholeness itself, and that integrity allows a person to be proper towards others. It lets you say no when you want to say no. It lets you make the right corrections when it is time to make a correction because you have answered to something that self-knowledge has educated you to inside of yourself instead of answering to the ideals and the ideas of this world by which we all measure ourselves.
ED: The last two items on your list were peace of mind and a growing sense of timelessness, and I think you just covered both of those. What all of this seems to be coming to is when we gain self-knowledge, we really gain knowledge of the higher life, because we see that the self we thought we were is not the self we are.
GF: That's precise. Self-knowledge, in the truest meaning of the word, is knowledge of Self that is not divided up into you, me, and everyone else, but rather is a whole nature with a whole light whose purpose is to bring us to that understanding. Then we have all of the things we've talked about.
ED: Yes, and what could be a greater benefit than that? Thank you, Guy.
GF: You bet.
ED: This has been a fireside chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.
True Benefits of Real Self-Knowledge
Posted by Guy Finley in 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532 on , and updated on .
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