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Articles
Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Inspirational Quotes
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Guy's Letters
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
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Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
This Week's Topic
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
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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.
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Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
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Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
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The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
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Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
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Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
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Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
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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.
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You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
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Student Q&A with Guy on "The Wisdom to Make Painful Moments Vanish into Thin Air" (3/12/23)
Posted: Monday, March 13, 2023
Meeting: Sunday, March 12, 2023
Duration: 36min 17sec
Topics Covered
The moment that a reaction gets named you have been set up to have a painful moment, because that consciousness resists the very reaction that it has named.
Revelation of resistance is the release from the captivity of that resistance.
"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -- William Shakespeare
An object or a condition cannot exist as it does for us, for the pain or pleasure of it, without prior knowledge of it.
Every name that is given to any moment has a history. In fact, there is no name that isn't history. No name has life.
If you name it, you are a captive of it. But you would never deliberately make yourself a captive. It's an unconscious, mechanical operation.
The consciousness names what is happening in an attempt to gain some kind of control over the condition.
You cannot avoid having a reaction. But you can either be aware of the reaction's quality, or resist it and therefore serve it.
Avoidance is trying to escape something that the consciousness has remembered. Awareness of that process leads to no longer being caught by it.
Humanity spends almost all of its time distracting itself from awareness of its own consciousness.
"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." The thinker suffers over its own knowledge, descriptions, explanations and interpretations that it identifies with.
No moment of real life has a name. The reaction to the moment does not have a name. So what is needed is awareness of the consciousness that makes names. We are tempted to name things.
Goodness becomes known when the observer and the observed are no longer separate from each other.
Before any moment can be judged, it has to be given a name.
What is this moment like, what is the energy of any reaction like without the name that is given to it?
Watch the temptation to name the moment and observe the sense of self that is produced as a result.
A name itself has no memory, but memory makes the name.
Don't think... live. Don't remember... be. There is no being in thinking, but being allows for thinking.
We are addicted to knowing, and yet who we really are is unknowable, beyond knowledge, beyond a name.
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