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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.
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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.
Guy's Blog
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.
Short Talks
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.
Student Reports
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
Sacred Music
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.
Daily Meditation Emails
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Special Lessons
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Student Talks
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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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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You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
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Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
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Shop eCoursesWhat about children? For example, my child is being disrespectful. I can clearly see that I am resisting and insisting that the child be other than what he is in that moment. I also see that I'm identified with something. I unconsciously want to be the mother of a delightfully flawless little angel. I do realize that that's nuts. But how do I carry out my duties as a mother without resisting bad behavior and insisting on good behavior from a young child?
Can you see that a lot of the reluctance you have is because you don't know what the right thing to do is, and you don't want to do the wrong thing?
We are captives of the idea of right and wrong. I am attached to and identified with wanting to be a right loving mother. And I believe that I know what a right loving mother is. But on the other hand, I know in these moments, I'm not a right loving mother. And I don't know what to do about not being a right loving mother. So I'm in conflict about what it means to be a right loving mother.
Can someone who is in conflict over not being a right loving mother ever be in relationship with the intelligence that is rightness and lovingness itself? It's impossible. So I have to be willing to go into these moments with my child (with anybody, honestly) with the one intention of wanting to be as present as I can to whatever it is that's participating in that moment in my name. Because I know what's not right, and I can taste violence. I can taste ugliness. Do I want to talk to my child from an ugly spirit?
But if I'm afraid of an ugly spirit, and then I treat my child and give them all this latitude that they should never have, am I doing the right thing by my child? So it seems like it's a rock and a hard place, doesn't it? But it's not if I'm willing to learn.
"Teach your children well. Your parents' hell did slowly go by..." How do I teach my children? I must learn myself. I must! I have to be with that person, with this place, with this situation. I have to be there. And the sole, the s-o-u-l intention has to be for me not to come in with an idea:
My kid is resisting, he's lying, he's cheating, he's stealing, he's doing drugs, taking money out of my purse - whatever it may be - I know my child is doing that. So here I am, and I know I need to make a correction. I have to. But how does a loving mother make a correction? And so now I'm saddled with this understanding - what I think is my understanding - of what a loving person is, instead of just letting what the moment is bring up in me what it brings up, act what I'm acting out, and then see what happens. How does that taste? What does that feel like?
There is no recipe for life. Don't you see you want a recipe? You want to drive by the McDonald's of happy relationship time and choose one of the "happy meals" so that you can drive through, have your curds and whey, and then go on with your life. There's no such thing!
It runs so deep. And yet, it's so evident. I can't stand uncertainty. I can't stand it! Why? Because something in me wants to know what's right and what's wrong so that then I can identify with it and have the feeling of myself as right or wrong, and then spend my life insisting that everyone and everything follow the guidance that my rightness and wrongness outlines for me.
Why can't I be a human being? Open, sensitive, experiencing - directly -the content of my own consciousness as it's brought up in my relationships with people. Why can't I be a human being? A human being doesn't go into any moment knowing how the moment should be. A human being doesn't go into moments thinking about who they should be or who they should not be. That's not a human being! That's a tape recorder. It's a broken machine that's a violent machine. It's an ugly machine, because it never participates in the life that it's being given so that it can continue to develop itself.
And if the mother develops herself, then by God, her children will have a chance to develop properly as well because she's acting out the very thing that she needs them to see. But if she meets them with resistance or righteousness, the child reacts and resists the righteousness or that resistance, and then does what? We just have the fomentation of this constant state of everybody trying to be according to what some condition or society tells us life should be like.
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