His first week in captivity he showed all the wildness of a once-free creature now penned; but in the weeks that followed, even the dried grasses once refused as food became not only tolerable but even agreeable. After all, no effort was required on his part to eat his fill. Food and water just appeared daily. And there were other benefits, it seemed.

While he was unable to get out of his compound, neither could anything get in; so his formerly restless nights, long disturbed by the fear of his predators, had now become just an old, bad dream. His new situation seemed to him more and more a kind of trade-off, and not that bad of one either.

Some unknown time later, a wild stallion ran across a neighboring hill, near enough to spot his captive cousin. Cautiously he approached the pen. “What are you doing in this strange place?” he asked as he looked around for any sign of trouble.

“I’m trapped,” said the captive stallion, between bites of his dry feed.

From outside the gate the stallion impatiently pawed around the gate’s wooded posts. “This gate looks flimsy. If we both run into it, you from your side and me from mine, I bet it gives way. You could escape. What do you say?”

“Thanks, but it’s not worth trying. We’ll just both get hurt,” spoke the captive horse as he pawed the worn ground of his pen to make his bed for an afternoon nap. “Besides, I’ve already tried it and nothing gave.”

The wild stallion flared his nostrils and snorted out, “I can see from this side that the wood in this gate has rotted. Let’s try!”

“No thanks,” the captive stallion sighed as he lay down, considering a roll in the dust but deciding against it because his water trough was too nearby. “Besides,” remembering the bruises to his shoulder, “I ran into that gate a dozen times, so if anyone should know what shape it’s in, I ought to. Trust me,” he added with a last measure of certainty to his neigh, “it’s no use.”

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The first night in the new room went by, and the next morning the father was looking around the table at the children, not asking, but waiting inwardly to know how his children were. He could see something was wrong with the boy who had just moved into his new room. So he asked, “How did you sleep last night, son?” The son said, “Oh... pretty good...” but the father knew that he hadn’t slept very well. Each subsequent morning it was the same story until the fourth day, it was better.

Thirty days go by, and it starts happening again. The father notices this pattern over a few months, so he decides to sleep in the boy’s room himself to see what is bothering his son.

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That night, the father is laying in the bunk bed next to his son, and as he looks around to try to figure out what’s going on, he sees an ominous looking shape outside the window, literally growing in size and moving its arms... and he almost gets scared himself. Then he realized what it was. He remembered that in the west field they had put up a large scarecrow. When the full moon would come up -- on that thirtieth day and then for several days afterwards -- it would pick up the image of the scarecrow and cast it across the field. He realized then what was scaring his son.

The next morning the father said, “Come here boy, I want to show you something.” So they went out to the field and the father said, “See this scarecrow? Watch this.” He reached inside and took out some of the straw. The boy didn’t understand. The father said, “You know that scary thing that’s about fifteen feet tall and has arms that wave around that you see out the window once a month? This is it! When the moon comes up, it casts a long shadow, and the wind is moving the scarecrow arms.”

The father reached in and took some more straw out of the arm, threw it in the wind, and said, “Here... you do that, too.” The boy did likewise and his father said, “See? There’s nothing to it!”

What are your scarecrows? What you haven’t been able to do in your life... what you think you won’t be able to do... the fact that you’re going to die one day? Fearful thoughts like these become obstacles, and if you run into a blockage, it seems to get bigger and bigger. It gets bigger only because you fuel it; you make it bigger. Why would you want to make it bigger? Because it makes you bigger. It makes you more important. “Look at what I have to deal with -- it’s huge!”

When you feel blocked, when something scares you, understand that what you see is nothing more than a form that has been congealed by a process inside of you that occurs whenever you think inside of yourself about yourself. Stop resisting and let go. Let the light pass through you. How? Risk it. Go out into the field at night, and whatever it is that scares you, walk up to it, and pull the stuffing out of it. Take the stuffing out of the scarecrow and take the stuffing out of what scares you! That frightening thought has no scary life apart from the fear you inject into it in order to be the person frightened.

Key Lesson: The smaller the world you live in, the bigger appear your fears.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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Always remember the following: if any want is the source of anxiety or sorrow, that want is yours and not life’s. If the want has pain, it is in vain. To let real life flood in, pull yourself out of the flood of self-wants that promises a future pleasure but only delivers a present pain.

Pull yourself out of the flood of your own wants by seeing that you are being washed away by them, and you will grow tired of being bounced along. Here is a key: never accept the presence of any mental or emotional suffering as necessary, no matter how much importance these impostors lend to a particularly pressing want. By refusing their dark presence, you make space for the present moment to give you its indefinable presence. This is where the life that you want -- and that wants you -- is waiting.

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No human being controls life -- his or hers or anyone else’s. If it weren’t for higher cosmic energies coming down, filling and animating your body right now, you couldn’t be reading these words. If you want to measure the level of an individual’s stress, measure his insistence that life does as he wants. The only thing you will lose by learning to want what life wants is your fear of not being in control, which was never real control in the first place but only the sensation of it, born out of living with its painful opposite.

Here is the most important point of all. No human being needs control over life because, in reality, no one is apart from it. Who you really are, your true nature, is not separate from life.

Let life bring you itself. Welcome it. At each instant, it is new, full -- untouched and undiminished by any moment before it. To enter into this full relationship with life is to give yourself to your Self. Fulfilling the true purpose of life is fulfilling yourself; they are one and the same. Here are five special key lessons to help you want what life wants.

1. Nothing can be released and resisted at the same time, which means that any attempt to reject some weakness detected in us is the same as protecting it.

2. True nobility is not a question of birthright or social rank, it is the native estate of each soul that, upon awakening to its divine inheritance, knows the strength of these twin truths without having to think about them: justice and mercy are one, as are love and fearlessness.

3. Nothing judges you; it is what you love -- and that love alone -- that either persecutes you or stands by you in your hour of need.

4. Whoever serves what they fear has failed to see that all they win for their service is to become more fearful.

5. We can spend our time struggling, in vain, to make others into what we want them to be, or we can see the inherent flaw in thinking this way, and -- rather than trying to change others to suit our needs -- see through the false idea that someone else is responsible for our fulfillment.

Key Lesson: Act on what you love, not from what you fear, and watch how fear fades as love grows.

Excerpted From: The Secret of Letting Go pages 137-142.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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Practice breaking thought. Go mentally silent. Just become aware of yourself without thinking about it. Break into that swarm of thoughts and feelings, over and over again, with your awareness of their presence. This will silence them and show you where you have been.

This important practice of conscious awareness allows you to know in each moment that there is you and your thinking, you and your emotions. All are present at the same time. This knowledge brings choice.

Consciously breaking thought -- becoming aware of your True Self within the existing order and values those same thoughts unconsciously impose -- helps you experience the liberating difference between being a captive of your own mental machinery and being in charge of it.

Come awake to yourself as often as possible. Break into your own thinking with your awareness of it. Break thought ten times a day, then a hundred times, and keep going. Watch how this powerful practice establishes a new order in your life free of all conflict and confusion.

Key Lesson: The misunderstanding of our relationship with life, awash with the unseen and useless suffering it creates, is the “mind and heart” of the false self, whereas the realization of our relationship to life, including our willingness to fulfill the obligation it calls for... is True Self.

Excerpted From: Freedom From the Ties That Bind page 98

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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As is true with all living things, especially the newly conceived, if you don’t feed and protect that nascent life, whatever its nature -- from the simplest to most complex -- it will perish and die.

Knowing the above to be a fact of life on earth, consider how much more so this is true when it comes to the embryonic appearance of a spiritual Light within you. Which is why, running through all true inner teachings, past, present, and yet to be... you will always find this one timeless axiom:

Never let even a single day go by without remembering your wish to be a part of the Life Divine, and then strengthen it by making whatever conscious effort you can to help make your wish come true.

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What will you do today to strengthen your true inner wish?

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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All movements, by their very nature, share three characteristics or qualities in common: first, they are always circular.

Second, at our present level of development, all movement is registered only by our senses.

Last, all movements exist as they do, and remain so only for as long as does the force of their initial cause.

The force of these movements tends to set other forces in movement; they are stirred into action by a corresponding force of attraction -- or resistance -- to that original movement. By proxy, these movements, and our sensory registration of all the sensations they produce, create corresponding movements within us. In this manner, identification with the movement takes place; one is first attracted to, and then gradually becomes dependent on this source of exterior stimulation for the familiar “fix” of feelings that they provide. These sensations fill one’s life, holding emptiness at bay, and always -- by their momentum -- provide the hope of something more promising to come.

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Accordingly, as a part of this movement, a form of dependency on the sensations it brings with it grows and creates -- in another iteration of the same movement -- a derivative sense of self that feels it must protect itself from anything that challenges the direction in which it is being moved; any counter movement is perceived as a threat to its very existence. And so begins its search for power to neutralize anyone or anything seen as its enemy; it seeks power to elevate itself above whatever may oppose it, so as to proceed -- unimpeded -- in the advancement of what it falsely believes to be its cause.

It makes no difference how any such movement defines itself, regardless of how seemingly noble; for regardless of how well-intended may be its inception, all human movements -- by reason of the very nature that brought them into existence -- end where they begin: at the start of another cycle... save for one added characteristic: dependency upon that movement has grown relative to the length of its existence; and where there is dependency upon anything -- whether ideological or personal -- therein breeds the fear of loss, and such fear is always, inescapably, the seed of mistrust and eventual conflict.

So, if one thing should be clear, it is this: whether it’s the movement of a single individual -- or that of a hundred million people -- whether for personal prosperity or for global peace -- all are secret war machines.

Movements for a more unified and tolerant humanity only create further isolation and dissent. There is not one piece of evidence in our own violent past that passing time doesn’t prove true: wherever two or more gather in the name of a cause, conflict is inevitable with those who can’t see the wisdom of that pursuit. All of which brings us to this point:

The wise do not engage in any form of violence, regardless of how subtly such conduct and conflict may be justified. No movement, no compulsory compliance with even the highest of virtues, can create anything good; for all those caught up in that movement are either complicit in the conflict needed to carry it forward, or have become unwitting victims of an unseen attraction and dependency on the sense of feeling superior to those they oppose.

These truths are self-evident. But the fact of them does not dispel the need of this world to change. The question is... what is to be the nature of this revolution? In many ways, these truths themselves point to the way, the only way in which such a transformation of our planet may take place: we can call this way “a revolution of one.”

The true revolution struggles not to change the conditions of this world, but rather to change the level of consciousness responsible for its compromised estate. Any other form of change is merely the continuity of the original conflicted nature at the root of all false and failed rebellions.

Any religious, philosophical, or governmental movement that must be enforced -- by carrot or by stick -- always produces its opposite.

Compassion cannot be enforced.

Legislated kindness breeds resentment-fueled anarchy; when any unstoppable force meets an unmovable object war erupts; such is the conflicted destiny of any unconscious desire not reconciled by love. But love is not a movement; its peace has no direction, and therefore nothing to put on a compass, let alone be charted. It is perfectly still, even though it allows everything that moves through it the direction of its choice. Out of this stillness -- that is the unseen gateway of love -- comes true, unqualified compassion: the act of first being able to mirror the suffering of another and then, by power of that same stillness, to step into that consciousness, and to share its burden.

This one action, and the personal sacrifice it calls for, has always been both the seed of true revolution, as well as its flowering. No one can “join” this movement because it has no beginning... And this is its unseen power and beauty: the true revolution doesn’t begin in opposition to anything, and its success is not in a time to come. It is one’s agreement to die -- moment to moment -- to any movement of self that sets itself against any other, including itself.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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But in our inner life, we don’t want a continuation of what has been. We want the new, and the free. We don’t want to repeat ourselves or build on patterns that contain obvious limitations.

This means to succeed in our search for self-liberation we must proceed in a completely different manner than the world around us would recognize. We are bound to set our compass not by what we wish to find, but by what we know we must leave behind us.

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Awakening to our own True Nature is a process of letting go. This point is a significant one. We don’t set out for what is limitless. Instead we quietly detect and reject those aspects of ourselves whose presence prevents us from enjoying the unrestrained life. As we let go of these invisible anchors, we find ourselves effortlessly rising towards the silent and ever-expansive nature of a free mind.

But again, we mustn’t try and imagine what our lives would be like living from this new nature. As our own experiences have shown us many times over, the pictures we create in our minds never live up to our expectations. And this is particularly true when it comes to the flattering images we hold of ourselves.

For example, we’ve all known those terrible moments in life where the picture we have of ourselves, as being strong enough to deal with whatever happens to us, suddenly falls off the wall and shatters before our unbelieving eyes. And we’re left standing there, stunned at how we could have been so blind to ourselves!

So, we must make this clear. What we want is that freedom, those strengths that are based in reality. And to achieve these reality-based powers, we must seek them there: within what is real.

And yet, over the years of teaching these principles of self-liberation, I’ve learned that the subject of reality is not exactly a welcome one. It seems most of us have little interest in facing what feels like the harsh light of our individual existence. It’s not difficult to understand why.

Our lives seem to flicker, like a bulb that may or may not light up the next instant. One moment we shine, the next moment what was once a glow is barely a flickering possibility. In that sometimes fading light, we see all too much about ourselves that seems shallow or loveless. We’re frightened that life itself may be too bleak and cruel to withstand. And soon, the fear of what we see as being the reality of life, becomes the basis of our reality.

This fear-filled mindset leaves us but little hope. We’re reduced to looking for, and finding, the happiness we long for only in our hopes and dreams. And so it goes that our lives become based in tomorrow. How else can it be for us? For in the way we look at what we think is reality, today just can’t be all there is!

But the day to day existence we all find so hard to face without our dreams of escape is not real life. We only think it’s real. And the only reason for this erroneous experience of reality is because we’re still experiencing the whole of our lives in thought.

We are not intended to think our way through this life of ours. The overwhelming evidence of this truth is all around us, only we’ve lost the innate ability to see it.

Excerpted From: Freedom From the Ties That Bind pages 39-41.

Key Lesson: If we would examine closely the strands of those unseen webs that seem to catch and hold us captive every day, we would see that they are nothing more than the stuff of our own thoughts -- spun off by a mind never quite content to be where it is with what it has.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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To weigh the value of what this world can reward you with -- you need only to remove the scales from your eyes; for were you willing to measure how many times you have fallen victim to a world that promises you victory, then you would know just how hollow is the hope of finding treasure in a trash basket.

If common social convention -- with all is contrivance and hypocrisy -- has one redeeming value, it is this: The happy day may come when we realize that our lives have been spent dining with devils, conversing with thieves, making plans with liars, and promises to people incapable of even a single act of integrity. This day of our awakening is the same as the delightful date of our departure from a bankrupt world filled with beggars dressed as kings and queens.

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Billions give their lives away for a moment’s pleasure, for the promise of approval, or in the hope of acquiring some power by which to make their world a prettier place in the face of all the ugliness that these same pursuits create. The few and the true also give their lives away, but only in acts of quiet selflessness that naturally follow in the footsteps of the one who follows the Upward Path.

For those with “ears to hear” there is but one question and one answer: Will we wait patiently for a single moment of relationship with what is Eternal and Real, wherein for the touch of something Timeless all the moments of our life are forever changed, or do we waste the few moments of our life chasing the pleasure of an imagined time to come that forever recedes from our grasp in the same instant that we reach for it?

No one can say “No” to this world who is afraid to walk through it alone. The unseen cost of this baseless fear is not to just keep the company of cowards, but to lose one’s possibility of ever coming to know the company of the Divine.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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It is not the real you, not the real “I” in us that latches onto these thoughts. It is the thief of peace! This is our divided nature. It cannot live without that familiar sense of self that it forms each time it examines and evaluates the images it can sink its mental teeth into.

One reason why negative states sneak in so easily to steal our peace is that we have been conditioned to believe in their right to punish us. Here is proof of this dark conspiracy:

We can be seated at a nice quiet table in a restaurant, have enough money to buy a fine meal for ourselves, have on nice clean clothes, be by ourselves or with friends, and for all of our good fortune, we will get upset because the waiter didn’t bring our toast buttered on the right side! As silly as this may sound, it’s true: Negative states such as these, born of nothing other than conflict-filled, comparative thinking, steal into us to squander our peace one hundred times a day.

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We do not have to yield ourselves to such meaningless states, nor live the life of the sorry self that revels in them. But emancipation will take a special effort on our part.

Following is a list for special Self-study to help get you started up the path of spiritual freedom. After a careful review of these peace-stealing conditions, take time to make a list of your own. Keep it simple. Use casual observations of yourself and others around you to be a spiritual detective.

1. One of the first thieves of our peace is spending time thinking about what others are thinking about us. Can we see that the only reason we are concerned with what others may be thinking about us is due to an imagined fear that they may have some power to take away what we are clinging to for our equally imagined peace? Let go! No one has the power to take peace away from you. It isn’t theirs to give!

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If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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Twenty minutes later, over the oohs and ahs of the other twenty-five passengers, the driver was describing the natural wonders of the breathtaking blue and green seascape that spread endlessly beneath them. The promise of a beautiful day sent a wave of pleasure through her and she relaxed in her tufted seat. Just then, one of the passengers in front of her jumped out of his seat, walked up to the driver and said he wanted to drive for awhile. The driver stood up, the passenger sat down, and the bus jerked forward. To Jessica’s amazement, no one around her -- including the driver -- seemed to mind this odd exchange.

In less than a heartbeat, the beautiful ocean vista had vanished and now all she was looking at outside her window were old, abandoned buildings and trash-littered streets. The new driver was taking the bus through the slums. No one else aboard looked at all surprised and so she tried her best to relax. The thought came that maybe this was part of the tour, but she didn’t remember reading about it. Her thoughts were interrupted when yet another passenger scrambled up to the driver’s seat and took over the wheel. Now the bus was racing up and down steep, bumpy streets and over dangerous narrow bridges. Something was definitely wrong. Too numb to speak out and too frightened to move, she sank deeper into her chair as one by one each of the passengers took over the wheel and drove the bus wherever they wanted. Her pleasure cruise had turned into a tunnel of horrors.

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She had almost resigned herself to a desperate kind of helpless rage when all of a sudden, from deep within her growing confusion, a thought came that shocked her awake and into a new sense of herself she had never before experienced.

Terrified but determined she got up, walked over to the driver’s seat, and said in a shaky but firm voice, “Now it’s my turn to drive.”

To her surprise, the passenger-driver got up and gave her his seat. She sat down, took the wheel, and drove herself home.

This story contains many higher lessons that we are going to need to understand if we wish to make it all the way to the ever-pleasant life. When we don’t know where we are going or who is driving, a pleasant present is impossible. The only pleasure we can have on this kind of ride through life comes from dreaming about where we are going. We must dream while others drive because if our eyes were open, we would never tolerate where we were being taken.

Even when we do run into a nice rest-stop or a pleasant event, there is no lasting pleasure in it for us because we know that we have no real say in how long we get to remain there. These temporary pleasures are usually a strange blend of anticipation and cynicism which we learn to swallow only because we don’t as yet know the taste of real pleasure.

Real pleasure in this life comes from knowing that you are in command of yourself now. We like to tell ourselves that we are at the wheel, but no one would purposely drive himself through the mud or off a cliff. Whenever we find that we are feeling sorry for ourselves, or angry, or worried and anxious, this is a sure sign that we took the wrong seat and that someone or something else is busy steering us down the wrong road.

At first it is humiliating to see and then admit that you only thought you were in the driver’s seat. This is a necessary shock if we want to identify exactly what is driving us. However, compare this temporary humiliation which eventually places you in command of yourself to the life without it that closely resembles Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland.

We live from a bottomless basket of endless wants that drive us everywhere, including crazy! Hoping to find comfort and life-direction in your wants is like trying to find shade under a swarm of stinging flies. While it may be cooler, you also have to keep running. Your pleasure is your pain.

Real pleasure is not the opposite of pain, it is the absence of it. Think about it. What you really want is to be free of your wants. This Higher want becomes an answerable need the more we realize that we do not have to sit by and submit to anything that is not of our own choosing. No one chooses to be pulled apart unless his idea of happiness is going to pieces.

Sometimes a man can get all of his wants pulling in one direction and so he may win his want. Only now his want is his haunt. Too late he realizes he must live with what he has won because he knows he didn’t really get what he thought he was after. Now all he wants is to hide from himself and everyone else that he is still not happy.

Here is the key to the ever-pleasant life. Our wants seem to hold the promise of a brighter, more pleasant future when the truth is that it is their very nature that is disturbing the present. Everything is pleasant now. You wouldn’t throw a pebble into a pond to quiet its surface. Left alone, the pond reflects the heavens above it. As we learn to leave ourselves alone, the clearer it becomes that we are happier that way. No one likes a nag so it’s no small wonder we don’t like ourselves.

Don’t be afraid to tell a persistent want that you are taking over the wheel. Let it holler. As all of these inner-passengers start to realize that you intend to drive from now on, they will start to exit the bus. At this point you may notice a weird feeling that seems something like loneliness. Believe me, this is just one of the last wants who doesn’t want to be ignored. Stay right there in the driver’s seat. Even though it may not feel like it at the moment, you have nothing to lose. This is the truth. Don’t worry if you aren’t sure where you want to go. Stick with your new inner-position and one day you will be happy to see even that worry was just another of the want haunts. Little by little you will discover that you never really needed to know where to go. Now it’s pleasant for you wherever you are because pleasure has become your nature instead of your goal.

Excerpted From: The Secret of Letting Go Pages 62-65.

Key Lesson: Part I: Whenever we can remember that all dark thoughts and feelings require our consent to punish us, and that these negative states are, in themselves, literally nothing without the powers we grant them in our forgetfulness, then in this same bright moment of recalling the truth of ourselves are we made the conqueror of what would overcome us!

Part II: The first cause of unhappiness in our lives is not the negative states that step into our hearts and cause them pain, but that we have forgotten that no darkness exists that is greater than the Light that is the life of our True Self.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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I understand this last image is not very flattering, but let’s be honest: experience validates the fact of it. Each time we’re drawn into a fight, it’s exactly as if someone “turns out the lights.” All we can “see” in that slowly enveloping darkness of our negative state is someone that we’re sure it’s our duty to change, control, or “make sorry” for what he or she has done to us... even as they are trying to do the same to us.

The unseen source of our negative reactions towards others isn’t necessarily because of what they do or don’t do toward us; rather, most of our sense of resentment or disappointment with others -- the real source of that “thorn” in our side -- is some invisible demand of ours that goes before us into all of our relationships.

These impossible expectations -- placed on friends, family, and our loved one -- are such that none can possibly live up to their mandate. And it’s not just people we know who have this power to trouble us at the push of the proverbial “button.”

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How about this familiar scene: you go to a dinner party and sit across from someone you’ve never met. And, before you’re even introduced, it’s clear that you don’t like him or her one bit! Here’s the explanation of this kind of negative reaction that we can have at the drop of a hat:

Each of us has a special role to play in the grand scheme of creation. Timeless forces of every possible character never stop “touching” us, literally weaving their way in and out of our being in every passing moment. This makes us a partner in the “cosmic dance” of Yin and Yang, an instrument of constantly shifting active and passive energies, so that in one moment we may feel attracted to someone, wanting to know him or her better... and, after only a moment of being near to them, our only wish is to get away!

This means that even as we’re receiving these celestial forces into us, we’re also radiating them at the same time. Not only are we, ourselves, directly involved in the constant interaction of these unseen forces within us, but they have their “own” relationship as well whose effects we know very little about. Nevertheless, our experience of their interaction can be thought of as one of those sudden feelings that come over us -- “for no reason.” We call these unpredictable emotional energies being in a “mood.”

These ceaseless interactions have a direct bearing on how we see and experience all our relationships in life, but these forces are blind; of themselves, they know nothing of their own nature; they cannot see the kind of experiences they create through their interactions; and neither is their individual character capable of caring about any of the above.

But do our relationships have to be defined by the interaction of these interior forces playing themselves out in the dark of us? Must we be “pushed” into a fight with anyone, just because we feel the presence of some pressure in us “telling” us that he or she is responsible for our stress? The answer is “No.” All this can change because of one remarkable fact: we can learn to see them. Not only can we become aware of these unseeing forces as they play out their designated role in us but, by the same light of this awareness, we will be given authority over them!

If we hope to see any real transformation take place in our relationships -- whether with family, friends, or our partner for life -- then it is we who must become illuminated. The kindness, the patience, the love we seek is going to have to start with us... even if the other person throws our best efforts right back in our face! Challenging? No doubt -- perhaps more so than anything we may have ever tried to do before. Rewarding? Let’s see, and then you decide:

What if rather than allowing these blind, opposing forces to set you against another, you could learn how to start using them; where even a hint of their pressure would not only awaken you to their presence but -- in that same moment -- empower you to consciously separate yourself from their punishing influences? This would be like owning a kind of spiritual “alarm clock” that goes off just before you start to blame -- or resent -- someone else; a silent but unmistakable alert system that serves, at once, to reveal and release you from the unseen parts of your own consciousness that tend to automatically oppose any unwanted moment.

Being able to observe even the smallest of your own negative reactions -- and to recognize on the spot that it -- that opposing force -- is not you, means that a whole new level of awareness is now awake in you. The light of this higher self-awareness now united with your willingness to see yourself -- as you are -- has done the unthinkable: it has set you free... from yourself. For the first time, you’re able to step outside the negative influence of unconscious forces, making it possible to love as you’ve always wanted to: unconditionally.

The more places we’ll employ the interior practice of seeing ourselves, the sooner we will find ourselves living from a higher level of Self that cannot be made to turn against anyone, let alone those we love.

Excerpted From: Relationship Magic: Waking Up Together eBook only $5.99 for a limited time - Buy Now

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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Everyone practices prayer twenty-four hours a day . . . only neither do they know they’re praying, nor do they know (and this is the real problem) what it is they’re praying for! And this fact of life includes those people who say, “But I don’t believe in prayer. I don’t have a spiritual practice.” A moment’s consideration of the following insight proves the truth of this claim.

Expectation is a form of prayer.

Let’s look at a few simple examples to prove the point. Don’t you walk around hoping that what you’ve hoped for will happen? “Of course,” you would have to reply. “But what’s that to do with prayer?”

Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that your hope that money’s going to come is a kind of prayer to the god of money? Certainly no one deliberately, consciously, sits there and says, “Oh please, lord of dollar bill signs, pour yourself down on me.” Then again, most likely, some do. Hopefully you don’t say to yourself, “Oh god of Mars, strike down this person who said that evil thing about me.” But you may be hoping for some harm to befall someone who hurt you. It’s possible the wish for revenge may be the momentary point of your life, as it becomes for many when they feel betrayed. So, in case this isn’t yet clear to you, realized or not, these hopes or wishes -- all such expectations -- are a form of prayer.

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When beset by troubles, how many of us have ever thought: “Why is this happening to someone as nice as me?” We’re forever telling ourselves, “I don’t deserve this kind of pain! My life is not supposed to be spinning out of control!” So we pray -- in one form or another -- for something that we think is either connected to what we want or to something that’s greater than the condition we perceive is punishing us. What we don’t yet understand is that within these prayers, whatever form they may take, we’re praying for something that we don’t understand. And this is why life continues to bring us the very things we say we don’t want.

There isn’t one of us who hasn’t had that terrible helpless feeling of watching ourselves hand our life over to an unwanted dark state. We go to bed at night and we’re subject to unwanted dark dreams or unremitting scary feelings. We awaken each morning to feelings of regret or defeat about what we have to do even before we do it. But a point comes in all of this where a small but definite self-realization dawns within us. It’s clear now. We must stop blaming life for the presence of these dark states, and start accepting the obvious truth of our present condition: it’s evident -- of ourselves we just don’t have enough to keep from being washed away. And as this (at first humiliating) new self-understanding grows in us, what happens is we naturally start asking life for something new. As slow as it may have been in coming, we are now able to see, albeit “through a glass darkly,” what is really missing from our life. And this realization is reflected in a whole new kind of request, something along the line of what follows:

“I’m tired and fed up being the unwilling victim of all these contrary forces that I’m subject to. What I really wish is to unite with something that will give me the strength, the ballast that I don’t have of myself in myself. I need to find some new sort of strength that will help me to stand up in my own life and allow me to stay that way.”

For the record, honest requests like this are rare. The person in denial of his or her own condition continues to ask for more of what didn’t help him the last time around -- more money, a better body, a new relationship, a better position at work, increased social prominence -- on and on it goes, going nowhere. This person hopes against hope that somehow this time he’ll find that missing anchor that will keep him from being bowled over by the waves of life’s events. In one way or another we’ve all stood and fallen upon similar ground as this. Trying to add ballast to ourselves through acquisitions of one kind or another, only to find that rather than anchoring us, our desires and their seeming fulfillment only tend to make us top-heavy and easier to topple. So now what? Please carefully consider the logic and higher lesson the following insight holds:

If our experience of life moment to moment is, in fact, what we are asking for -- which is always the case -- maybe it isn’t so much that we’re unable to ask for the right and rescuing realities as it may be this: we don’t know howto request what we really need. Yes, it’s true. But it’s also true that there are secret ways of asking that we have yet to understand, hidden ways to request being in relationship with our true and unshakable Self.

Most of us think that prayer is primarily asking for something: “Please do this for me,” or “Why won’t you intervene?” These prayers are centered, one way or another, around ourselves. And whether these are done in a “spiritual-religious” sense or from out-and-out greed or ambition, it is evident that our lives are little more than a series of such requests. We ask and ask, and then can’t understand -- for all the things we’ve asked for and received -- why it is that our (interior) life remains so easily disturbed by the dark state of the day.

But, what we’re attempting to reveal here is that it’s this very understanding -- the fact of our true condition, and the subsequent action we take based upon that realization -- that constitutes our True and Higher Request. And that prayer is answered even as we ask, because we are made new in each moment that we see we can no longer be who we have been.

Key Lesson: Stressful worry helps no one -- not those we are concerned about, and certainly not us. Such worry heals nothing; instead, it hurts all who mistake its dark embrace as a path to empowerment. The only thing worry serves is to strengthen the grip of our fearful expectations and, in so doing, holds us captive in a bad dream of our own making.

Excerpted From: The Lost Secrets of Prayer: Practices for Self-Awakening pages 44-50.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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2. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... I am not the only one who suffers.

3. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... I’m the last person on earth that should be telling others where to look for peace, let alone how to get there.

4. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that to look away from any painful reaction only ensures I will get to see it again.

5. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... the only thing that rushing does is strengthen the illusion that there’s some place more important to be than where I am.

6. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that how I say something to someone is more important than what I say to them.

7. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that enabling friends, family, or strangers alike is not the same as having compassion for them.

8. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that “more” is never enough.

9. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... there are parts of me so hungry for attention they can’t be bothered to look at who, or at what is feeding them.

10. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that in the moment just before I’m about to go over a waterfall, retrospection is useless.

11. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... that without your Light I live in a world of darkness I know not, let alone what I do within it.

12. Thank you, Father, for opening my eyes to see... there is only one way to heal the lingering pain of any past regret, and that is to live in the light of the Presence moment.

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Why would we think (as most of us do) that somehow or other the Divine owes us something? Why wouldn’t we inwardly be always taking care of the part of ourselves that is capable of being in direct relationship with the beautiful energies and eternal forces of the Divine that are constantly pouring into us?

The real problem we face is that our lives are out of order, meaning that when it comes to living in real spiritual light -- an unshakable understanding that “goes before us to make the crooked places straight” -- our habit is to adopt the will of the reaction (in the dark of us) instead of working inwardly to be increasingly watchful of the mechanical reactions themselves.

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All of those seemingly personal reactions on your part are produced by something coming down the beautiful river of life, striking what it is intended to so that you can observe and see this mechanical nature, this liar, this pursuer, this temporary lover. And in the observation of these qualities of yourself, you gain that which cannot be gained in any other way. You gain the realization that the observation of what appears in the moment that something asks for it, also resolves what appears in the moment it’s asked for. You watch yourself rise and fall. You watch yourself appear on fire, and you watch the fire go out. You watch yourself rise, frightened, and you watch life erase the conditions that produced it. You’re able to see in this state of self-observation, of watching instead of being willful, that life is answering itself and that you’re the instrument of this question and answer. Life -- in its brilliant movement -- brings things that are pleasing or not, and you can be in direct relationship with the whole of that movement. That’s what the capacity to observe yourself sets into motion.

But when you give yourself over to an automatic reaction, all the potential energy for your spiritual development is shunted off because immediate resistance or immediate attraction doesn’t allow you to have any relationship with the actual essence of yourself, with the energy that has been revealed by what has been given to you by life. Regardless of what your reaction is, it keeps you blind to the possibility of being part of a living question and answer that is the life of the Divine, in which something is always being seeded and brought to life, and something is always passing and being born again.

Until we are able to remember, and then embody, the realization that “I am” must come before “I want” - then the old fears and tears over our self must continue taking precedence over the possibility of our spiritual rebirth.

Learn to be actively passive as you observe the nature that either accepts or rejects the moment. Be watchful of the tendency to instantaneously identify with your thoughts, opinions, expectations, and then begin to realize that there is another way in which you can meet life. The nature, the personality that is out of order does not have answers to what life is asking. Life is asking for a relationship, not a solution. God is asking for communion, not a conversation dominated by your wishes.

Key Lesson: The fact that we always want something from the moment -- even if it’s to not want what it offers, or has otherwise come to reveal -- blinds us to the fact that every moment is always giving us... showering us with the Light of a Life that wants for nothing.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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It all happened in a quiet west Texas town called Turnaround during the years of the Great Depression. This little town really seemed quite ordinary, except for one thing: right in the heart of it stood an old haunted house.

Like most of the people who lived there, there were four young boys who did everything they could to avoid passing the place. It was rumored that anyone foolhardy enough to venture too close to the creaky old mansion ran the risk of being dragged into its depths by a ghoulish phantom! The boys had no wish for that kind of an adventure, so they went considerably out of their way each morning to reach one of the other streets that would take them to school. It was inconvenient, but there was no help for it. No one in his right mind would pass by the menacing house!

Allow me to break into the story and draw the psychological parallel. We all have things inside of us that we fear: haunting thoughts and dark feelings we sense are down there, but that we’d rather not face for fear they may drag us into their domain. So instead of questioning any of them, we let them work in the dark while we go out of our way to avoid becoming aware of them. Who are these unseen goblins whose presence we know but upon whose faces we won’t look? Isn’t anger a demon? Our discomfort at being alone, a gloomy specter? And what about that phantom fear of growing old? Instead of looking at these internal chain-rattling entities to see whether or not they really have any power to hurt us, we keep them out of sight. Like the children in the town of Turnaround, we walk the other way whenever we distract ourselves from some unwanted condition or blame some outside cause for the way we feel.

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Now, the young boys in our story preferred to go the long way to school rather than challenge what they believed to be the perils of the haunted house. That is, all the boys except for one. His name was Justin. And one fateful afternoon on the way home from school, just as they were all about to take their usual detour, Justin turned to his friends and asked, “How do you know that house is haunted?”

With the exception of old stories and excitable hearsay, not one of his buddies had a real answer to his question. And this discovery made something else clear to Justin: he now wanted to know, once and for all, the truth of the matter! It took some doing, but he convinced his schoolmates to approach the haunted house with him. Sure enough, as they had all predicted, as they drew closer they started hearing strange noises. Here was proof that the house really was haunted!

But Justin stood steadfast.

“Nobody knows for sure,” he told himself over and over again. With his new uncertainty as his only comfort, he ventured up the weed-caked walk toward the already agape front door.

Before he knew it, Justin had stepped inside. At first, the dim light, along with the tension of his drumming heart, caused him to jump at every strange noise. But as he bravely approached and saw through the source of each one, he soon began to laugh in amusement. There was nothing spooky in here. It was just an old house, that’s all. Each howl was only the wind passing through age-separated side boards. The rattling sounds that had always made him picture skeletons performing a macabre dance was nothing more than the shaking of some loose window shutters. It really was pretty funny to think that almost the whole town of Turnaround could have been so frightened of a pile of splintering floor boards!

Justin ran out into the light to tell his friends that there was nothing to be afraid of, but not one of them went in to see for himself. Each had his reason: it was late; tomorrow would be better; so on and so on. One boy even said he knew the house wasn’t haunted all along. Sure enough, the next day, none of Justin’s friends wanted to appear to be a coward, so they all walked with him past the old house on the way to school. But they never stopped looking over their shoulders, and they still jumped at each strange noise until the old house was out of sight. You see, they were secretly still afraid because they had never found out the truth for themselves. Only Justin knew there was nothing in there with any power to hurt him.

It is the same with us. Only the truths that we know from ourselves can sustain us through any storm.

As events occur, we always assume that we know what they mean for us, and we immediately fall into what feels like the appropriate emotional reaction. That reaction further influences the way we view the following events, and in this way our initial negative response is “confirmed.” In fact, if someone were to tell us that things were not as we took them to be, we would probably take that person as an enemy who cared nothing for us and who was, himself, a part of the threatening situation.

Because we so readily accept our interpretation of events as being correct, we rarely investigate to see if another view is possible. As a result, we do not see, for ourselves, that the goblins we fear in our inner “haunted house” are not real at all, and therefore our anxieties continue.

As long as we fail to investigate our belief that every strange noise that emerges from the haunted house is what we interpret it to be, we cannot evolve. However, if we will courageously examine every frightening specter to see if it is based in reality, we will eventually discover that there were never any thoughts or emotions that we had to fear. By striving to see ourselves objectively, we learn that all those beliefs about ourselves are not who we really are at all. All of them can be dropped.

Key Lesson: Don’t wish for freedom; choose it. Start by challenging the false notion that negativities are true powers. Deliberately walk past any dark state whose painful presence -- left uncontested -- makes you a prisoner of its domain.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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A great man that I once knew told a small group of students the following truth: life is not a race to win; it is a school for our higher education. The more we grow to realize the significance of that simple truth, the more we will slow down… And in the quietude of reclaiming our own attention awaken to realize the Truth of who we are. ~ GF

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If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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Some travel with clowns and animals.
Some take only walking shoes.
Some take the road with guru and saint,
While others take the road with drunks.

Some walk the road so slowly as to stand still,
Even as some sprint toward a finish line as if it’s in sight.
Some take the road filled with dreams.
Others take the road to leave their dreams behind.

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Some take the road and wait for each sunrise,
While others walk all night, every night.
Some don’t want to take the road at all
But wind up taking it anyway...
While others say they take the road,
But only walk when they can stay in one place no longer.

Some take the road with a forced smile.
Some dampen the road with their tears.
Some take the road and kick up dust with dancing heels
Just happy to be upon it wherever it goes!

Some take the road and pray the entire way,
While others sing to fill the emptiness that comes each time
They round a bend and see only more road ahead.

Some take the road and help others along the way,
While others can’t help themselves from wishing
They were ahead of everyone walking just ahead of them.

Some take the road and complain the whole way.
Some take the road with sheer gratitude that they can still walk.
The point is it does not matter how you take the road...
All that really matters is that you take it.

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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But if you’re lucky, and you don’t get caught in the bitterness trap, at a certain point, you’ve run everywhere you can, and nothing works. Then you have to do what? Just let it go. Because you realize, “I am absolutely powerless.” In that moment, a collapse takes place, and suddenly you get it: “I see it!”

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There is a direct relationship between the moment of the pinnacle of tension and the release of it that brings forth new eyes with which to see. Because in that instant where these tensions are relaxed, the release of the tension is the end of the fixation that the nature had with itself or was resisting in itself. And in the end of the fixation is the realization of a completely different set of energies that had always been present, only you were unconscious to it. In the relaxation, the fixation is not only over, but it allows for the advent of a relationship with something that was always and already present in you, even in the moment of tension.

And what is it that was always present in you even in the moment of tension that you had no attention to give to? The spirit of aspiration. The ascending spirit. Christ, Life, God, Love -- call it what you will. The ascending spirit is never not in you. But you’re not present to its presence. And this we can prove for the purpose of delivering us into a new understanding of what any given moment holds as a possibility when a person is facing inwardly a crisis of any kind whatsoever.

Now, this takes some work. Have you ever had one of those moments where finally the tension just drops off because you can’t do anything? And then, whether it’s ten seconds, ten minutes, or ten days later, “That’s the best thing that ever happened to me! I don’t know why I thought I had to fight like that. It was nuts! Because I feel so much better now. I’m reborn!” And in a manner of speaking, you are. Because a contact has been made with this ascending spirit, and this ascending spirit is not different than the Source to which it ascends. It’s an alignment. There’s an exercise implied in this understanding, and we’ll go over it now.

Because our attention is taken by this sleeping mind and riveted to whatever it is resisting, our sense of life is essentially given to us through the lens of a negative state of not wanting. As a result, we have almost no sense of anything going on outside of us. We are unable to externally consider another human being. Do you know why you can’t consider other human beings? Because you’re self-involved, caught up in one fashion or another of a fixation with being somehow trapped. And in that fixation, there is this constant tumult of feeling that everything’s impinging on you, and you’re being blinded.

Now, that means we have almost no voluntary sense of what it means to be ourselves. We have no voluntary awareness, attention to the whole of ourselves, because our attention is taken by this resistance and placed upon the resisted.

We have the capacity to voluntarily use our attention, our sensing of ourselves, to give it to what we want to give it to, when we want to give it to it, so that our attention, our awareness doesn’t belong to that part of ourselves that just puts it where it does and then keeps that tension in place.

Instead, you can begin -- which is what the exercise is about -- a thousand times a day, whenever you can, to become aware of a tension within you. Reclaim your attention, and instead of being identified with the resistance to the tension and what the mind is blaming for it, reclaim your ‘I’, meaning become aware of the resistance to that tension, and deliberately release it.

Now listen carefully, because this is a very fine line. To release the tension doesn’t mean that in the moment you do it, it’s going away. When you relax from the tension, what you are releasing yourself from is the identification with the sensation. So in the moment of this tension, you become aware of the identification with it, and then deliberately relax from the tension before unconsciously identifying with it. And I tell you that if you do that properly, in sensing the whole of yourself, you will sense the ascending spirit that was blocked by your fixation with the descending spirit. In the relaxation of the fixation there is not only an integration that takes place, a true healing, but it also becomes possible for you to be aware of the ascending spirit, the little part of you that’s always present, that wants to rise, that wants to ascend.

The beauty of what I’m telling you is that this is something you can use every second of your life. And if you ever actually catch a glimpse of this, if you actually have a moment where you’re fully in the grip of this contraction -- this resistance and the tension it’s producing -- and you actually catch that and deliberately relax yourself, release yourself from the identification with that tension, in that same second that you release yourself from the descending spirit, you’ll be made aware of a little champagne bubble, a little interior movement inside of you going up.

Using your own life, the moments in it, for the process of discovery is to realize that there is a possibility of releasing yourself, but not from the condition. Before you can be released from an unwanted condition, you must be released from the father of that condition, which is a consciousness that is set against itself. And the consciousness that’s set against itself is set against itself because it’s divided. All it knows is tension and pizza. Tension and collapse. Tension and sex. Tension and drugs. Tension and pleasure. That’s all it knows. But you can know something else if you wish it. Tension and relaxation are a circle. They’re one thing. And in the middle of them, right through the heart of those opposites, is an ascending spirit. You have the tools. You have the understanding. It’s up to you to use it.

Excerpted From: The Celestial Cure for Stress and Tension MP3 download only $3.99 for a limited time - Buy Now

If you want to know more about the the principles that Guy teaches at his non-profit Life of Learning Foundation, go to linktr.ee/GuyFinley. He offers free online classes on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Hope you can join him in 2026!

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