☼New Model For Success! -Guy Finley

Preface Note- Here is a review and glossary on Guy Finley’s work from a bmindful member KahunaKeith
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I chose the thread-title a New Model For Success for 2 reasons. 1- It is the title of video by Guy Finley in the next post. & #2- I wanted to attract your attention to this mentor, by saying new …I don’t know about you..but buzzwords that express newness do cause me to look(:

In many ways… many will find these ideas brand new. This will be especially true for those who believe ‘fixing’ every thought and feeling takes grueling inner work Sometimes as we know there are exceptions. I would love to hear your thoughts on his writings/audios/videos/books.

I do find Guy Finley to be someone who says things in ways, whether you’ve heard it in some shape or form before, to shake up the newness. I love (1) starting from beginnings and (2) also love being reminded that I’m in charge of anything in my life that may begin to feel stagnate or the refreshingly new(: If it is to be, it is up to me…and the God of my understanding. Like all of us, I’ve had areas that have needed a head-on approach…though not with collision forces….but forces of love…and patience and faith…and often a detachment that brought me closer to my true self. And once again, like all of us…I’m not done yet(:

Just like any mentor out there you have to be in the mood for the content and it’s delivery. If the videos do not strike your fancy in this moment, I’d like to ask you to bookmark them, and return. I am very interested in how Guy and his message works on something within(:
Much Love, Reinvented Refreshed Free Spirit (RRFS)

Personally I really enjoy this next one [8 min 58 sec] :

 

 

What we would have from others, or have them be towards us, we must provide or be ourselves. When we know we tend to be critical of others because they don’t show us the respect we would have, we must show these same people the respect we want. If we wish for kindness, let it begin with our own. Otherwise all we give each other are unconscious demands followed by judgment and disappointment.

Real spiritual growth — true self-transformation — depends upon what we are willing to give, and not upon what we feel we are owed.

This article is excerpted from The Essential Laws of Fearless Living (pages 108-110).
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The space is reserved for Guy Finley quotes that were not posted on the thread initially, and soon will be placed elsewhere and in the table of contents.
More Guy Finley Quotes:
►•The rush to judge some character flaw in another human being is one and the same as the speed with which the false self races to hide from itself; a similar imperfection. Guy Finley
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• Real strength is the refusal to act from weakness. See where you have been calling inner-weakness an inner strength; such as calling anxiety concern, or anger righteousness. Dare to live without these false strengths. Result: The end of your confusion and pain over why your strength so often fails you. At the same time you will realize the birth of a new and true strength that never turns into its weak opposite.

• Have the courage to proceed even while knowing that you are afraid. Dare to take one shaky step after another. Result:Freedom from a life of fear because fear cannot exist whenever insight is valued above feeling frightened.

• In spite of all the inner-screams to the contrary, dare to treat your trespasser as you would want to be treated. When you stop punishing others for their weakness, you will stop punishing yourself for yours.

• Real hope is the fact that there is always a Higher Solution. See that any time you feel pained or defeated, it is only because you insist on clinging to what doesn’t work. Dare to let go and you won’t lose a thing except for a punishing idea. Result:A new life that fears no inner or outer challenge since defeat can only exist in the absence of a willingness to learn.

Above thoughts excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go by Guy Finley

• • The first 2 books I had read of Guy Finley’s was back in early-mid 90’s.
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  • The Secret of Letting Go Table of Contents

 

• Freedom of the Ties that Bind Table of Contents

His books seem to reach into the spirit and experience of being present.
They are the types of books that can be read over and over for “new” personal meaning. The Secret of Letting Go had a profound effect on me, and I recommend it highly (312 Pages)
customer reviews from his site Most report of all Finley’s books, this is probably the best.

• Here are a few quotes from the book:
• Uncovering what is wrong must always precede the discovery of what is right
• Letting go takes no strength-only a willingness to see the need for it.
• Letting go is the natural release which always follows the realization that holding on hurts.
• Unhappiness does not come at you. It comes from you.
• Real freedom is the absence of the self that feels trapped, not the trappings that self acquires to make it feel free.

Above quotes Excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go by Guy Fi

nley

 

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I am trying to make this thread reader friendly…with a table of contents. Hope it helps(:
Table of Contents POSTS 1-5
Post #1

• • 2 Reasons for Title of Thread
  • 2 Earlier books from Guy Finley and their table of contents
  • Video – “Remember Yourself and Realize Freedom” [8 min 58 sec]
  • Video – Q and A on Spiritual Alignment [1 min 49 sec]
  • Site Link – Guy Finley’s Official Site
  • Table of Contents

 

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Post #2

• • Video – A New Model For Success 2 min 38 sec
  • Article -How to Stop the World and Be Still
  • Article – You Are More Than You Know!
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    Post #3 Videos range around 1 1/2 to 7 min. Hover over each to see length if you have a time constraint
  • Video- The Essential Laws of Fearless Living
  • Video- The Secret of Letting Go
  • Video – Use True Self Correction
  • Video- Agree to Be Free
  • Video – The Anatomy of a Negative State
  • Video- Real Growing Takes Going Beyond Yourself
  • Videos 1-7 – Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
  • Audio A Fascinating Fact About Real Feelings
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    Post #4
  • Article – How To Stop the World & Be Still
  • Article- … Self-doubt, anger, denial, anxiety, aggression, worry, resentment, ambitiousness, envy, greed, self righteousness, sarcasm, one-upmanship, demands, cynicism, avoidance, recrimination, dependency, expectations, coercion: all are wrong answers that can only supply secret aches
  • Article – Strengthen Your Connection to the Timeless Life
  • Article – Stop Fear Before It Gets Started!
  • Spiritual Exercises ….When you hear someone say, “I’m sick and tired of it,” what he is really saying without realizing it is that he’s sick and tired of suffering from his own lack of understanding. This all becomes clear once we understand that unhappiness does not come at us, it comes from us.
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  • Article – Start Exploring the World of Your Own Higher Possibilities
    by Guy Finley
  • Article- Release Yourself From the Unseen Source of Painful Impatience by Guy Finley
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    Post #6
  • Article – “Let Go of the Pain of Blaming Others for Their Imperfection”
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    POST 7

 

• Inspiring Quotes From Guy Finley And this Guy Finley blog on Letting Go (Thanks D’Marie)
• From Guy Finley’s Blog*
• Enter into the Flow of Life
  Find Release from Seeking the Approval of Others
• Nourish Your Wish To Grow – very short audio

Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/lettinggo/2011/12/find-release-from-seeking-the-approval-of-others.html#ixzz1hwHXP6NO
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Guy Finley’s Official Site

• In the end, nothing we can win in this life can enrich us half as much as what we are willing to lose for the sake of living without fear. -Guy Finley

• The loss of our inalienable right to be free – physically, psychologically, and spiritually – begins with forgetting that no one and nothing outside of our own true nature knows what is best for us.-Guy Finley

• Freedom by Jason Mraz

Post #2
POST #2 Table of Contents
Video – A New Model For Success 2 min 38 sec
Article – You Are More Than You Know!

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video

• •  2 min 38 sec
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article
How to Stop the World and Be Still
In one respect, everything about one’s spiritual life is so terribly simple. There is only one time and one way in which to be still, and that is to be still.

So the first thing is to understand that we don’t need to stop the world. What we need to do is understand that the world whirling around us is the world of our own reactions. It isn’t until we can start to see some of this that it becomes possible for us to realize that it isn’t our task to stop our own mind. If we can see clearly our reactions and our identification with the reactions, then we can realize the way to stop the world is to understand that it’s not our world that is moving. It’s not our world that is in jeopardy. It’s not our world that is caught in fear. That’s how the world stops. There is nothing we can do. Everything we’ve tried to do to stop our mind, to be quiet, contradicts the wish we have because it is a form of resistance.

It is not a curse that the only way to be still is to be still. It just means that you have to wade into your own life. That is what meditation is. Meditation isn’t just sitting someplace with your eyes closed. Meditation is a constant, direct relationship with the sum of yourself in the moment. When one is truly meditative there is always stillness, because the act of meditation takes place from the awareness of movement instead of being a captive of movement through reacting to it.

When its time to be still, let yourself be still… and just see all that isn’t. Then don’t react or identify with all that isn’t. Let all that isn’t reveal all that isn’t you — meaning all the noise, the fitfulness pulling you left and right, revisiting the past, planning the future, getting caught up with how much you want to be a good spiritual person. Watch it all. If you work at this, and are willing to enter into it, slowly and certainly you will begin to realize that the reason you have not been able to be still is because you have not understood that who you are is not the noise.

This article is excerpted from The Meditative Life (“The First Step to Being Still”).

article
You Are More Than You Know!
by Guy Finley

Key Lesson: Our reluctance to throw ourselves into life with all that we are — to abandon ourselves, come what may — is born of the fear we may not be enough to succeed. But the truth is that within us dwells more than we take ourselves to be . . . and only by leaping do we learn of unseen wings that open only in mid-air.

Let Go and Live the Extraordinary Life
When it comes to letting go and living in the Now, no sincere effort goes unrewarded. In the long run, it is not our ability to succeed with some individual task that determines our spiritual success, but our willingness to learn what is new and true about ourselves. Within each of us dwells a being without bounds, but unless it is explored and exercised wisely we will never know the heights to which we may rise.

Imagine a newly fledged eaglet whose home rests high upon some rocky cliff, and that today it rises for the first time to stand on the edge of its woven-stick nest. Before now, the only world this little creature had ever known was the sheltering safety of its enclosed aerie, but no longer is this true. Standing there, it peers out over an open and seemingly endless new world, and as it does, a silent but unmistakable invitation sounds itself through the eaglet’s heart. Its answer to the call of this expanse is instinctive and immediate: It stretches open its white-tipped wings and feels them catch the swirling updrafts that race their way around the mountainside. Slowly, the young bird rises, teetering in the air, even as its talons involuntarily lock onto the sides of its nest, anchoring it there.

For several days this future king of the skies will run through this exercise, exploring its newly found powers and the promise of flight, though it still remains earthbound. And then there comes a moment when — caught between the instinct to be grounded and the wild longing to fly free — it lets go of the only world it ever knew. In that instant, in a certain sense, it is born again and takes its rightful place in the open airs it was created to rule.

With this simple look into what is commonplace in the natural realm, we catch a glimpse of something supernal. We are given a hint of what we must do to enter into the heavens hidden within ourselves.

It is up to us whether or not we fulfill the promise of this extraordinary vision, of this there can be no doubt. Will we spend our lives in mere dreams of winning a limitless life, only to be shaken awake time and time again by what is seen as a rude reality? Or, will we do the inner-work of awakening ourselves from this dream? Choosing the Extraordinary Life begins with our conscious work to realize it, which each one of the following special practices help to ensure.

1. Let Nagging Questions Go Unanswered . In times of stress, learn to listen to what the Extraordinary Life is trying to tell you about your True Nature, instead of searching anxiously for familiar answers to make your stressed-out self feel right again. All fearful, doubt-filled moments are secret reflections of what we have yet to understand about life and ourselves; they are not life’s rejection of us or of our wish for happiness. Choose to go consciously quiet whenever there is a riot in you. Refuse to take part in the search to repair what you fear may be coming undone. Let go and watch what happens when you consciously sacrifice the fear-filled self. This new action allows the Extraordinary Life to enter into you, where its presence alone proves that all is well.

2. Don’t Make the Rescue Call . In times of anxiety and fear, we almost always call upon someone or something to help us get through our stress. This dependency on others for strength to see us through our trials not only weakens our soul, but it also steals from us the possibility of being educated by the Extraordinary Life, which means we miss two major lessons. First, the crucial insight that all our fears are based upon false evidence that appears real. With this revelation comes our second realization: the same frightened self that seeks rescue secretly confirms its imagined condition as being real each time it cries out for help. Refusing to rescue ourselves from inner states that scare us invites the Extraordinary Life to show us that no such scared self exists that needs saving.

3. Do the Thing You Fear Doing . There is a correct time and place for thinking through practical plans in the ordinary scheme of life’s events. But nothing that is founded in thought can serve to reveal the unthinkable plans that the Extraordinary Life holds in store for anyone willing to leap into the moment without a parachute. Never mind those old fears of falling. Just jump! Being willing to risk failing is a prerequisite for fearless living. If you take the leap into what you are psychologically afraid of doing, the Extraordinary Life will prove to you that its unshakable ground is everywhere beneath you at all times. Nothing in the world compares with this discovery because, once realized, there’s nowhere for you to go but up! A note of caution: taking a spiritual leap is a far different thing from taking a reckless physical risk. Never risk the wellbeing of your physical body for the sake of a passing thrill; for what is possible to attain with a body, cannot be done without one. The temporary rush of adrenalin has nothing in common with one’s awakening to the reality of a timeless, fearless life.

Each of these inner practices makes it possible for you to reveal and then release what stands between you and your relationship with the Extraordinary Life. To succeed, all you need is an earnest wish to awaken, coupled with a willingness to go to work on yourself. Should you feel yourself starting to sink just thinking about how far removed you are from the Extraordinary Life — that the distance to go is too great to cover — never mind all that nonsense. We should always remember one thing: whenever the inner-going gets tough, which it must if we are to grow, it is far better for us to temporarily fail at becoming what we intend to be, than it is to succeed at remaining who and what we have been.

This article is excerpted from Let Go and Live in the Now (pages 177-184.).

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Back to Post 1 which includes Table of Contents

POST #3
Videos range around 1 1/2 to 7 min. Hover over each to see length if you have a time constraint

• The Essential Laws of Fearless Living
• The Secret of Letting Go (1 min 46 sec(
• Find a Part of You That Cannot Fail
• Use True Self Correction
• Agree to Be Free
• The Anatomy of a Negative State
• Real Growing Takes Going Beyond Yourself

• 1Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 2Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 3Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 4Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 5Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 6Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life
• 7Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life

• Audio – A Fascinating Fact About Real Feelings
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• The Greatest Gift You Can Give written/posted by Guy Finley | 3:00am Friday December 23, 2011
  The greatest, most “expensive” gift that anyone can give to another is priceless, and yet… it is available in abundance for everyone to give all the time. Not only that, but this same gift rewards its giver in the same moment of being given. This great gift is what we give away anytime we come wide awake to ourselves and — rather than giving out our negative state to whomever is nearby — we give up our negative self instead.

article
Stop Giving Yourself Away by Guy Finley

There are few places in our life where the pressing want to be wanted — the need to feel approved by others — doesn’t compromise our true best self-interests.

It’s time to snap ourselves out of the painful delusion that any individual either possesses or, in some way, can grant us the power we need to possess ourselves.

No one can give us the approval we seek, because it isn’t his or hers to give. And the more we understand the truth of this higher fact, the less inclined we’ll be to give ourselves away.

Seeking and receiving approval from others is like sitting down hungry to an imaginary meal. You’re invited to eat all you want, but no matter how much imaginary food is served, you can never get your fill. Your hunger remains. No fictional feast ever satisfies.

But this fact isn’t so apparent when it comes to our appetite for approval. We still look to others for our sense of self even though the very moment it’s received, it must be renewed.

Believing we can’t be happy without the approval of others is like thinking that we can’t see beauty without someone else’s eyes! Time and time again, we come to the same spiritual lesson: no one can give us that which can only be found within our Self. But we must transform our sensing of this timeless Truth into our personal understanding of it. We must do the needed inner work, which alone leads to owning our own lives.

— Guy Finley
Excerpted from Freedom From the Ties That Bind, page 102.
Guy Finley/Life of Learning Foundation
PO Box 10 · Merlin, Oregon 97532 · www.guyfinley.com · 541-476-1200

The true spiritual path is not so much about changing the kind of works that we do, as it is about realizing the need to change for whom it is that we do them.

Guy Finley

The following quoted traits are written by Guy Finley. I have some exceptions with his black and white bold statements, though I also have found lots of truth there too. What do you think?

The Ten Traits of the True Spiritual Warrior

1. The true spiritual warrior knows the only enemy she has is what she has yet to shed light upon in herself; therefore, she never postpones a battle that must be engaged.

2. The true spiritual warrior always remembers that his enemy never forgets his weaknesses.

3. The true spiritual warrior starts life over, over and over again.

4. The true spiritual warrior works every day, every moment, to sharpen her battle skills.

5. The true spiritual warrior leads by example, never fearing to make an example of himself — no matter what the cost.

6. The true spiritual warrior makes it her aim to never burden another human being with what is her own pain.

7. The true spiritual warrior is never afraid to look at what he doesn’t want to see.

8. The true spiritual warrior commits herself to her best choice and realizes that to live in conflict over what is or is not best is the refusal of responsibility.

9. The true spiritual warrior never fears feelings of helplessness, because she recognizes such states as the heralds of new powers to come, like storm clouds before spring flowers.

10. The true spiritual warrior knows that the path of spiritual liberation that he has chosen must lead him to one encounter after another with conditions that always seem greater than he is.

— Guy Finley

Excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go, pages 207-209.
© 1998-2010 Guy Finley/Life of Learning Foundation
PO Box 10 · Merlin, Oregon 97532 · www.guyfinley.com · 541-476-1200

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article
Excerpted from The Essential Laws of Fearless Living, pages 19-23.
— Guy Finley

© 1998-2010 Guy Finley/Life of Learning Foundation
PO Box 10 · Merlin, Oregon 97532 · www.guyfinley.com · 541-476-1200

Here is a particularly vital idea for those of us who are tired of finding ourselves a surprised victim of our own actions: in this world of ours response is request. We can slightly enlarge this idea by restating it this way: the way you respond to life is also a request you make to it. See how the next few examples prove this important discovery:

Someone walks into your home or office and says something that just steams you. Instantly you see “red,” and then sit and simmer over what’s taken place long after the offending party has left. But here’s what you don’t see: your continuing negative state — your response to the event — acts as a request to all those you encounter in the hours to come. It’s a law: people tend to treat us as they find us treating ourselves, and when we meet them with some kind of misery, they reflect the same back to us. Surely we’ve all seen how “like attracts like.” In this context it should be clear: our refusal to let go of some negative state amounts to a request for its continuity.

Most of us have found ourselves washed away, overcome by a flood of punishing thoughts and feelings. Picture a desperate man being swept down a river, grabbing onto whatever comes along, and it’s easy to see how we end up clinging to things that — rather than saving us — actually serve to further sink us. From the frying pan into the fire is the expression that defines “bad bounce” relationships, addictions, and a host of other self-compromising acts meant to end one’s misery, not extend it.

There is only one reason any pain has the power to command us as it does. We have forgotten this one great rescuing truth: no dark state has authority over who we really are! This is spiritual fact, pure and simple; but why can’t we remember it in our hour of need?

The answer is somewhat shocking: in those moments when the light that lives within us is meant to transform whatever troubles us into a new and higher form of self-understanding, it is we who get transformed into that trouble itself! Here’s a look at how we get so turned around: we become the very negative state we don’t want by identifying with our resistance to it. And we all know what happens next. It is no longer we who meet life, who welcomes the lessons it brings; instead the conflict we are in goes before us, as do dark clouds before the storm. Seen in this light, it’s little wonder that we receive what we do back from life. After all, what do lightening rods attract?

What’s needed is a whole new way to ask life for what it is we really want — to live from an unshakable self that cannot be made to act against itself or anyone else. This is where new and true self-knowledge is irreplaceable.

Your true nature is something already greater than any self-compromising state, much in the same way as the ocean shoreline is greater than the waves that pound it. Your True Self is the unshakable ground over which all “waves” of thoughts and feelings both move and break. And just as light doesn’t fight with shadows for fear of what they portend, neither need we ever do anything towards our interior troubles except meet them from this timeless ground within us.

The willingness to be inwardly still and take no action towards our interior troubles is one and the same as our new request. How so? Deliberate non-action towards whatever threatens to wash us away is the same as asking our God to lift us above these troublesome waves.

Instead of habitually identifying with negative thoughts and feelings, we realize these various mental and emotional states are visitors, not who we are. We see that while negative states are within us, they are not our true nature any more than super-heated deep-sea vents are the same as the waters they warm. And by our choice to remain aware of their presence within us — instead of identifying with the pain they bring — we are instantly “transported” to that higher ground within us: a higher state of our present self that dwells worlds above the waves that used to sink us.

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The following is a longer video…

• • Walk Thru This World Without Fear or Worry 14 min 17 sec
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Back to Post 1 which includes Table of Contents

POST#4

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… Self-doubt, anger, denial, anxiety, aggression, worry, resentment, ambitiousness, envy, greed, self righteousness, sarcasm, one-upmanship, demands, cynicism, avoidance, recrimination, dependency, expectations, coercion: all are wrong answers that can only supply secret aches

————————————————————————————————————- Lift Yourself Into a Brand New World
Within each of us there is an expansive world of thoughts and feelings whose movements determine how we perceive and experience the world outside of us. While this inner-world of thoughts and feelings may not directly bring us what we see, it does profoundly influence how we see our world of relationships and events. The inner determines the outer. In other words, we are seeing the exterior but experiencing the interior.

One simple example of how this works is when our heart is heavy or troubled. Whenever we happen to feel this way, everything else around us tends to appear equally dark. But there are far deeper implications to this important insight. With patient self-study, we can turn it into a personal breakthrough of the most freeing kind that can lift us to a brand new world. Let’s get started.

All of us have felt, at one time or another, trapped in our own life. During these periods of heightened unhappiness one thing seems clear: the only reason we haven’t realized our great potential is because we’re being held back. There is some unpleasant person, an inescapable condition, some unwanted place in life where we got “stuck.”

So, over and over again we plan our great escape. And over and over again we find ourselves either having gone nowhere, or back where we started from, both results being the same. For all of our efforts, nothing really changes. New loves, new jobs, even new homes change only the walls that surround us — not our feelings of being imprisoned. We sense that all we have done is changed cells!

We mustn’t fight with or in any way fear this shocking conclusion. Why? Because this temporarily disturbing discovery about our actual condition contains a crucial insight. It was never that person or circumstance that was blocking our moment in the sun. No! In spite of how things may appear to us, we are never trapped by where we are. The trap is always who we are. Here is a short summary of this new and unusual self-discovery:

When you run into a personal obstacle, you have not run into an outer condition that is denying you happiness. You have run into your own present life-level.

Your level of being is what determines where you are at any given moment because your experience is always who you are. Let me repeat this. For better or for worse, you experience who you are, not where you are

• Strength
  When you hear someone say, “I’m sick and tired of it,” what he is really saying without realizing it is that he’s sick and tired of suffering from his own lack of understanding. This all becomes clear once we understand that unhappiness does not come at us, it comes from us.

For instance, impatience with our level of understanding is the very level of understanding we are impatient with. The understanding of this spiritual principle allows us to disconnect ourselves from our impatience. Life becomes instantly better. For one thing, the frustration fades. In its place, learning flowers. And the more we inwardly grow, the easier our whole life flows.

This new idea of acting to deliberately disconnect ourselves from whatever we think has us blocked leads us to true self-liberation because we have never been trapped by anything outside of our own lack of understanding. This is why even the attempt to disconnect ourselves from the limitations of our present life-level already belongs to a higher level of understanding.

This conscious action on your part “works” by gradually breaking down the painful circle-of-self that is repeatedly formed by asking the problem for the solution. Barriers begin to crumble and disappear, because you have stopped creating them. In the truest meaning of the words, you are getting out of your own way!

Practice self-disconnect as often as you can. The more you work at this special kind of letting go, the freer your days will flow and the higher your life will go.

Persistence is everything in your personal work. You must persist even if it is only with your wish to be persistent. You must persist in spite of all forces that seem to be against your wish to break through to a new you. Believe me, there are no real obstacles between you and the brand new life for that you long for. You can (and must) prove this kind of freedom to yourself, starting with this understanding and implied action:

The greater the doubt you will dare to step through, the greater your possibility to grow beyond yourself. Here’s why this axiom always holds true. The only barriers between yourself — and a life without limits — are the powers you’ve mistakenly given to your doubts and fears. On the other hand, every time you walk past these false powers — by disconnecting yourself from the false concerns they cast at your feet — here’s what happens: spiritual strength is increased.

What is spiritual strength? It can be said in dozens of ways, but for now let’s put it like this: it’s knowing you don’t have to compromise yourself in any way — with anyone, over anything — in order to be content, confident, and secure in life.
Spiritual Exercises
Here are seven proven ways to increase this new kind of spiritual strength. Study them with the wish to uncover the secrets hidden in their empowering instructions. Practice each one — or all of them — every day. You’ll see that with the very act of disconnecting yourself from the fears and doubts that compromise your life, you are re-connecting yourself to a new kind of power that never leaves you alone in your hour of need.

• Never accept any negative reaction you may have as the only possible answer to your present challenge.
• Refuse to revisit your own past for a way out of any present problem you face.
• Remember that everything you resist in life increases its weight by the magnitude of thought spent in not wanting it, so you accept all that you can, and quietly drop the rest.
• Never explain yourself to anyone out of fear they may misjudge you.
  Say “No” to anyone or anything that you fear saying “No” to.
• Learn to see your own defensiveness towards others as an offense against your own right to be free of fear.
• Whenever possible realize that the person you are about to argue with is in as much pain as you are.
  The Above article-Lift Yourself Into a Brand New World
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Strengthen Your Connection to the Timeless Life
Conscious efforts are always rewarded with increased consciousness.

We live within a totally responsive universe, always responding with more than we have asked for. And when you begin to ask for real things in life, you get more than you can possibly know you’re asking for. To increase your consciousness is the same as learning to ask for something more, and to learn to ask for more is to receive more than you could ever imagine.

Wasted energies are the same as lost opportunities.

When you stop working to grow, you begin dying. Beginning today, choose to use your life for those true purposes that withstand the test of time instead of allowing your life to be used up serving only one temporary purpose after another.

Whenever you can remember yourself in whatever you may be doing, bring yourself back into the awareness of the present moment and into that secret Permanence that dwells therein. Use every waking moment — when you’re eating, while you’re walking, or just waiting. If you’re at work, you have to do your assigned tasks, but when you take a break, return to that higher awareness that cannot disappear into the river any more than the ocean can be engulfed by one of its own waves. In this state of awareness, the river of time and all upon it runs by you, through you, instead of carrying you away. In its waves and ripples you can see your own thoughts float by with no sense of loss. This is the essence of spiritual detachment. You choose to stay with what is Timeless by refusing to lose yourself in the world of thought and time.

This article is excerpted from The Lost Secrets of Prayer (pages 144-147).
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Stop Fear Before It Gets Started!
by Guy Finley

Key Lesson: What is true never fears investigation; what is false… fears everything.

How to Realize New Possibilities
What happens in the moment where life throws something at you, or nothing goes as you had planned? You know what happens. Instant negativity! Unhappiness over what is unwanted ruins the day. Why? Because now you’re resisting the event, wanting nothing to do with it. And how many possibilities do you have in such moments when you resist life like this? None… except to grow more and more negative.

But have you ever had a moment where — right in the middle of what seemed like a bad dream — you experienced an instant of awakening? Where suddenly you realized there was more than one way to look at this event? That you didn’t have to just look at it through your regret, resentment, or your despair over the loss of something? Then and there it dawns on you that life holds more possibilities than what that dark reaction is showing you. You can see how every moment of life holds many different “worlds” within it — light and dark, high and low — and how your moment-to-moment experience is decided by which of these worlds you choose to embrace.

Which brings us to this important key lesson: We cannot know any higher order of greatness, of freedom, than what our awareness of the world above us makes possible through our awakened relationship with it. The way in which we grow is that we grow into the world above ourselves. We realize new possibilities that have always been there, only we just couldn’t see them because we were always looking in the wrong direction.

So much of what we need to understand about our lives, and why we have the fear and worry in them that we do, depends upon being able to see ourselves as we are. No frills, and no self-supplied chills either — just doing the work it takes to remember that what we really want isn’t power to control the dark conditions around us, but to be part of a new brighter and higher world within ourselves where fear and worry no longer exist.

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• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 1
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 2
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 3
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 4
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 5
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 6
• Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life Part 7

Back to Post 1 which includes Table of Contents

post 5
2 articles in this post are:

• Start Exploring the World of Your Own Higher Possibilities
  by Guy Finley
• Release Yourself From the Unseen Source of Painful Impatience by Guy Finley
  Post#5

Start Exploring the World of Your Own Higher Possibilities
by Guy Finley

Key Lesson: Each moment is unique; never to come again… and this includes all of our relationships as they’re revealed through the celestial conditions that converge to create them. This is why our one real wish should be — as best we’re able to remember it — to never rush through any moment of life; otherwise we lose the always new and higher possibilities inherent in its very appearance.

Remember This Key to Self-Command
Whenever we’re anxious or rushing around, we are not in command of ourselves; seen clearly, it’s evident that something within us has taken charge of our life and is telling us that if we can just get here or do this, then we’ll be free. So we give ourselves, willingly, to this inner taskmaster whose hardened hands push us — over and over again — to rush, rush, rush. Why? Because then we’ll move past this feeling of not having control of our lives and we’ll come, at last, to the peace we’re after. No! Any thought of a peace or contentment “to come” is coming to you from a part of you whose secret pleasure is your continuing unrest and discontent.

The key to regaining command of yourself in any moment you start to feel as though you’re in a rush is to remember that who you are and what you are is made to be changing and transforming the moment you are in. We can’t have one thing more than what we are in this present moment. What God gave us, what He made us to be — and made it possible for us to partake in — is now or never, and it has nothing to do with a place or time to which we can rush. When you see that, don’t you regain self-command?

If we can understand the truth that everything that it’s possible for us to be — all that is right, true, bright, and good — lives inside of us and is always working, always present, then when something says we must be someplace else in order to get something, we can look at that idea and dismiss it! Then we have real command of ourselves because we have the backing of Reality itself. We have the backing of the Truth itself, of understanding the truth of ourselves.

When you start to become anxious or feel the urge to rush, keep an intention in that moment to remember for yourself what you know to be true: There is never a need to rush anywhere, for all that you can hope to be already lives inside of you. When you remember what is true, and you act on it in this way, you will find that what you are given is an irreplaceable, timeless form of confidence and command.

This article is excerpted from The 3 Keys to Complete Self-Command

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• Release Yourself From the Unseen Source of Painful Impatience
• Key Lesson: The pain of impatience doesn’t exist without some unseen level of self, already in place, that secretly demands events must take place precisely as it has imagined they should.
  This article is excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go (pages 83-84).

Your Secret Power of Self-Disconnect
When you hear someone say, “I’m sick and tired of it,” what they are really saying without realizing it is that they’re sick and tired of suffering from their own lack of understanding. This all becomes clear once we understand that unhappiness does not come at us, it comes from us. For instance, impatience with our level of understanding is the very level of understanding we are impatient with. The understanding of this spiritual principle allows us to disconnect ourselves from our impatience. Life becomes instantly better. For one thing, the frustration fades. In its place, learning flowers. And the more we inwardly grow, the easier our whole life flows.

This new idea of acting to deliberately disconnect ourselves from whatever we think has us blocked leads us to true self-liberation because we have never been trapped by anything outside of our own lack of understanding. This is why even the attempt to disconnect ourselves from the limitations of our present life-level already belongs to a higher level of understanding. This conscious action on your part “works” by gradually breaking down the painful circle-of-self that is repeatedly formed by asking the problem for the solution. Barriers begin to crumble and disappear, because you have stopped creating them. In the truest meaning of the words, you are getting out of your own way! Practice self-disconnect as often as you can. The more you work at this special kind of letting go, the freer your days will flow and the higher your life will go.

This article is excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go (pages 83-84).

POST #6
Guy Finley

• Let Go of the Pain of Blaming Others for Their Imperfection
  by Guy Finley
  The following article is excerpted from Letting Go

Key Lesson : Even though we must each do all that is in our power to make our lives and this world as perfect as they can be, we must never forget that perfection is a relationship and not a set of rules by which to justify punishing ourselves, or others.

Let Go and Grow Happy !
You can spend your time struggling, in vain, to make others into what you want them to be, or you can see the inherent flaw in thinking this way, and — rather than trying to change others to suit your needs — see through the false idea that someone else is responsible for your fulfillment.

You can let go of those resentful feelings toward your job, because the treadmill isn’t what you are doing but the way you are thinking.

You can let go of trying to change other people, because you are what is bothering you about them.

You can let go of the fear of unforeseen changes or challenges, because all you really ever have to face in any challenging moment is yourself.

Best of all, you can let go of the impossible and unbelievably self-punishing task of thinking that you are responsible for the way the world turns. The only world you are responsible for is your inner world : the world of your thoughts and feelings, impulses and desires.

You are always right where you need to be to take the next step beyond yourself .

Back to Post 1 which includes Table of Contents

Post #7
In response to D’Marie’s post:
Wow Marie! That is an awesome contribution! I’ve never seen that Guy Finley blog before & I love it! Found great quotes there as well! Inspiring Quotes From Guy Finley And the Guy Finley blog on Letting Go D’Marie mentioned Thanks again!
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• Table of Contents for this Post:
• Guy Finley Insightful Quotes
• From Guy Finley’s Blog :
• Enter into the Flow of Life
• Find Release from Seeking the Approval of Others
• Nourish Your Wish To Grow – very short audio
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• Guy Finley Quotes found on Beliefnet.com:
• Good Things Come from Goodness “All things good come to those for whom the Good is all things.”
• Everything in Life is a Gift “To know that every moment — regardless of how it comes wrapped — is a gift greater than you can give yourself, is to be well on your way to a life without fear.”
• Be Fully Present In Your Life “Being fully present is the best guarantee for a bright future.”
• There Are No Limits “The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.”
• Don’t Hold off Making Real Change – “No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down. The best time — in fact, the only time — to make a real change in your life is in the moment of seeing the need for it. He who hesitates always gets lost in the hundred reasons why tomorrow is a better day to get started!”
• Fear Feeds Weakness – “The strength of any weakness within us is the degree to which it is feared.”
• Criticizing Others Is a Downfall – “The more time we spend considering the shortcomings of others, the smaller a person we become.”
• Make Friends with Your Mind “An unattended mind is the breeding ground of self-defeat.”
• Peace Wants to Find You, Too “The Peace you long for also longs for you.”
• Learn the Secret of Self “There is nothing as certain as silence, stillness, and solitude to introduce you to the secrets of yourself.”
• Drop What is Dragging You Down “Do the moment-to-moment work of dropping anything that wants to drag you down, and Reality itself will see to it that you rise.”
• Discovery is the Key to Quality* “The real quality of our life is not determined by what we have won from it, but by what we have discovered within it.”
• Choose in Favor of Yourself “Once you know what it means to choose in favor of yourself, there is no power in the universe that can make you choose against yourself.”
• The Past Cannot Darken the Present “Never speak out of anger, Never act out of fear, Never choose from impatience, But wait . . . and peace will appear. The past is as powerless to darken the present moment as is a shadow to reach up and drag down the form that casts it”

Read more
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Enter into the Flow of Life from the blog on Letting Go
posted by Guy Finley | 3:00am Wednesday December 28, 2011
Question: Some things I’ve tried to accomplish in life have been such a struggle, and yet some other things have just “fallen into place,” almost without much effort. Does this have any bearing on how we should choose to do things? Should I stop planning my life so much and just try to “go with the flow”? I’m almost afraid that if I stop planning so much, nothing will happen!
Answer: There is never a moment (although I know it seems not so) when the flow of which you speak is not all around us and available to us. We do not create this flow, but enter into it. This means that since this flow exists before my consideration of even needing it, there is something in me that is obscuring it, blocking it. This should be our task: to awaken increasingly to what in us is out of the flow. Find this and the flow presents itself. Where possible, experiment with giving up the planning as best you can, and watch what happens. It’ll be tough, but worth it.
Read more

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Find Release from Seeking the Approval of Others
posted by Guy Finley | 3:00am Tuesday December 27, 2011
One must lose hope in the false idea that winning the approval of others has any real power to quiet the nature within that doesn’t know what else to do with its sense of being incomplete save to imagine itself as being something it’s not. If I am what I believe myself to be, why do I need anyone else to confirm it; and if I am not what I believe I am, then can anyone’s confirmation of this illusion make it real?
The peace of mind we seek is not to be found in the world around us, but rather in the understanding that who and what we are can’t be measured by ourselves, let alone be judged by anyone else. Thought is but an instrument, and no tool or scale can know the value of what it measures. To see the truth of this is to be touched by a grace that comes only with dying to the whole idea that you will ever be able to pocket and save what is truly Good.

• Nourish Your Wish To Grow- listen now-audio

Read more

For more

Note: If Guy Finley’s words seem to resonate with you…come back often, I will be adding new items to the table of contents.
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Stop Wearing Yourself Out Over Nothing
quote by Guy Finley
“Here’s the real reason why talking to yourself about what you resent in someone, or otherwise resist about some event is so exhausting: it’s very hard work to make something (so big) out of what really amounts to nothing”
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Note:

• Alot of what Guy Finley says reinforces some powerful things for me, which is why I started this thread & enjoy lots of his work. I don’t identify with “everything” “everywhere” he has written/said…though there have been ideas that have really helped with centering…like Remember Yourself and Realize Freedom …and links/articles/books/audios on this thread
  —————————————————————————————-
  I am trying to make this thread reader friendly…with a table of contents. Hope it helps(:
• Table of Contents POSTS 1-5
  Post #1
• 2 Reasons for Title of Thread
• 2 Earlier books from Guy Finley and their table of contents
• Video – “Remember Yourself and Realize Freedom” [8 min 58 sec]
• Video – Q and A on Spiritual Alignment [1 min 49 sec]
• Site Link – Guy Finley’s Official Site
• Table of Contents

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• Post #2
• Video – A New Model For Success 2 min 38 sec
• Article -How to Stop the World and Be Still
• Article – You Are More Than You Know!
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• Post #3 Videos range around 1 1/2 to 7 min. Hover over each to see length if you have a time constraint
• Video- The Essential Laws of Fearless Living
• Video- The Secret of Letting Go
• Video – Use True Self Correction
• Video- Agree to Be Free
• Video – The Anatomy of a Negative State
• Video- Real Growing Takes Going Beyond Yourself
• Videos 1-7 – Brand new tools for building a brighter more balanced life

• Audio – A Fascinating Fact About Real Feelings
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• Post #4
• Article- … Self-doubt, anger, denial, anxiety, aggression, worry, resentment, ambitiousness, envy, greed, self righteousness, sarcasm, one-upmanship, demands, cynicism, avoidance, recrimination, dependency, expectations, coercion: all are wrong answers that can only supply secret aches
  Here are seven proven ways to increase this new kind of spiritual strength. Study them with the wish to uncover the secrets hidden in their empowering instructions. Practice each one — or all of them — every day. You’ll see that with the very act of disconnecting yourself from the fears and doubts that compromise your life, you are re-connecting yourself to a new kind of power that never leaves you alone in your hour of need.
• Article – Strengthen Your Connection to the Timeless Life
• Article – Stop Fear Before It Gets Started!
• Spiritual Exercises -….When you hear someone say, “I’m sick and tired of it,” what he is really saying without realizing it is that he’s sick and tired of suffering from his own lack of understanding. This all becomes clear once we understand that unhappiness does not come at us, it comes from us.
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Post#5

• Article – Start Exploring the World of Your Own Higher Possibilities
  by Guy Finley
• Article- Release Yourself From the Unseen Source of Painful Impatience by Guy Finley
  ————————————————————————————————————-
  Post #6
• Article – “Let Go of the Pain of Blaming Others for Their Imperfection”

• Guy Finley’s Official Site
• Q and A on Spiritual Alignment [1 min 49 sec]

POST 7

• Inspiring Quotes From Guy Finley And this Guy Finley blog on Letting Go (Thanks D’Marie)
• From Guy Finley’s Blog*
• Enter into the Flow of Life
  Find Release from Seeking the Approval of Others
• Nourish Your Wish To Grow – very short audio
  Read more

• Back to top of thread page-> Post 1

Hi Laurie and other Guy Finley followers,

Thanks for this thread. I’m a Guy Finley follower too.

I was having a hard time understanding something he said today and almost asked for help from you.

The Secret Cost of Character

I don’t want to make you listen to the whole thing (6 minutes) if you are short for time. Here’s where I stumbled. at 2:55 he says “The things (people) hold precious and true, above all else, are incapable of completing them.”

My problem was I took it out of context. Once I realized he was talking about the need to re-examine your values and surrendering those which don’t value YOU back, I was fine.

So I changed this post to just say HI and THANKS instead of asking for help. Thanks for being there!

In response to AccidentalNote’s post:
Hello Accidental Note(: My pleasure.
I was logging off as you posted…6 minutes of Guy Finley is a drop in the bucket(: I enjoyed/appreciated listening to the audio and hearing from you (:
I like Guy, because he seems to speak to us wherever we are and assisting us as the individuals we are… uniquely…to the ‘next place’…like whole-person poetry (: I like how he states these things (people, places and things) cannot (should not) complete us.

For me..it made me think of this: It is a constant “checking” to reevaluate how what we connect with are seen… weighed/assessed. It can be our job where we give our greatest part of self…and one day the job asks who are you and says we need something ‘better’.. If we allow other things to (truly/totally) complete us/validate us and give us meaning…then who are we when …stuff happens? Who are we when our connections are wonderful…Who are we apart from our connections? While what we involve ourselves with may add major things to our being…we are more than our connections. And even if he wasn’t saying that at all…it made me think of this(:. Love to hear more from you and your view. Love discussions like these. Glad you are here too.(:

My point with anything that assists…is that it assisted…no more no less. Not everything Guy Finley says is for me…but I have prospered from my reading for my own life.

Don’t Let Your Soul Starve to Death We will make detailed preparations for a single day off, lay out careful plans for a special date, or spend untold moments worrying over what we should wear; but few of us rarely take the time to prepare our interior life to receive the higher impressions that awaken our soul to its substance and meaning.~GUY FINLEY

I like Guy in small doses. His twitter feed is perfect for me.
@guy_finley

I never research where he gets his sayings. They just usually make sense to me.

Freedom From the Fear of Feeling Powerless
posted by Guy Finley
Real power isn’t the ability to imagine and implement an endless series of new solutions to old problems, but to awaken the higher understanding that allows us to transcend the need we have to live with any painful problems at all. Which would you rather have: a big fire hose with a hydrant and a fire to put out every day, or a life without fires in them?
But what we have to examine here is the way we think! Most of us wouldn’t know what to do if there wasn’t something pressing us. Isn’t it weird that we’ll come up with a path, a solution, something that we’re going to do, that once we do it we’ll become whatever we’ve imagined? No more pressure, no more fear — but then, the very thing that we set out to obtain, to make us fearless, to take the pressure out of our lives, becomes the source of a new fear and a new pressure! And then when that doesn’t work, we do it again, and again.
We have no idea of the power that we’re created with. We are granted at birth the possibility of a freedom that has absolutely no contingencies whatsoever that can fall apart because the conditions in our lives do.
The kind of power I’m talking about is so simple. For instance, ordinarily we’re trying to obtain things so that we can control or manipulate conditions, but we’re not talking about that. Instead, how about the authority over our own negative reactions? That’s a completely different kind of power, isn’t it? To possess ourselves as opposed to trying to possess things or relationships through which we have a measure of security. The power to possess ourselves can’t be granted by anyone or anything outside of us. It doesn’t exist; nothing can grant us what it is our heart of hearts actually longs for which is to be quietly in charge of our own heart and mind.
Work to remember that at any given moment you don’t have to be captured by anything that presently causes this compromise of your soul. Remember, always, that higher possibilities are never farther away from you than your wish and work to be open to them.

The Secret Cause of Confusion and Its Spiritual Solution
by Guy Finley

Key Lesson: Confusion is the distance between what you’re being shown about yourself and your refusal to see the same. This article is excerpted from Freedom From the Ties That Bind (pages 194-195).

Pull Yourself Out of Confusing Thoughts
Pressuring yourself to come up with a happy ending to a sad or shaky situation only goes to show you still believe that you can resolve these troubles. But if you could have, you would have by now.

The next time you run into some familiar blockage or begin to feel unsuited to face some new and difficult personal challenge, don’t do what you’ve always done before. Don’t try to think your way around it. You no longer want a way around your troubles because what goes around, comes around! What you want is to grow beyond the level of that disturbance. And to do that, you must not act from it.

So don’t allow yourself to be pulled down into any anxious concern or confusion over not knowing what to do about your present condition. What you really want is an insight into your situation, not a fight with it. The two have nothing in common. So make it clear to yourself once and for all: nothing that hounds you can help you.

Draw yourself back from your usual thinking. Quietly observe it race around looking for the shelter of a conclusion it can recognize. Have nothing to do with its frantic motion. Just relax. You’ve gone as far as you can go with what you know. You’ve done what you can do. Now it’s time to know that, so that you can let what you know go, and let something unthinkable occur to you.

You’ve prepared the stage, your own mind, for the arrival of a higher nature and a new kind of freedom. But learn to expect the unexpected. There may come a flash of insight, a clear glimpse into some self-created cause of your own continuing inner captivity. Or, perhaps, a sudden and sweet deep sense of wholeness will sweep through you, a quiet but profound intuition, wherein you know yourself, for that moment, to be one with all of that life pulsating around and within you.

However that Light breaks into the darkened room of self, consider each brief illumination as an appointed messenger, a heavenly herald sent in advance of a greater freedom to come. Learn to embrace each appearance, for regardless of what may be revealed — to you or about you — these insights are not unlike the sound of the shouts of liberation heard always just before the arrival of the liberating forces. A new freedom always follows. Now, follow it.

_{This article is excerpted from Freedom From the Ties That Bind (pages 194-195).}

Guy Finley says

“Strong opinions produce the illusion of intelligence.”

and this really makes me mad!

:)

I don’t think it’s strange that different authors would appeal to different people. I don’t generally like rap “music”; some people consider it art. (Dumb people.) Anyway, you get my point. I’ve read “The Power of Intention” and got a little out of it, but it’s not one of my favorites by any means. Does that mean it’s not worthwhile? Ever actually heard Eckhart Tolle speak? If you weren’t paying very close attention to what he was saying you might well think he was mentally challenged, yet his books, to me, are wonderful. What about Socrates? He wasn’t exactly a dummy, – he thought that writing things down could mess up our minds. This thread intrigued me so I went to Amazon to look up reviews on Guy Finley. His books have very good reviews.
Have any of you ever read “Confederacy of Dunces” by Toole. It won a Pulitzer. I hated it. I don’t say “don’t read it”. I say “read it if you feel like it, I didn’t like it, but a lot of people do”. When I’m sharing music, sometimes I say, “I’m not sure if you will like this, it’s kind of out there, but I like it – I’d like to share it with you”. Two people can look at the exact same thing, report what they see very differently, and yet both be telling the absolute truth. What is truth anyway? Can truth be subjective? Yes. Truth can be a tricky, sticky bidness. Saying “this is how it should be done” and “this is what should be read” and “this is what should be avoided, because it’s not the best” is a dangerous road to follow. What is best for one person may be deadly for another. Copernicus got in a little hot water telling the “truth”. If we dismiss one author, composer, artist, philosopher or whatever, because his work is not “original” we would have to dismiss all authors, composers, artists, philosophers and whatever. Would any of us know about Carmina Burana if it weren’t for Carl Orff? What would Plato have written or thought about if it hadn’t been for Socrates? Anyway, that’s just my “strong opinion”, Accidental note, lol! That’s my own personal Grand Illusion of intelligence! It feels kind of strange defending an author I’ve never read, but some of what I read in this thread felt like a passive aggressive attack or something. Maybe I just took it wrong, but that’s sure what it felt like. It looks good on you though

  

going to revise this thread, because Guy has some good work I'd love to post & share, and hear comments. We had some heated debate on this site at 1 time, and some comments some may see are a response to the strong opinions from another about  minimal value of Guy Finley contributions. That time is past, and we have moved on, and hoping to clean this thread up now that we are all sharing civilly again(: