Guy Finley

And what we do with this potential conduit that we have is kink it in like a hose that gets kinked or put little boulders in the stream to keep the flow of energy from moving smoothly because we want this or we don't want that.

I listened to Guy Finley's talk on Sunday, this last Sunday, and it's all about can I be okay with whatever happens? You know, is...

Is it possible that I can understand that my judging this set and the other thing is not helping me? It's actually detrimental.

So, as always...

I'm not letting it sink in.

I'm not questioning.

I'm not looking for the similarities between what Michael Rice has said and Guy Finley says and Michael Singer says and Dale Allen Hoffman says and Gangaji said.

I'm not looking for those connections the way I do when I'm reading it with commentary.

But the essence of this is, a- as he's trying to say in this, in these few, first few paragraphs, if you're fighting this, you can't learn from it.

I remember how Guy Finley has a whole talk, and he...

One of the punchlines of it was in order to learn from anyone or anything, you've got to make yourself subordinate to that from which you would learn.

So if your mind is fighting with you as you read this, saying, "This is garbage.

Not, Tim, well, the way I'm thinking about it, right? This is, this is just...

Because of this kind of jump that you just made a- and, and that I would have made in the early going of this, I ended up formulating it this way.

After listening to Michael Rice for years and Guy Finley and all these other people, I ended up putting together this.

If I'm going to be in a position where I can learn something, I can't go in thinking I know what I know and how right I am, and I've got to be willing to cancel my goals and ask to be shown and, and, and understand that there's a different state of mind that needs to happen.

There's always another way to look at the data points, the situation, the interpretation, et cetera.

And so we use texts like Course in Miracles and The Way of Mastery and A Course of Love and Diedrich Wolzak's book, Choose Again, Michael Rice's book, Why Is This Happening to Me Again? christian sunberg's book a walk in the physical we use these just to help us see different options than the ones we've been trained into or conditioned into by our family and our culture and our language and i i i like to bring up some of my favorite quotes from these different teachings like um Guy Finley, who says there's nothing more practical than true spirituality.

So if there's something that you hear as we're reading, if there's some kind of an upset, we encourage people as we're reading these different teachings.

If you're listening and something inside of you gets tight or tense or wants to push against it or argue with it, Just soften.

You have within you The Capacity to Be Still and Know, which is the title of this second chapter.

You have within you a connection.

The way Guy Finley talks about it is he says, your creator didn't put you on a planet where if you search long enough for enough decades and Himalayan mountain caves, et cetera, you might someday stumble across a teacher who can teach you what you need to know.

That's not what your creator did.

to make you conscious of its presence.

So here's Guy Finley at one point, he says, you know what? What most people don't realize is there's an unseen cosmic curriculum and everybody has to take it.

It's not up for debate whether you take it or not.

The only thing that's up for debate is when you take it or how long you delay taking it.

This same message comes in the way of mastery.

almost verbatim, the same message.

But the way Guy Finley talks about it, he says is, there's an unseen cosmic curriculum.

And the only purpose of that curriculum is to educate the soul to the existence of the wisdom, the power that gave rise to the curriculum.

It's not created or contained or maintained by anything external.

So here Joseph S. Benner goes on and he says, "Likewise, all that ever appealed to the capital Y You coming from some outward expression, it was simply the confirmation of what you're gonna be reading here in my word already spoken within you, and which outward expression was the avenue or means that I chose at the time through that, that experience of your life to reach and impress your human or your self-consciousness." So here he's talking about, as Guy Finley would say, levels of scale.

So there's you in your physical body, and there's the part of your consciousness that's awake and aware within your physical body.

And please understand that these teachings, not just Joseph S. Benner, but many of these great teachings say that's not all you are.

It's kind of like the people that like to do whatever their guru did.

And so people were... starting to listen to Guy Finley and they heard him tell a story about how when he was, you know, first working with his guru, his primary teacher, Vernon Howard, that Guy Finley used to walk around with duct tape over his mouth.

And so then Guy Finley's students decided they should walk around with duct tape over their mouths.

And he said, what are you doing? Well, you did this.

And I was like, yeah, but I did it because I couldn't shut up.

That kind of a thing can do that without necessarily having a conceptualization in your mind of who or what you're turning it over to.

You don't have to have a picture of God in your mind, and you don't have to have a way to demonstrate that your God is the one true God.

You just have to have the observational awareness that says, I'm using a tiny little nine-bit mind, as Michael Rice would say, or I'm using this mechanical level of mind that Guy Finley would say, or I'm using the intellect, which has just been shoved full of trivialities like garbage in a garbage can, as Way of Mastery would say.

It is application and not knowledge that I'm interested in for you.

So in other words, I just flashed on this story from Guy Finley where this young man woke up and he was in a kingdom where he was serving the master and the master had a big palace and grounds and it wasn't that bad it wasn't an abusive place but he started to wonder why am I here why do I have to serve the master and he started voicing it and the master just chuckled and said but because that's your role And your dad and your grandparents and your great-grandparents have all served me.

This is your role to serve me.

Well, that satisfied the young man for a while, but fortunately for him, he had something inside of him that was eating away at him.

He read philosophical treaties and political treaties on freedom.

And he understood all the stuff about freedom.

But Guy Finley breaks into his own story and says, but you might know, you might have experience of your own sometimes in life where you can read all the cookbooks in the world.

It doesn't make you a good cook.

This work is about newness, and you can't have new what's new if you stick with what you know.

Guy Finley says, what is new, truly new, can't be known.

It won't be recognized.

He won't really have words for it.

Well, and we remember it and we dream about it.

And it's a few more cold nights.

And now we, you know, we're thinking back to those wonderful persimmons or pawpaws or whatever the fruit was that we were sick of you know two weeks ago now we wish we had some now we're fondly remembering the taste and we're locking in where it was and so that at the end of the next year when this time of ripening comes again we can find that and aid us to survive but yet again we get back there the next year and we have three or four of them they taste so good but then we got to keep eating because we're packing on the calories and we're just eating and we're not really savoring the flavors matter of fact we're pretty sick of it the shine wears off the rose very quickly that's a phrase of how my interest in something wanes after i have acquired it and guy finley and other teachers say not only that but there's a problem woven into this.

I think that me acquiring that thing is going to bring me this emotional energy that I want satisfaction, enjoyment, et cetera.