49:36

Dismiss Any Painful Thought Or Feeling GF Live 8-09-25

by Guy Finley

Rated
5
Type
talks
Activity
Meditation
Suitable for
Everyone
Plays
65

Key Lesson #1: Self-realization is the same as the conscious negation of any form of identification; (it is) inseparable from a higher awareness that reveals what no so-called "spiritual thinking" can see, let alone understand as true: no matter how pleasurable or painful, elevated or excruciating may be any conditional, temporary sense of self…it is not who you are.

Self RealizationAwarenessSpiritualitySelf IdentityTranscendenceConsciousnessFear ManagementAttitude AdjustmentSpiritual ContextAwareness PracticeNext TechniqueConsciousness LevelSelf Transcendence

Transcript

As I was waiting to come online and begin our Saturday morning meeting,

I was thinking about how many of us have ever wished in one way or another that we had a magic wand of some kind.

Kind of like that movie,

A TV tuner where you could click the button and if you didn't like what was playing in front of you,

You could hit a button and change what you're looking at or you could just turn it off.

Where you would have some kind of power over people or problems.

Well the truth is that those stories,

Those movies,

Those myths,

They are rooted in something that is quite real but that we don't know is real because we don't know where to look for such an understanding that would grant us authority over the conditions in our life that are challenging to say the least.

So I have to share with you this morning,

This afternoon,

This evening,

Whenever you're joining me,

Three stories.

Each story will build upon the story that comes after it and the summation of these stories is intended to present an understanding that once grasped and worked at in terms of being able to employ it,

Will give you what it is that you are looking for and the title of the talk and I'll ask Kate to post it so we're all at least starting in the same place is as follows.

Talk is titled,

A Powerful One Word Solution to Dismiss Any Painful Thought or Feeling.

A One Word Solution to Dismiss Any Painful Thought or Feeling.

I tell you without reservation that there is such a word,

A wand if you want,

But that the word is useless unless a person understands what it is that has to be utilized in that moment to call upon it so as to change one's relationship with the entire moment,

Whatever it may be,

And in the authority over that moment,

No longer live in fear,

No longer be pained by what seems to be coming straight at you.

First story,

Imagine a young woman,

She wants to be a pilot,

A bush pilot.

I had thoughts of that myself when I was growing up.

And so she goes to bush pilot school and she's on her second to last checkout flight,

Which is the flight before she has to go up by herself with the instructor and in these instructor planes there's two sets of controls,

The pilot sits at one but the instructor has another set of controls he can take over immediately in case.

So up there flying around and she doesn't know it,

Part of this test is that he blindfolds her and she's terrified of the idea but she can see pretty far out,

No problem.

He blindfolds her and he tells her to hold the plane steady,

Which she's able to do because she's being asked to involve her senses in the actual operation of the flight.

And she has that sensory control,

No problems for about three or four minutes when suddenly he takes off the blindfold and God straight ahead,

I mean literally a mountain and she's suddenly paralyzed with fear as you might be,

As I might be.

I was flying along,

Kind of happy with myself,

The instructor saying,

Good,

Good,

Takes off the blindfold,

Suddenly not so good.

And so right in front of her,

This mountain and she freezes at the yoke of the controls and she,

What do I do,

What do I do?

Because fear has blinded her to all that she had learned before,

Such an important lesson.

It takes the longest time to realize that having a mental understanding is not the same thing as having control over this vehicle,

Over this relationship between ourselves and the things that pop up in and around us.

And then he quietly says,

Listen,

Her name's Yolanda,

Listen Yolanda,

You have a power you've forgotten.

All you have to do if you want to avoid the mountain is just pull back on the yoke and you will gain altitude.

Do that now,

Gain altitude.

And then she remembers,

Pulls back on the yoke,

Plane rises,

Passes over the mountain,

No problem whatsoever.

Now that sounds simple,

Doesn't it?

But if we can make the correlation,

Which I want to do with each of these subsequent stories,

We have to realize there are moments where we seem to be flying along no problem whatsoever and suddenly right in front of us,

Out of nowhere,

This unyielding,

Unwanted moment,

Whatever it may be,

He said they did,

They wouldn't.

And that moment is lined up and it looks like it's going to run right into us.

It's coming for us,

Just as it would have appeared to her that the mountain was coming from her,

Coming right at us.

And basically all we know to do in those moments is to grab hold of something and try to figure out what to do to change the moment,

A moment that in our mind we need to change for fear of the outcome,

Instead of realizing that the only authority we really have over any moment is to rise above the understanding that is making it seem to us to be something to be feared.

God did not put the spirit of fear in a human being.

She had,

Just as you and I do,

The power to gain altitude.

If you're following the spiritual metaphor,

What does it mean?

How do we gain altitude and fly over,

If you will,

These moments that look like they're coming straight for us?

Well,

I want to put together the word altitude with attitude.

In the moment where she was full of fear,

The only thing that she knew to do was to rely on all of these reactions that started telling her where she was and what was taking place so that her attitude towards the moment was based on what she was being provided by these fearful thoughts and feelings that were describing for her the eminent danger that as she feared that danger,

Resisted it,

She didn't know what else to do but to continue to call on the same thoughts and feelings that were creating the fear.

And in the fear and identification with it,

Being locked down and being locked down,

Having no chance to gain understanding,

No chance to rise above the circumstance by calling on what is natural,

In this instance,

Her training.

So until you and I have the capacity to realize that something captures us,

And then when it does,

The attitude that it provides tells us,

Look,

You're going to run into this mountain,

You're going to smash right into it.

And our new understanding is that the only thing that we run into with God as my witness,

The only thing that we run into in any given moment that creates fear or pain or some kind of psychological suffering,

Is our own misunderstanding that produces the misperception of the moment we're in,

And in the misunderstanding and misperception,

We are handed a false path.

And that false path is a,

I don't know,

What do they call that when you fly,

A flight path that can do nothing but assure us that the problem before us is something that we're going to have to,

That we're doomed,

We're going to run into,

We have to control it.

And then our mind belongs to something that we can't do anything with other than obey it.

The question is,

In the first story,

Where do we find this new attitude,

This new altitude that changes how we meet these challenging moments in our life?

And I want you to see this with me.

When you run into a challenging moment in life,

What do you turn to?

Who is your guide?

Where does this understanding come from that promises to lift you above whatever might be lashing at you?

And that even if it does momentarily change that condition,

It still doesn't change the consciousness where the next moment,

Whatever it was that you thought liberated you turns out to be the next prison that you're in.

We need a new understanding that realizes,

And listen,

Please,

In real time,

In real time,

That we cannot separate the experience of the moment from the level of consciousness that's responsible for that perception.

We need a new understanding that lets us realize that the experience I'm having in this moment is one and the same as the way in which something is telling me the nature of the experience so that what I'm actually experiencing in any given moment isn't the conditions themselves,

But the level of consciousness that as it is telling itself,

Oh,

Look at that,

Why this,

It is actually producing for itself the experience it doesn't want and then tries to change the experience of itself by changing the conditions around it by dressing itself in some new identity,

Some new way to get through the moment.

You don't need a new way to get through an unwanted moment.

You need a new understanding that reveals unwanted moments cannot be separated from the level of consciousness that creates them.

That's what we need,

And that's what every true teaching that was ever disseminated on this planet,

Its intention is,

To help remind human beings that within them lives a living light,

A true understanding.

Christ called it metanoia,

A new mind,

But that we are asleep just as the young pilot,

Yolanda,

Fell immediately asleep into a nightmare where everything that she was taught disappeared because of the tension that came to her when her mind said,

Oh my God,

This is unavoidable.

This can't,

What are we going to do?

Second story.

Nice deep breath.

First of all,

Everybody more or less tracking with me so far,

Please,

Just to make sure we're all on the same page and to bring you in.

I want you to stay present.

Don't want you to go to sleep.

Don't want you to go into a dream.

Here's during World War I or II,

Whatever,

A man fighting for the allies to overthrow whatever that particular evil axis is at the moment that's trying to dominate some part of the world and he needs to escape the country he's in and he finds his way to a harbor and he finds a way to swim out to a boat that looks to him as he's swimming out to be somehow connected to the allied crew that meant to pick him up.

But as he boards the boat and he can hear the language being spoken on the boat,

He realized he's gotten on the wrong boat.

That's pretty terrifying in itself.

Speaking of seeing something coming at you that you don't want.

He doesn't know what else to do.

Ship's starting to head out.

So the only thing he knows to do is he jumps into a cabin that's unoccupied,

Pitch dark,

And he's soaking wet and he doesn't want to spend the night soaking wet.

I mean,

You'll catch hyperthermia or whatever that is.

And so in the dark of the room,

He reaches into a closet and puts on a uniform.

Can't see what it is.

Too dark.

And he falls asleep exhausted in the closet.

He doesn't know how long he's asleep when boom,

Loud explosion and all of a sudden,

Red light fills the room.

Emergency lights fill that room.

And smoke and confusion and hysteria.

And he realizes without knowing it,

That on one side of it,

Whatever ship,

Wherever it is,

That's a torpedo.

They're going down.

But at the same time,

When he was suddenly shocked awake,

He hit his head.

And when he's coming to,

Even though he knows there's fear and something dreadful happened,

He doesn't know who he is.

He can't remember who he is.

Can't even remember why he's on that ship.

Have you ever awakened having fallen asleep?

Maybe it only happens when you get older.

You fall asleep.

And when you wake up for a split second,

You don't know where the heck you are.

Especially if you fall asleep like a dusk and you open your eyes and suddenly it's dark.

This is what happened to him.

He doesn't know where he is.

He didn't know what.

But in that red light in the mirror there in that room,

He looks and he sees he's the captain.

He's dressed in the captain's outfit.

The bars on the shoulders.

Got the whole nine yards.

And when he sees that he's the captain,

Because he doesn't really know who he is,

Another form of fear rifles through him because he does know that it is the captain's responsibility to see to the welfare of everyone else before he abandons ship.

In fact,

The captain's supposed to go down with the ship.

So here he is.

He's terrified now.

I'm the captain of a ship I don't remember being the captain of.

It's going down.

I don't know why it's going down other than it's been torpedoed.

Why did that happen?

All these thoughts rifling through his mind.

And the more they rifle through his mind and the more he realizes he's doomed because of who he is,

Or at least who he thinks he is,

The more fearful he becomes.

Again,

Just like Yolanda in the plane.

Has no understanding save for what his reactions are telling him is reality.

But then by the grace of heaven,

And it is,

And the story is a parallel to something that must and will,

I trust,

Might have already happened to you a number of times.

I can only hope so.

He begins for a moment to realize,

To remember that he is not the captain of that ship.

He remembers that he is fighting for the Allied forces and that he somehow or other dimly slipped onto this ship.

And then it all starts to come together for him.

He begins to have the story pieced together in his mind where he realizes he's not the captain.

He doesn't have to go now with the ship.

And so what does he do?

Strips off the captain's uniform,

Jumps back into his clothes,

Jumps overboard,

And fortunately is rescued by the Allied ship that was intended to meet him there.

The sub comes up.

You know those stories.

And he's whisked off to safety.

Does that sound to you unrealistic?

Because we're making a correlation here between that experience of that Allied spy and ourselves.

Because I want you to see it is totally related to our life.

Look and see.

Tell me if you can't realize the reality of what I'm going to describe.

Here I am.

I'm sitting at home.

My wife and I,

For instance,

We're moving to Florida.

And as the window of changes close,

We've got like,

What,

14 days we're off.

As all that closes,

So does all the stuff that has to get done.

And when you start to see all the stuff that has to get done,

You start realizing,

Well,

This has to happen like this,

Like that,

Because you've got a timeline.

It's almost like Mission Impossible.

And boy,

One small thing gets out of gear,

And it's like,

Bang.

Wait a minute.

If that affects this,

That's going to affect that.

Try to see this in your life.

It's with your people,

With your relationships,

With your friends,

Your family,

Your business,

Whatever it is.

Things are lined up.

They're supposed to go this way.

Boom.

A torpedo.

And we're torpedoed.

The mountain is suddenly in front of us.

And what happens in that moment?

Please see this with me.

To use a metaphor,

Inwardly,

Something says,

Here,

Try on this thought for size.

Try on this idea.

Try on this plan.

And like a smorgasbord of thoughts basically simmering in some form of stress,

All of these ideas start to appear in our mind,

And we're trying to fix the best one,

The one that will have the least possible problems downstream.

And now our sudden sense of self,

Because we're identified with what we've been dressed in,

What we selected to save us,

We start to realize that this whole thing is terrible.

But it's terrible because without knowing it,

We have dressed ourself in some specific sense of self.

We have dressed ourself in a temporary identity that we didn't know was a temporary identity because it came to us from our mind,

So to speak,

From the past and its conditioned experiences.

So it finds the closest parallel,

And it puts on whatever it needs to put on to get through that moment.

We go deep into thought,

And in that thought,

Out of those reactions,

It feels like now we know what we need to do to escape or control this moment,

But we're still looking at it through the eyes of whatever that uniform that we aligned ourselves with.

We can't see in that moment that this sense of self is not us,

Because I'm so used to being someone who's irritated,

Impatient,

Someone who knows better,

And by God,

You better listen to me,

Or someone who's so passive that we live in resentment of everyone and everything that comes along and not only causes what we say is challenging us,

But then tells us what we have to do to get through it.

Makes no difference,

Active,

Passive side of this at all.

What matters in this moment is that there's some part of us suddenly awakened,

But not remembering anything other than what is handed to us by some form of resistance,

Negative reaction,

And it's basically telling us,

Oh my God,

Any port in a storm.

Get away from this,

Get over to that,

Don't think this,

Go over there.

So this consciousness of any port in a storm,

The parallel is any persona in the midst of a pain,

And this unconscious nature is happy to hand us who we should be.

We don't know who we are without that nature telling us who we are as it describes to us,

Not just the person we are in that moment and what's been done to us or taken from us,

But what this person must do in order to escape what's being done to it,

And the whole thing is an illusion.

And these legion of personas,

And that's actually what the legion is,

All of these different eyes,

These parts of ourselves collected and amassed over time,

That they appear at the drop of any moment that seems to be denigrating us,

And suddenly we're caught up in this psychological machinery.

One day you'll actually see it,

A kind of psychological machinery that starts to wind up,

And as it winds up the stress,

The conflict grows,

As it grows the greater need for some way to resolve the situation.

And once we are locked into that cycle of self,

That circle of false self,

We're doomed because all we know to do is to look for what the maker of the problem promises us will help us escape it.

And if you see this clearly,

If you've ever had any experience whatsoever,

Of seeing how many times,

For instance,

An addict,

What does an addict call on when he or she meets a problem they don't want?

An addict calls on an addict's nature.

It's not his real nature,

It's not her real nature,

But it is a nature that has been cultivated over time,

Conditioned in such a way that when challenges come,

The machinery says,

Here's what you do,

Go eat,

Go buy,

Go drink,

Go stuff,

Do something that I'm telling you to do so you can feel consoled in this moment.

And we all know that that's a dead end,

Time and time again.

We need another order of being,

As I reach the halfway point of this talk.

Another order of being,

We don't know what that means.

Even people who think they know what that means don't know what it means.

Let alone the people back in the day when Christ said that one must,

In quote,

Repent.

The word repent does not mean what you think it does,

Feel bad about yourself.

The word repent means to turn around.

It was connected to this word metanoia.

I've spoken of it for 50 years.

Not quite.

Yeah,

Maybe more.

That a new mind,

I need a new mind if I want to meet moments in a new way.

Because the old mind is not only what meets old moments and relives them,

But the old mind is responsible for the perception of a new set of conditions that it calls old,

So that it can have a familiar sense of itself as one who knows what's happening.

So a new mind means that we realize our experience of the moment is determined by a sense of self that is,

In effect,

Called up from our past.

The old mind,

Here's what it does.

Here comes a moment.

It just eludes us.

How can I know the meaning of a moment?

When that moment,

By the grace of God,

Is the intersection of a series of absolutely inexplainable,

Timeless events that have all been brought together and somehow or other are unfolding in me.

I saw something last night on television,

And I wrote it down because I thought it was so significant to be in a TV series.

And this person was explaining,

He said,

The reason that we have all these stories,

These myths and legends,

Is because the mind,

Unable to explain to itself the unexplainable,

Had to create a story to explain the unexplainable.

And if you don't get that,

It simply means that what our mind tells us,

The stories it gives us,

That,

By and large,

Incidentally,

Are dragged up from an unconscious nature,

In its own sense,

Timeless.

These stories are meaningless.

You have to ask yourself,

How many times have you told yourself a story about what a moment means,

And then found in that story a path or a plan laid out by the content of the story to follow it where?

To another story that you have to tell yourself to make up for the one that didn't work before.

That's what explanations are.

That's what justifications are.

I'm going to give a whole talk on this later.

I don't want to go deeper now.

So this moment brings up a story,

Brings up the past.

Not you.

It wasn't your mother or your father's or their mother or father's.

These stories that were handed down to help us get through and explain and control or otherwise reconcile these unwanted moments.

Moments resolve themselves,

And they are intended to,

Because every moment is a revelation of God's life.

And God's life doesn't need you to reconcile it.

The reconciliation and the restitution of the soul related to it is built into the moment.

So this story comes out of the past to tell us what's happened,

When what we are seeing as having happened,

We see it because of the past and the past telling us what that moment means.

Gee,

I hope you can understand that.

I've got to keep going through this.

And so it goes for us flying along as it will.

Here comes this turbulence.

Our best plan gets torpedoed.

You know the drill.

We feel like we're going down.

We can feel the anger.

We can feel the depression,

The regrets.

And we find ourselves forever meeting moments like that,

Trying on what we think is a new uniform,

A new captain's outfit,

Whatever it may be,

Because we will find consolation in the sudden sense of now I'm in control.

I understand the circumstance.

And so we put on that set of thoughts.

And when they abandon us,

When we sink in them,

Which we always do,

We have to find another set of thoughts and their conditioned corresponding sense of self to get through another sinking moment.

Oh,

I don't know how to encourage you to remember that who and what you are cannot sink in time.

There's no problem that can come along that can cause you to drag,

Be dragged down.

We are dragged down by the fact that we don't know what to do with our own attention in the moment where suddenly there's tension in our lives because we can't see the tension we're feeling is born out of a part of ourselves having already determined what that moment means.

And then as soon as it's determined what the moment means,

The very nature that creates the tension then tells us here's how to get out of it.

And it knows nothing about that.

We need a new understanding of life if we're to have any chance at all of ever transcending this constant sense of self forever torpedoed,

Forever meeting a mountain head on.

And what is that new sense of self?

As best it can be described where we're handed in those moments,

Not something to convince us that the mountains right there,

We're going to run into it,

That we're on a ship and we're the captain.

We have to go down with it.

But rather in that exact same moment,

We are reminded of who we are.

The very tension that we feel brings us into a relationship with the machinery producing it so that instead of turning to a way to struggle with the problem,

We lend our attention to the light of this awareness,

To the indwelling light that allows us to see beyond the shadow of a doubt that what we're experiencing in that moment is what this old nature is telling us is true about ourselves and our life and how all these things that happened back then are responsible for what we're going through now.

And instead of identifying and lending our attention to whatever that next uniform is,

That next identity that we've put on a thousand times in a thousand different ways,

Instead of that,

Something else altogether takes place because of this new understanding,

Because of this awakened awareness.

Let me get to the last story.

Take a nice deep breath.

Don't let the subtlety of this story fly by.

Wide awake,

Try as best you can not just to listen with your mind.

That's so useless.

If we can't meet in experience,

Not in my experience,

Not in your experience,

If we can't meet in experience itself,

Where we know for a fact,

Yes,

I know that's true.

10,

000 times I have put on,

In quotes,

The captain's uniform.

I'm going to take control.

Or we've put on the ship's junk collector.

I put on,

I'm the worst person.

That makes no difference what you put on.

The trick is to understand that you are being tricked into identifying with thoughts and feelings that come to you from the past and that ensure you will repeat it,

That you will reincarnate that nature again and again if you don't understand the possibility that this living light produces when we will be awake enough to call upon it in these sinking moments.

An old model that I use for a lot of my stories because it helps in one way,

It helps us be familiar with a story.

Remember,

A story is told to help explain the unexplainable.

It isn't the explanation of the condition.

It's a way in which for us to see,

Hopefully by different points of view,

Something new about what has been inexplicable to us.

So here's a detective.

The detective represents you and I.

He is a man who is interested in understanding this phenomena that takes place,

All of this inexplicable phenomena.

You see,

Here's a big problem.

To us,

It is understandable that somebody shouts at another human being.

Because mom and dad shouted,

We shout.

For us,

It's not inexplicable that somebody gets addicted to a drug or can't stop shopping or can't live without plans,

Without a day filled with everything that has to be done.

To us,

That's understandable.

I am telling you that that behavior in truth is inexplicable because it belongs to an inexplicable relationship that has taken place in the consciousness of that human being that has bound them to a pattern,

That has bound them to a mind that can only unfold in a certain way so that it makes perfect sense to them to always be anxious,

Makes perfect sense to be a control freak,

Makes perfect sense.

But one day you'll see there's no sense in that regardless how well put together that person may seem.

Honest to God,

I tell you the truth,

You'll see this one day.

One in a million human beings is together enough not to be undone in an unwanted moment.

Not pretend,

But as you'll see,

To have a different relationship with it that produces a totally different outcome.

So this detective hears about this place,

This city where souls are literally disappearing.

Men and women are just evaporating off the street.

Now,

Most of the people in this town don't really see it and if they do,

They're afraid to recognize it's happening.

I wish I always had more time.

When you see somebody get angry,

You can't see that they just disappeared.

All you see is what you fear about them or what you judge them for.

But the minute a person is taken over by a thought or feeling,

That human being for all intents and purposes,

They disappear because the possibility given to them by the divine to be perfected by the very moment that they think is punishing them,

It's gone.

And when the possibility is gone,

So is that person,

The purpose of their life.

So people see people disappear,

You see people disappear all the time.

But nobody wants to know what's going on.

We don't even see ourselves disappear in impatience.

When you're impatient,

You disappear.

Why do you disappear?

Because there's no longer any love there.

There's no longer any kindness.

There's no longer any compassion.

There's just a demand that wasn't met and the outcome of it.

So he hears about these people disappearing.

He runs,

He goes there,

He walks around.

I have to go through this story a little more quickly now.

And he sees this man walking down the street.

And as he's walking down the street,

Somebody bumps into him and knocks the package out of his hand.

And the man keeps walking who bumped it out of his hand.

He bends down to pick it up.

And as he bends down to pick it up,

The detective sees something coming up out of the ground,

Sort of an amorphous shape.

And as it's coming out of the ground,

The detective recognizes at a distance that this thing is kind of taking on the shape of a human being,

But it has a mirror-like surface.

So try to put this in your mind.

Something's shaping itself.

And as it shapes itself,

It's kind of in the shape of the person that it's appearing in front of.

And not only is this mirror-like amorphous darkness taking on that image,

But it's reflective.

So that the man,

When he finally stands up,

He's looking into this amorphous mirror-like image,

And the image engages him.

And the man starts to have a conversation with this,

Whatever this mirror-like image is.

And as the man begins to have the conversation with this mirror-like image of himself,

The more that image of himself becomes crystallized,

Meaning more definite.

The detective's watching all this.

And that's not the end of it.

Another mirror-like object,

Shaped like a person,

Like himself,

Appears behind that mirror.

And the longer this man has this conversation with the first mirror,

The more they're drawn,

Seem to be drawn together.

And there's more and more mirror-like images of himself lined up behind that.

So the detective sees 10,

12,

15 of these mirror-like body-shaped images lined up behind,

In front of this man.

And at a certain point,

He's shocked.

The man,

All the mirrors,

They just come together like that.

There's a clap,

And they're gone.

What?

What happened?

What was that about?

He'd never seen anything like that before.

And by the way,

This is,

In quotes,

A true story,

A way to explain what we have yet to see.

When you see the truth,

You don't need a story.

When you understand your relationship with God,

With Christ,

With what is true,

You don't need beliefs.

We have beliefs because they are stories,

And the stories comfort us in the face of what is unexplainable.

And when we have unexplainable pain,

We'd rather have the consolation of a story or a belief than the fact that we are created to transcend,

To rise above these moments.

Story goes on.

He sees this happen three,

Four,

Five times.

Then,

He's trying to figure out what's going on when he walks into a restaurant to get a cup of coffee,

And there is a woman there sitting at the table.

She's had her breakfast.

The waitress brings the bill over,

And the woman just starts to berate the waitress.

Food wasn't this,

Food wasn't that.

Really cruel.

And as that person is berating the waitress,

The detective sees right out of the ground.

Nobody else sees it.

Suddenly,

Here comes this amorphous shape that's like a mirror,

That the waitress begins to see herself in this mirror.

All the time,

She's still engaged.

This is so important.

She's still engaged with this rude customer,

But all that's going on,

And appears this mirror,

And she starts to have this conversation.

Have you ever not caught yourself talking to yourself while you're talking to somebody else?

Looking for the uniform,

The right person to be in that moment.

How I deal with this,

I call on that.

So,

She's looking at this mirror-like image of herself.

It's taking on more shape form.

More and more of these mirrors are lining up behind that mirror,

Indicating that there are more ways in which this nature,

Whatever it is in its darkness,

Wants to drag her in.

And he knows what's going to happen.

She's going to disappear as surely as everyone else,

But that doesn't happen.

Because right in the middle of it,

Right when it looks like it can't go any other way,

He sees the waitress simply say one word.

He didn't know what it was,

Just one word.

She just said one word.

He could barely hear it.

And the minute she said that one word,

That mirror-like amorphous image that had her image in it,

It disappears.

And the next mirror,

The next image comes up.

And he watches,

And whatever it is,

She says the same one word,

And it disappears.

And he watches five,

Six,

Seven of these mirror images of herself that want to engage her in a conversation.

She just says one word.

And one by one,

They disappear.

And finally,

The whole line of them,

Whatever legion represents 108 different eyes,

All of them just disappear at once.

They collapse into each other.

And she's left there free.

And not only free of the moment in which these mirrors were trying to steal her life,

But she's free of that rude human being in front of her as well,

And actually understands the nature of that rudeness so as to not be rude back.

Doesn't mean that she loves this rude person.

It means that she understands love has given her a way to be in that moment and to transcend herself,

And to know that love was there helping her go through this.

The detective is beside himself.

What in the name of God?

What in the name of God just happened?

Was that magic?

She said,

No,

That's not magic.

What do you mean it's not magic?

I've watched this all over town.

What did you say to that image?

To that mirror-like image of yourself,

Let alone all the rest of them that lined up?

What could you have said to make them disappear?

And she said,

Well,

It took a long time for me to understand this.

I don't know that you will either.

But all I said is all I ever say,

Anytime one of these amorphous thoughts and feelings or identities,

Images of myself appear,

All I simply said was,

Next.

What?

Yeah.

Next,

He said.

Yeah,

Next.

And then the next one lines up.

I recognize it for what it is,

Something I don't need to be or do or say,

Next.

And I say that to every one of these identities that appear every time a problem pops up that wants me to identify with that nature,

That past,

That pain.

It has no authority,

She said.

That was what I was given to see by the grace of God.

Next.

Next.

Think for a moment what it would be like.

Here comes that reaction.

Oh my God,

What am I going to do?

Next.

Not ignoring the moment,

But realizing the moment exists as it does because some part of you has already laid out a plan that's been challenged.

And now you have to try to prepare yourself for some unwanted moment that doesn't exist without your plan.

Next.

He said,

But how did you get to that?

She said,

It's simple.

The more clearly it became to me that none of these identities was me,

I realized not one of them is me.

So why would I deal with,

Why would I sit and talk to,

Let alone negotiate with something that has appeared in a particular uniform that's familiar to me?

Kate,

Let's bring up the key lesson we're getting near the end of the talk.

If you will,

Please.

This key lesson is a good description of what it is that I've been describing all along.

Read along with me.

Self-realization is the same as the conscious negation of any form of identification.

It is inseparable from a higher awareness that reveals what no so-called spiritual thinking can see,

Let alone understand as true.

No matter how pleasurable or painful,

Elevated or excruciating may be any conditional temporary sense of self,

It is not who you are.

It is not who you are.

But you don't know that yet because when unwanted moments come,

Comes the storyteller,

Comes the familiar uniform thoughts and feelings as we are so used to being dressed in them and then being carried off by them.

It's important that you don't sentimentalize,

That you don't make a religion out of this idea.

What is true and full of light and good is always with you,

Within you.

You just need to remember that it is what you want to be related with.

It is what you want to attend to in the moment so that the shift,

The way it is now,

Where the uniform and its responsibility to go down with the ship,

It appears and all you know to do is to agree with it.

The shift is from realizing that what I'm being given to do is being given to me by what is not new.

I must make this shift from doing to seeing,

From struggling as I do to be free,

From seeing the fact that who I am can't be made a captive of any given moment,

Let alone of my own reaction,

A captive of my own reaction.

That's what happens.

I have a reaction.

Oh,

I shouldn't have that reaction.

Now I'm in the hands of something that is telling me put on this uniform,

Be contrite,

Pretend to be kind,

Act as if you understand Christ's life because if you can act it out,

You can be it.

No,

You can't.

Christ's life is not an act.

It is a living action.

What is true and divine is not an act.

It is a living action.

And when you participate in that living action,

Which we are intended to not do but to be,

Then we see through the illusion of all these identities when they appear.

You don't have to,

In quotes,

Disidentify.

This isn't about repressing or suppressing the fact that suddenly I'm dressed in whatever it is that is telling me here's how to designate responsibility.

None of that.

The light of awareness dismisses the illusions of a self that appears in the absence of that light because we don't know where else to turn or what else to do.

So the idea of next,

It's not willful.

It's born of the capacity to see that this identity,

How many times have you been afraid in your life?

How many times have you listened to that person tell you what to do?

And how many times do you want to keep going on being afraid?

Because as long as you allow yourself to identify with whatever that I is,

That identity,

You will be reincarnated in its image and it will continue to live your life instead of you having your life in the light as it's intended to.

You will see if you even get close to this,

If you actually inwardly next,

Meaning I see this sense of self,

It's a lie.

I don't know who to be.

And that's part of my fear.

Because when I don't know who to be,

I have to find who to be.

I need a story to support it.

And so I'm endlessly in search of a story.

You don't need a story to tell yourself.

You need to participate in the greatest story ever told.

And that is that you are made in the image of the divine.

That the light of life itself is within you.

And that's what gives you next.

And it's just like that.

If you ever watch and you're ever even to say next,

You catch yourself.

You watch,

They line up these thoughts and feelings like mosquitoes waiting to come get a bite.

Next,

Next,

Next.

And you stay there.

Not insisting,

But dismissing every identity that wants you to insist on some path or plan by which to save yourself.

You are already saved.

You just don't know it.

And the clearer you begin to understand that you have been given this light,

This life,

The sooner you'll be able to dismiss all of this darkness that keeps appearing and telling you it's the light and that you must enter into it.

Enter into your awareness of the moment.

Let it tell you who and what you are.

And it won't be in words.

It'll be in a new action that allows you to say next.

Do your work.

Meet your Teacher

Guy FinleyGrants Pass, OR, USA

5.0 (6)

Recent Reviews

Michelle

August 20, 2025

Thank you so much 🙏🏻

More from Guy Finley

Loading...

Related Meditations

Loading...

Related Teachers

Loading...
© 2026 Guy Finley. All rights reserved. All copyright in this work remains with the original creator. No part of this material may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

How can we help?

Sleep better
Reduce stress or anxiety
Meditation
Spirituality
Something else