The New Self-Understanding that Makes You Unstoppable by Guy Finley
No one succeeds in life who lives in fear. Fearlessness is first the will to proceed in spite of conditions, and then it becomes a consciousness fixed in us that is beyond conditions. Real success is a fearless state of being in a conscious relationship with an Intelligence that always achieves its ends in spite of changing conditions.
The success that our present nature looks for is to try to find some point in our life where we’re able to put together conditions outside of us sufficiently enough so that we feel fearless. The only way we know to try to achieve this success is by attaching ourselves to something that we imagine, and by the very fact that we’ve done that, we become dependent upon what we’ve imagined remaining in place – which means that we’re right back to having a life that has fear in it.
The more we imagine success, the more fearful we become, and the more fearful we become because of ideas, images, and people in our lives which we say have to remain in place, the more we resist change in them. The more we resist change, the more static we become as a human being.
Unlike every other creature on this earth, you and I are created to be changed, to go through transformations which put us into a new relationship with a different order of life if we have allowed those changes to take place.
Three of the most powerful words in the English language are: I can learn — not learn how to identify with things outside of myself in order to get what I want, but I can learn about the forces inside of myself so that gradually I begin to recognize that the only thing that stands in my way of finding the fearless life is something in me that tells me I can’t.
Out of this persistence, everything changes. We don’t know that everything changes because we only make a tiny attempt at something and then run into our own conclusion that it’s a dead-end street. We then try to find another street we can go down, never knowing that none of those streets go anywhere because they are created by the same mind that produces the dead-end. Mountains crumble before the one who will wait for a passage through them. Persistence is knowing that life changes.
The seasons themselves are the evidence of a Reality that is always shifting, in transition, ever improving itself. I know that if I sit and watch, I will gain new self-knowledge through the observation of the fact that everything is changing. I discover through this persistence connected with self-knowledge (which is born of awareness) that I am in a world of changes but within me exists something that is unchanging because I am willing to watch the changes take place. Then passages open up before me that were impossibly closed because they were closed to the one who sat there with the insistence they open the way I wanted them to.
When we understand that, then we can start letting go of this nature that creates its own passage, and wait for Truth, for God’s Life to create and show us passage through the change. Then our persistence begins to pay off because it is a gateway to a new kind of confidence and success based in the conviction that we have inside of us. It’s a conviction because we have experienced for ourselves that the world changes if we will watch it change. If we try to change it according to what we want however, we will never see the changes that we imagine, and will always wind up a captive of our own imaginings.
Out of this persistence comes the gradual, marvelous recognition that a big part of changing everything is learning to be persistent in waiting for the right moment for me to move through… and I have to be there when it happens. I can’t run for fear that I won’t accomplish what I set out to accomplish.
We live in a world that is established for us to succeed in realizing that within us dwells an Intelligence beyond fear. The whole world is set up so that we can take attention, awareness, self-knowledge, and persistence, and bring them together. We can choose to be in this moment in order to let the moment educate us, without telling ourselves what we want. We let Life, that we have finally found out has a purpose, give us what we need to understand.
Once we experience for ourselves that the universe is actually set up for us to succeed in becoming wise in all things, we realize in that same moment that Reality itself is compassionate. It is founded in Love. With this discovery in us, fear is dissolved because we are no longer apart from life. We don’t have adversaries anymore. We’re not fighting with anything or anyone because we have some idea of scarcity of commodity or consciousness. We have awakened in ourselves to something in us, and it is our knowledge.
This process takes a willingness to dive in and go through it, because as you yield to these principles and they are married up inside of you, you no longer look at life as a series of separate actions taking place. Rather, they are one complete action you can be complete in, and in which you can discover the perfection that is inherent in the center of your being. You find that Love is that wholeness, indivisibility, and recognition that all things good come to those for whom the Good is all things. When you set out to find this truly fearless life, lo and behold, you discover Love, Intelligence… and fear cannot dwell in the presence of this Light.
Author: Guy Finley is the best-selling author of more than 40 books and audio albums on self-realization. He is the founder and director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for self-study at which he gives talks four times each week. For more information visit GuyFinley.org, and sign up to receive a free helpful newsletter emailed to your desktop each week.
Click here to download Guy’s Free Self-Realization Starter Kit