Access over 500+ Hrs of Basic Content for as low as $4.97/month!
Sign up today!Select Category
Browse from A-Z
Go Deeper!
Make self-realization part of your daily life – become an aspirant and join Life of Learning’s online community.
You'll gain access to:Click for Quick Inspiration!
Welcome to Life of Learning's Online Wisdom School
Access an In-Depth, Multi-Media Resource of Higher Wisdom, Online or On-the-Go!
Sign up today!You need an active subscription to enjoy more access.
Subscribe to unlock more content.
Access Over 500+ Hours of Premium Content Today! Try it Completely RISK FREE for 30 days!
Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
If you have a few minutes, and want a burst of enlightenment, watch or listen to these brief talks by Guy, filled with concentrated wisdom.
Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
Dive deep into a subject on your own! Work at your own pace with a series of talks by Guy on topics critical to your inner development.
Catch Guy Finley’s weekly message that focuses on spiritual and personal breakthroughs. This is updated weekly and is available in video, audio and text.
Join a lively online discussion with other members each week of “This Week’s Topic” – a new Guy Finley talk selected for in-depth study.
You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
Guy regularly holds open Q&A sessions. Often members of our global community send in questions, or speak directly to Guy online.
Access to all our private Facebook updates, student Facebook discussions, and our LIVE Saturday lunch roundtable discussions.
This member forum is where you can write in your observations and experiences, and receive feedback from fellow members. Read-only access for Free and Basic members. Full access for Premium & All Access members.
Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
Short but powerful quotes by Guy Finley will inspire you throughout your day.
Heartfelt inner-life questions from people around the world, and Guy’s enlightening answers, will shed light on your own issues.
Read Guy’s newest insights as he jots them down, spontaneous and uncensored.
Watch or listen to the specific talk we will all be discussing during this week’s Online Study Group meeting.
If you have a few minutes, and want a burst of enlightenment, watch or listen to these brief talks by Guy, filled with concentrated wisdom.
Hearing Guy interact with an interviewer is a delight. Listen as he makes deep spiritual principles easy to understand.
Be encouraged by hearing fellow members share their experiences and discoveries as they bring higher ideas into their daily lives.
The Life of Learning singers and instrumentalists perform beautiful music that will inspire and uplift you.
Join us for exclusive live broadcasts of select Guy Finley talks.
Start your day off right with a nugget of wisdom that can transform your experience with everything you do and everyone you meet.
Inner-life exercises and special writings deepen your understanding.
Longtime local members speak for 10 to 15 minutes on a special topic. Hear the explorations and discoveries of others on the inner journey.
Dive deep into a subject on your own! Work at your own pace with a series of talks by Guy on topics critical to your inner development.
Catch Guy Finley’s weekly message that focuses on spiritual and personal breakthroughs. This is updated weekly and is available in video, audio and text.
Join a lively online discussion with other members each week of “This Week’s Topic” – a new Guy Finley talk selected for in-depth study.
You are not alone on the inner journey. Listen to lively, weekly online discussions between members.
Every Saturday Guy leads an open discussion. Local members share their discoveries, and Guy’s comments deepen everyone’s understanding.
Guy regularly holds open Q&A sessions. Often members of our global community send in questions, or speak directly to Guy online.
Access to all our private Facebook updates, student Facebook discussions, and our LIVE Saturday lunch roundtable discussions.
This member forum is where you can write in your observations and experiences, and receive feedback from fellow members. Read-only access for Free and Basic members. Full access for Premium & All Access members.
You need a membership to access this content.
You need a membership to access this content.
You need a membership to access this content.
You need an membership to access this content.
Pick a Plan and Sign up Today!
Access 500+ hours of Basic Content for as low as $4.97/month!
Sign up today!You can find softcover and hardcover books in our store. Many of Guy’s works are also available as eBooks.
Shop BooksListen to Guy’s talks on CD or MP3. Some of his books are also available as audiobooks.
Shop AudioWatch Guy on DVD or MP4 as he presents talks on a wide array of topics related to your spiritual discovery.
Shop VideoOur eCourses focus on specific topics, building your understanding through a series of related talks. Most eCourses include MP3 audio and MP4 video formats you can play online.
Shop eCoursesED: Hi. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein, and I'm here with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today we're going to talk about finding freedom from painful attachments.
Guy, I think all of us know what it is to have a painful attachment. Throughout our lives, we develop attachments to people and to objects. Maybe we even have dreams that we're attached to, and then we find that they don't fulfill us. Maybe they even break our hearts, and yet we just can't let them go. We keep carrying them with us. What is it that we're hanging onto? Why can't we let go of them?
GF: It's a deep question that requires a certain amount of detachment to even begin looking into it, because the real root of attachment is a very invisible adversary to the possibility of a person being present to themselves -- to living, and being in the moment.
The real nature of attachment is a nature, a self within us that is always wanting continuity. It wants the sense of itself to always be intact. The way that nature keeps everything intact is by clinging, not to the objects or the people (because those things are incidental), but to the images of these things. When a person thinks about who he once had dinner with twenty-two years ago where he dropped the ball or he could have been president of a basketball company... the revisitation is the action of a nature that only knows itself through these images, through these thoughts. What it seeks is the sense of security that is inherent in being able to move mechanically in the mind from thought to thought to thought, from event to event, from person to person, from excitement to disappointment -- all visiting a very deeply stored set of ideas about ourselves that when we are able to look at them (whether we hate what we see or love what we see), gives us this sense of: "I exist," "I'm real," and "Not only am I real, but I'm going forward. This is who I was. This is what I will be." That nature is the attachment nature.
ED: So it feels a benefit even in pain. It puts itself first, even above the well-being of the individual.
GF: Yes. The mind -- that brain and the way that it works -- is literally unconscious of all the relationships that it has (just as an organ in the body), with what it does to the whole of the system when, for instance, it will cling to an identity, a particular thought: "I'm someone who," or "I do this," or "I don't do that," or "I'm never going to take part in this," or "I want to one day have this." It makes no difference what it attaches itself to. It seems to that nature that what it is thinking about has to do with a world outside of itself in which it is able to move about and interact, but the fact is, it's all in the mind. It's all inside of us.
The attachment, again, is the sense of myself connected to what I'm able to withdraw from, borrow from, those images as I relive them. The continuity of the self is that sense of security that comes from always knowing that I always have myself to draw on, even if it's in depression, even if it's in despair. I can always go to me, and that sense of myself will be there.
ED: And as long as I am depending on something outside of myself -- which isn't even outside of myself because it's the image, as you said, that we have of the thing -- as long as I'm depending on something like that to make me feel right about myself, then I'm constantly in danger, because the world can always be disrupting what I see as my desired connection with that thing.
GF: We as creatures, no different than the deer and the antelope, have an inherent need for security. It's deep. It runs much deeper than people know. It really pretty much governs everything that we do, and it governs most of what we think about because that search for security is the product of thought.
Let's say you're sitting in your office, and somebody comes up to you and says, "Hey, there's a meeting that wasn't planned for." All of us have had moments like this. Maybe it's not at the office. Maybe you're just at home and something happens that is not something you planned for. You are going to go into a situation in which you're not certain at all about the outcome (which by the way, defines life). The minute that happens, if we could see ourselves, what we would see is that there is an instantaneous default process that takes place. My mind will rush back into itself and look for a life boat.
ED: Right... trying to find protection.
GF: It will find something by which it can define itself, meaning that even though I'm going into this unknown moment, I'm not really going in by myself. I'm taking this thing with me that either blames you for causing this or that is protecting me from it by walking in and having an assumed attitude -- or whatever it is -- so that I'm never without that nature that is always trying to shield itself from this unknown moment.
But see, real life is nothing but an unknown moment. That's what is so extraordinary. Even the simplest examination -- if we could do it (that's why I said it takes a little bit of detachment to see it): you tell me something in life that's known before it happens. It's never known before it happens. What's that passage? "I go before thee to make the crooked places straight." We have a nature that goes before us and makes the crooks in the thing!
ED: It's our very desire to protect ourselves (whatever that self is) that puts us in a position of feeling unsafe.
GF: I want to touch something as deeply as possible. You know the story of the "Ugly Duckling"? Here's a creature who falls into a world with creatures not of its own kind -- a swan falls in with ducklings. It only knows the ducks' behavior. It only has the ducks to mold itself into. That's all it knows. Here are these creatures whose nature, relative to the story, doesn't have the elegance of the swan. Ducks don't carry themselves the same way that swans do.
We don't know that we're living in a world of ducks. You look at your mother, your father, your husband, your wife, the political leaders, the religious figures... you look at all these people, and you think somewhere amongst them there is a swan. They're ducks. Why are they ducks? Because all they can do is think.
The only sense of self that human beings have at this level of existence that we're on -- where we're unawakened to ourselves -- is a nature that knows itself through an instantaneous reflection of itself and its own mind, only it doesn't know that it's looking at itself. This is Narcissus and all of those marvelous stories where a person discovers what he didn't know, that all the time he was deriving the very sense of himself from a process that is internalized, that by its very nature is unconscious to its own action. What it gives the individual that it's active in -- all in the dark of oneself, all asleep like Plato's allegory, all shadows -- is duck life.
Real life belongs to a completely different order of energy that belongs to a nature that we have inside of us the capacity for, the potential to live in, that doesn't look out and see what it's thinking about. It doesn't see what it's thinking about at all because it's not thinking. It's present. The energy that is present is completely different than the energy that participates in moments that are defined by its own thought action. This is the difference between ducks and swans, metaphorically speaking, between being a sleeping human being and someone awakening or coming into a life in spirit, a real life -- which is what we talk about.
That nature that's present to itself doesn't carry anything over with itself. It's not interested in reflecting upon what was and what could have been so that therefore it can diagnose what will be and how to make it better for itself. It doesn't think like that because it's not thinking. Its sense of security, its sense of value, of goodness, is all given to it by something greater than itself. The self that thinks about itself actually thinks it's greater than what it thinks about, if you can see it.
Every time you look at yourself and you don't like yourself, aren't you greater than the self you don't like? Every time we judge ourselves or judge others -- all of that is an indication of a divided mind that is merely giving itself the momentary security blanket of hanging onto a bitterness or a sense of betrayal, or a sense of belated whatever -- all for the purpose of staying asleep. That's what that nature wants, and that is the root of attachments. We live in a world within ourselves that is given to us by an order of ourselves that we need no longer live in.
ED: So these unconscious attachments keep re-creating the same painful life. It's a form of reincarnation.
GF: Exactly. They seed themselves, and seed themselves, and seed themselves... and each time that they seed themselves, in other words, each time I feel like I've been a victim of something, each time I find an anger or hatred that's justified towards something or someone, every time that fire rages in me, every time that sense of myself is re-planted, not only does it grow stronger, but my sense of self becomes more validated by it. I actually become further dependent upon that attachment for the definition of myself, which is why we become touchier. God forbid anybody should question our belief, whatever it may be! You want to find a spiritually asleep person? Find someone who, when you question their belief, goes ballistic on you. They'll tell you "love" and this, that, and the other while they have nothing but an image. "Thou shall have no graven images." They are a nameless god. These things have been given to us, all through history. Little by little, this incipient, insidious nature slips in and finds things that it can form pictures of, finds conditioned sensations from, and then always refers to that for who we are... which is why there is war in the name of love, and other monstrosities.
ED: One of the things I love about the way you talk about these things is that you always seem to put everything on its head. When people think of painful attachments, they think: "Poor me. I wasn't fulfilled, and this is why I'm feeling pain," when in fact, it's the attachment itself that is causing the pain.
GF: Exactly.
ED: So, is it just becoming aware of this that can break that cycle?
GF: Yes. That's why I said that a certain level of detachment is necessary. Life gives us ample opportunities for that. Who of us hasn't had a moment where someone or something that was pivotal to our purpose, to our persona suddenly the whole house of cards starts shaking, and because we can't help ourselves (literally, because it's compulsive), for fear of losing ourselves, we will try to re-create or build that thing back up so that it just sits still! "Stop it! Don't move, life!" Think about that: I want life not to move. Once I get it to where I want it, I don't want it to move, and if it moves, it has to move according to my ideas of improvement.
When we have that life relationship, then everything that takes place in it is seen as being either an advocate of that which I'm attached to it, or (and this is critical) that which threatens me, threatens my sense of self.
I put the question to you, what value does anything have -- no matter how great the image is in my mind -- if as it is placed there and I derive my sense of self from it, instead of becoming the ruler of that image, I become ruled by it? You tell me what value there is in such things.
Here are some examples: I'm attached to a certain position in life or that people treat me a certain way, or I'm attached to possessions that I either have or hope to acquire, because when I do, I won't be the footstool of whatever it is that I imagine myself to be (which by the way, is also an attachment). Now, as I vest myself in these images, I give myself to them, because as I imagine myself having them or actually on the way to them, I feel free. "I'm on my way!" or "I've got it!" Then the very thing by which I have found the sense of my freedom turns out to be a very cruel master and dictator to me, because anything that threatens the condition threatens my idea and my images that are associated with that, and by proxy I'm punished, I'm in pain.
So when I see that I'm not finding freedom but I'm further enslaving myself, by this process of allowing this nature in its sleep state (which is all the time: "quack, quack, quack, quack"; think, think, think, think) doing what? Seeing the system stays in place. When you understand that, then you're willing to begin this process of natural detachment, because no man or woman is going to consciously take part in what compromises them.
ED: Right. We're cooperating with the very thing that is causing the death of ourselves.
GF: Yes, and that's a beginning of dissolution, but not like "annihilation of ego" in certain schools... it has nothing to do with that. It has to do with a natural transformation that was always intended to take place with this darkness of ourselves in which desire forms an object and then pursues it. It's all in the sleep of ourselves. It's intended to bring the light of awareness into that whole process so that the whole thing can become used so that a person then increasingly has the energy to be present to himself, to be in the moment. It becomes a beautiful spiral upwards towards more freedom, to a more enlightened life, as opposed to this continual constriction, denigration, and downward slope that occurs when I'm identified and attached to everything that I am and don't want anything to change. We don't want one thing to change. Somebody says, "You can't have two sugars; you can only have one," and we come undone! "What will happen to me?" (I'm talking personally now!)
ED: This brings up the role of our relationship with the world and what happens to us. As long as we've got this need to protect ourselves, things happen as they will, and we see the whole world as our enemy because it destroys our dream. From what you're saying, that's the wake-up call. That's the shock that gives us the opportunity to see that our dream never had anything behind it and that we can leave that behind and find a real life outside of that.
GF: Yes. It seems like our dreams are stuffed with the hopes of a brighter and broader life, but the truth is, our dreams are stuffed with the stuff of ourselves. It's not until we see that the stuff of ourselves is merely a re-configuration of what didn't make us happy the first time we dreamed it, that then we can begin to let it go. Not because we're brave and forthright spiritual people, but because we recognize that what I have been doing with my life -- every time I return to thought about what someone did, every time I sit and worry about how I'm going to handle tomorrow (and I'm not talking about practical things... no fear belongs in practical thought) -- every time I do that, I need to understand and recognize in such moments that I need to drop it right there. That's what we use as an exercise. Any time you catch yourself feeling any stress at all, the stress is born out of a sense of fear connected with the idea of the loss of something critical to yourself. Who you really are cannot lose anything real. When you know that, you find your real self in proportion to that discovery.
ED: Yes. And the only way we can know that is to enter the unknown.
GF: Risk it.
ED: Go out without the protection we think we need to face the moment, completely open, and let it reveal itself to us and reveal ourselves to ourselves.
GF: Yes. Let us be willing to see ourselves as we are, and let the very moment of that kind of clarity produce in us (and it will) a certain kind of understanding that we don't have when we're leading ourselves through these moments. There is something in us that is intended to lead us, or rather to lift us, to change us into men and women who no longer harm ourselves or the world we're in.
ED: Yes, and this reminds me of what you always say, that "all things good come for those to whom the good is all things."
GF: Yes.
ED: Thank you, Guy.
This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.
Getting to the Root of Painful Attachments
Posted by Guy Finley in 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532 on , and updated on .
Comments (0)
Get Guy Finley’s Bestselling eBook for FREE!
Freedom from the Ties that Bind
Simply by Joining Our Newsletter List!