ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley.

Guy, in your new book, Let Go and Live in the Now, you relate a special idea that really deserves deeper attention. You tell a short story whose moral is expressed by this short poem: "The feel is real, but the why is a lie." So many of us would say we feel the pain of suffering, but we don't really understand why we suffer as we do, do we?

GF: No. Our problem is, by and large (and it has been for as long as humans have walked on his planet), that we have dozens of reasons why we ache the way we do, but we fail to see that for all of the answers that we've given ourselves, our fundamental problem still exists -- meaning that we still hurt -- and the conundrum of this pain is compounded with each passing generation, as each subsequent generation believes that it will finally "get it right."

What we fail to see is that not only are future generations (including our own present one) not getting it right, but for all of our actions to try to bring an end to our suffering as individuals and societies, the actions themselves are depleting the planet of resources, bringing us to war with other human beings -- not only in a familial sense but in a global sense -- and turning everything faster and faster in the wrong direction.

ED: So you're saying that we find an explanation for our suffering and then do something in order to ameliorate it, but we're not really going after the real cause.

GF: When your stomach aches, what is the purpose of it?

ED: To warn me that I've been doing something bad.

GF: It's a sign, a symptom of the body that is revealing that something has been done to it that is against its balance. When we have a stomach ache, we say, "OK. I should have only eaten four cookies, not the dozen that I ate!"

Why don't we see our psychological pain and suffering as fundamentally as that? The reason is that we human beings are more than the sum of our experience, but we think and believe that all we are is our experience. Let's look at this idea.

Life has produced a series of experiences -- the kind of person we are, the kind of family we were raised in, the environment that family took part in, the social conditions -- all of which have formed an essential experience that we take as being who we are. But we are more than that. We are more than the sum of our experience. Within each of us there is a nature that is being acted on by forces greater than itself. These forces act upon these essential elements of ourselves, of our life, and they turn and produce conditions that we then call our experience. But what happens is that we are ignorant of the fact that we have in us something more than the sum of our experiences because we measure ourselves by these experiences. So that then, when natural changes take place in life, we meet those movements from the mistaken idea that who we are is limited to who we already know ourselves to be through all that we've experienced. And, as such, anything in our new experience that challenges this past sense of self is seen as a threat.

ED: We try to understand our present experience of life in terms of what we already know.

GF: Yes -- not just try to understand it -- we try to control it. More accurately stated, there are parts of us that want power over what is perceived as an attacker, not recognizing that what's happening isn't the real cause of what's punishing us. Our stress is the negative effect of a false self that clings to "what was" in order to hold on to what it imagines itself as being.

We are more than the sum of our experience, but every time someone walks up to us and they don't show us the respect we want, or something that we've worked towards falls away, in that split second, we think, "Oh no!" And the pain starts! Why? Because we measure such moments -- and ourselves, accordingly -- through the images that live in us created by all our past experiences.

ED: So I resist an experience that could actually pull me into a larger world, and I stay trapped in a small world of suffering.

GF: Yes. The inner attitude is: "Just leave me alone!" Followed, of course, by finding someone or something to blame for the way we feel. But, Ellen, even in the most devastating moments there isn't one of these events, taken rightly, that isn't a secret invitation asking us to let go of and transcend the self we've been. But in order to do that, we have to release ourselves from this body of experience by which we presently know ourselves.

ED: So, we can meet these events in a different way. What is this different way in which we can meet events?

GF: This goes back to what was said at the beginning. When it comes to our unhappiness, our negative states, our suffering, the feel is real but the why is a lie.

Here's a child lying in bed at night, and something takes place in his bedroom that scares him. A shadow runs across the wall. The instant the shadow runs across his wall, the mind -- loaded with his experience of seeing horrible images on TV or at the movies -- instantly imagines the monster hiding in the corner behind the chair. In his mind he sees that monster! It's there, hiding in the corner. So, his heart starts to race because his adrenals have kicked in; he is sure he must protect himself from what his mind "sees" as being there. All these feelings he has are quite real, and they are perfectly logical to the self that is stimulated by such fearful negative images stored in the mind.

ED: The mind that has defined why.

GF: Yes, the mind defines why the feel is real, but we can look at the child and see that his why is a lie. We know that the reason that child is in pain and suffering is because of having become unconsciously identified with some negative image… so the feel is real, but the why is a lie.

ED: One can more or less understand how this happens with a child's mind, but what about us? Why would our "self" rather suffer and hang onto its feeling of being real than to let it go?

GF: It doesn't even occur to us that there is actually a beautiful purpose behind whatever it is that happens to us, always inviting us to discover within ourselves a higher self, a truer self. But we must choose our path as each moment unfolds, because to live by the default state of letting darkness define us when things don't go as we wish, is to slowly lose the chance of ever transforming our lives. And we know what happens to people who cling to their suffering, who become professional martyrs, because we have seen their destitute fate.

ED: Then everything that happens to us can be for our benefit... if we use it properly?

GF: Absolutely. But, it begins with becoming individuals who are willing to ask themselves the tough questions, and then be honest with their answers. For instance: Tell me what it prospers any human being to sit and think about their pain and who is to blame for it? The only thing that comes out of this kind of thinking is the confirmation of a conflicted nature that always comes up with a new plan to rescue itself with; and we never rescue ourselves from that suffering because the suffering we're trying to escape is coming from our experience.

Such futile actions are not a part of what we're intended to do in such moments. Such flailing around prohibits us from realizing the real lesson -- which is to see that "I am unable to go past myself here." What could be more beautiful, more stress-releasing than admitting the truth? But the catch here, and why we don't let go as we should, is that because we can't go past ourselves by ourselves. If the sum of my experience, to date, is actually what is producing this unwanted experience I am having, then what's the point of clinging to the notion that I can rescue myself with what I know? The whole of that moment is telling me one thing: it's time to let go!

ED: I found in my own work that when I'm in a negative state, my thoughts will just obsess over whatever it is that is disturbing me, but when I remember to watch what is going on and "sit with the feeling" as you tell us to do, and don't concentrate on what I blame for the way I feel, it dissipates.

GF: We have to learn to let go, to go consciously silent in the face of our suffering. To go silent in the face of our suffering means that we no longer allow our own suffering to tell us what we must do with it. There is nothing that lives that does not want to go on living, and that includes these negative thoughts and feelings that are slowly killing us. Everything wants to keep going. It's the exact same thing with our suffering. We think that because we hate our suffering that we don't want it, that such pain is the proof that this nature is somehow different than the suffering it resists. But we come to find out -- once we've done a little bit of honest self-observation -- that the self that is sitting and resisting the suffering is actually producing the suffering that it's resisting.

The key point is that when I start to recognize the truth of these findings, then I understand that if I give this suffering a voice -- meaning if I talk to myself about it, if I talk to others about it, if I hate life because of what it tells me I have to do and be in order to be free, etc, -- then all that's happening is I actually become the tool of this nature.

ED: So the suffering is almost a force of its own.

GF: It is a force of its own. We can see that. The child in the bedroom -- heart pounding, sweating, afraid -- is experiencing a force. These things have great force. But the beauty of what we're talking about is that these great forces are as of no force in the light of understanding their actuality, their reality. We can begin to work with these natural conditions inside of ourselves. Then, our relationship with our suffering (or whatever the condition may be) is not to suffer it as it would have us serve it, but rather to use it to serve the greater principle that is at work inside of us that produced it to begin with. That's a complete turnaround.

ED: This idea that the suffering is not us will be new for some people. The suffering is something that comes into us and we identify with it.

GF: It becomes us because we literally incorporate it by giving it a body -- our body of thought, emotion, etc.

ED: But we can be in a completely different relationship with it.

GF: Oh yes. But only to the degree that we realize that these unwanted moments of ours are not there to take something away from us, but are there to bring us the opportunity of allowing something completely new to work its way within us, to change us in a way we cannot do for ourselves. Then we become willing to let this Greater Life work upon us through the light of our awareness of it, through what we now understand about its ways.

A lot of this inner work must be done with a kind of inner silence towards what then unfolds within us -- which is a real relationship with Life itself. We watch. We learn. We grow. We are changed not by trying to change what has happened, but by not letting our reactions to it define us. We allow the whole thing -- whatever the nature of the event -- to come as it naturally comes, go through what it goes through naturally, and then we are on the other side, seeing it depart.

As the event goes, which it will naturally, goes with it the self that was resisting, and a new "me" is there that isn't afraid anymore the way it used to be, that doesn't suffer the same way over the same things. Gradually we find ourselves having become part of a much greater, more beautiful process of Life; we enter a real spiritual paradox which is to be a part of Perfection perfecting itself.

ED: So just this little poem, if we can remember it: "The feel is real, but the why is a lie," shows us, in the moment we remember it, that we can be in a whole different relationship with the moment and with what is going through us.

GF: Yes. And it begins by becoming awake, aware, understanding, choosing new, and then watching Newness itself being born within you. It's a miracle.

ED: Thank you Guy. This has been a Fireside Chat with best-selling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.