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Enlightening articles by Guy Finley on a wide range of topics address practical life issues and deepen your spiritual understanding.
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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.
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Shop eCoursesED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein and this is a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I thought that today we would explore the topic of regret. Most people have things in their life that they regret. Memories come up of embarrassing experiences or lost opportunities, or maybe mistakes that they made or things that they're sorry over... and these things that may have happened years and years ago still torment people, and actually poison their lives today. Why is it that we can't let these things go?
GF: The real reason is because we are bankrupt as human beings, only we don't know that we're bankrupt. A bankrupt human being is someone who the only way that he or she has to know themselves is through thinking about themselves. And when the only way a person has to know themselves is to think about themselves, then the nature that is satisfied with deriving sensation from such kinds of thoughts -- be they the most sorrowful, regretful, ugly thoughts one can possibly imagine -- doesn't care one iota. Not a split second does it think to itself: "Look at the suffering that I'm causing this poor being that is taking my part." So that man or woman who can't shake off their regrets, first and foremost has been subject to a kind of ignorance, Ellen. That's why the work that we do at the Life of Learning Foundation, what we're trying to disseminate into the world, is so critical, because how can I help myself if I don't know any better? Most men and women do not know any better.
ED: I have memories like this that are little time bombs. There will be an association with something and these memories will come up periodically... I know that they're always lurking, just waiting to come out and get me.
GF: Self-knowledge is crucial. Let's say something painful happens. The root of my regret is that there is something that took place at some point in my life where I did something terrible or someone did something terrible to me. I know that I hurt someone or that someone hurt me. There's no question in my mind. I know that I didn't grab the golden ring at the moment when I could have grabbed it, and now look at me.
ED: I could have been a contender.
GF: The first week, or the first six months, the "pain," the strength of that impression by which I felt myself to have failed in some measure, is pretty deep and strong. It doesn't take a lot. I look and I see the person that I had the dealing with, or I see someone who looks like the person I had the dealing with. I see some cereal like Wheaties on television and it reminds me that "I could have been champ."
The point is that the first set of associations is very easy to strike me because I'm still very sensitive. But unbeknownst to me is that the more that these associations set off the reminder of the sensation that is a derivative of the image, that nightmare picture that is stored in my mind, that association takes place, and the split second the association takes place, the whole animation is brought to life. Suddenly I am completely a captive of believing that there is no choice but for me to think about what my mind has put on the screen, what I've remembered that has been brought by whatever it is that takes place. When a man or a woman does that enough, they don't need associations anymore.
ED: These things take on a life of their own.
GF: Not only that, but in a certain sense, the body itself becomes addicted to the need for a chemical release caused by either resisting the sensation or finding some kind of thrill in it (and both are actually fairly synonymous), so that at a certain point, a person doesn't need any association at all. They can just sit at home and call up all the regret, fear, loathing, all the negative states. They can simply sit and bathe in those things and they don't need one thing outside of them anymore by which to associate. All of us understand this.
I want to say this because I can feel certain things when I say things like that... if you're reading this, don't you think for a moment that there is such a thing as being too far gone. A person thinks, "God, he just described me. I've hated that man for so many years, I don't have to think about him. I just feel the hate whenever I see anyone with a mustache." I'm saying that what happens to us has happened to us because we didn't understand ourselves, so that the real seed of our sorrow had to do with unawareness of the workings of our own hearts and minds. Therefore, new awareness is what remedies that. It is what heals us. Not just the knowledge itself, but what begins to happen to me when at last I recognize, "God. I'm sitting at home, and I just watched the news and I saw that business about Liberia, or I saw that deal about Lady Liberty, or I saw something about a Liberty dollar... it doesn't take much... and wow, suddenly I start to feel all these feelings again."
Most of us don't have any idea where these feelings come from, Ellen... none. We're sure that it has something to do with an uncaring world, with a condition way outside of our control. There is no such thing as a condition that is outside of our control -- not that we can control the conditions that stimulate that remembrance, but that we can be conscious in the moment of that association and recognize it as being a bum at the door, something that has no right to enter into us, and that can't stay in us if we don't agree to remember it -- which is one other important point.
You and I have the power to choose what we remember. Nothing can stay in our mind that we don't want to stay in our mind. Nothing. In one sense, these things that we can begin to recognize are so simple, but because of our bankrupt soul, our bankrupt spiritual life, it sounds like it is too far fetched. Most men and women don't know anything about attention, what they do with their attention. Attention animates. I give my attention to an image of something that hurt me, and the very attention I give to it re-animates it. The re-animation pours the aching that is associated with that image through me, and I don't know that I unconsciously gave my attention to it and that I can consciously withdraw my attention from it. This is what we're interested in.
ED: So if the memory comes up, it is actually possible to remember the event without reliving the emotion of it.
GF: Why would one want to remember a painful event?
ED: One wouldn't, but sometimes -- maybe as you said -- we have an association come up and the thing is there, but then we give life to it.
GF: That's the point. The remembrance that way is mechanical, Ellen. And what is mechanical is not intended to rule our life. We are created to be conscious creatures. So yes, all kinds of mechanical associations take place, but in the instant of that mechanical remembrance, we can use the jolt, the awareness of the pain that comes from being caught in those sensations to bring ourselves back and realize, "You know what? Something just got into my house that doesn't belong in there." And that's the end of it... instead of going along with remembering those painful images because that is so familiar as we do it that the sensations give us our familiar sense of ourselves.
ED: That's just it. We actually get a strange kind of pleasure out of the pain of reliving it, and until we see that there is something inside of us that is against us...
GF: But we can't see that, Ellen, until we recognize that we are voluntarily agreeing to this process that is producing the ache in us. This is what almost no one understands that you cannot sit at home (or wherever you are) and suffer over something that happened to you in the past that you are not suffering because you have agreed to suffer with it. That is unconscious suffering that provides a very definite sense of ourselves that we don't know we're a conspirator in. We need to become conscious of the fact that it's our own mind.
Do you have things in your house that you don't want in there? That's ludicrous. You wouldn't keep a bear in your house. The point is simple. This is my house, and what created me has given me the authority to keep out of that house what doesn't belong in it. Does that mean that the errant bumble bee, that biting, stinging thought or feeling, that terrible image, doesn't come in? No, but the second that it comes in, it is recognized as being something that is not intended to be in there, and that's the end of it. Which means, that's the end of regret, because regret is always a form of resistance to something that one has remembered against their own will.
Frankly, the problem is, we care about the wrong things. That's about as simple as it can be said. We care more about what people think about us than how much pain it causes inside of us to want approval. And what is it one regrets if it isn't some relationship, some involvement, something that happened to them, that they were at least the co-creator of, that they at least had some involvement in? Nothing just happens to a person.
It isn't until a person begins to recognize: "My whole life has been spent trying to escape the past that isn't perfect with some hope and aspiration to arrive somewhere where I won't feel like I do, and wherever I go, there I am. I don't escape my regrets no matter what I'm able to realize. I bring them with me, and they spoil everything." And the reason they spoil everything is because they belong to a negative imagination, a negative nature, a part of us that has no right to dwell in us and rule us the way that it does.
ED: This reminds me of a talk you gave a couple of weeks ago about regret and how somehow we think that by living over this awful experience in our minds, we'll be able to correct it, but it's futile because the thing happened back then; we can't correct it now. The only thing that can make any kind of correction is to change the nature that we're living with now that caused the event to happen.
GF: That's exactly right.
ED: And when we put all our attention on this past event, we're not doing the work to change the nature now, and so as you said, we keep reliving the same thing.
GF: That's exactly right, and I'll even strengthen it. "Let us never forget"... you've heard that a thousand times... let us never forget Hitler, Mussolini, 9/11... let us never forget these terrible events in life. There are stadiums and temples built so that we don't forget ever again, and I'm telling you it's pure psychopathery. It's pure self-worship. All of those things are pure self-love. How can a person ever forget something like that? It isn't that we can forget it; it's that we don't want to forget it, meaning that inside of us, every time I can call up that horrible thing that he did to my family, that those people did, that this situation produced, every time I can relive that, I can relive all of the fury, the anger, and the grief that I have, and I exist one more time unto myself as something separate from the rest of the world, and no one understands my pain. Trash. Why? Because if I see something and I recognize it -- my God, what kind of world could produce a condition under which a person believes there is a benefit in hating another human being, that something as terrible as what happened on 9/11 for instance could repeat itself again? then I don't need to remember that. If I have to try to remember that, then it hasn't changed me, and the point of events in our lives is to change us in the instant that they happen, and if we're not changed in the instant that event transpires, then we don't change. A memory is formed of it by which we relive the event and keep the conditions alive under which that event will take place again.
ED: The change we want -- for a better life -- is constantly occurring, but by thinking that I'm going to change it by reliving this past event, I'm interfering with the process that could actually bring about the better world that I say I want.
GF: Sorrow sows the seed of sorrow. Fear sows the seed of fear. Hatred sows the seed of hatred. Christ himself said, "As ye reap, ye sow." When something happens and I remember it, I recall it, and I go through the bitterness connected with it. I actually believe that my bitterness is somehow going to better the condition when all it does is provide a condition in myself that keeps alive the very bitterness that I blame on the event. Most of the things that are terrible that happen to us, Ellen, wouldn't happen to us if we were awake and changing moment to moment to begin with, because we wouldn't be caught in the kind of identifications that we are at present.
ED: It reminds me of something Vernon Howard used to say: If you apologize and say you're sorry for something, you'll do it again.
GF: Not that we don't apologize if we're genuinely sorry.
ED: Right. We're talking about internally.
GF: That's right, Ellen. That's all we do. A man hurts a woman, a woman hurts her children: "I'm sorry. I'll never do it again." And nothing changes except for the way in which we hurt each other again. Why? Because we don't learn. We think we pay our dues with regret. Regret is not a way in which one pays their dues. The way in which one pays their dues is to consciously suffer the nature that errs in the moment, to become conscious of the thing that is at conflict with life around it. Then I don't have to worry about how I'm going to fix this a moment later because I'm beginning to let go of the part of me that causes others to suffer.
I tell you, it just isn't clear enough, and it probably will never be in this world. The greatest thing that could happen to any human being, Ellen, is to catch themselves right in the middle of making someone else suffer because of the nature that they're living in, in that moment. Then they don't have to say "I'm sorry" (though they might). They have seen something at the quick of themselves by which they can no longer be that man or woman anymore. And if I make the change now, I don't have to worry about making a change later. If I change now, I don't have to be concerned about what once happened, because the self that produced it begins to disappear.
ED: If I have a regret over it, then I'm saying that there is this part of me that knows better than the other part of me. There's a smart part of me that knows more than the stupid part that made that mistake, and it's not really facing the fact that it's one nature that has the flaw in it.
GF: Not a flaw... an incomplete understanding. It's a very tough sell, because by and large, most of us only know how to regret a lot of what we did with our relationships. You tell somebody that there is no value in the regret and they feel as though you are actually stealing something from them, when regret is always a self-wrecking emotion. The issue isn't that there isn't value in regret. The issue is that what one regrets now is merely an image that has been formed in their mind that is not connected to anything real other than the sense of real pain it produces when one visits it. So it's actually wasted. It doesn't produce change. It cements in that man or woman the sense of identity they have as being the person who did that, when the whole act of really regretting something would be the wish to transcend the self that produced the pain to begin with. So it is against us to live like that, which is why there is no substitute for self-knowledge, the beginning of understanding these ideas. Know thyself.
ED: So, I can undergo a change now. In a way, I change my past. I change the way I remember it, the relationship I have with it.
GF: That's exactly right. I change the relationship. Now my relationship with my own past is a set of mechanical reactions that produce misery that I then blame on the images that then cause me to feel that way. That's what happens to me. A mechanical set of associations produce pain. When I become conscious of that, and I don't allow that kind of activity to take place in my house, I have a new relationship, not only with those mechanical associations, but with the actual outcome of that new relationship, because now I can see this is taking place. My sense of being is no longer purely derived from the pain that used to come with that. I'm conscious now of the fact that there is something in me that actually likes re-visiting my past. I never was conscious of the fact that there was something that re-visited for the sense of making me a victim. I never knew the relationship. I was asleep to myself spiritually, psychologically.
So the instant that I become conscious of that relationship, in that moment that consciousness produces a way in which there is still that feeling (because one doesn't just get rid of that instantaneously), but now instead of unconsciously suffering it which drives that cycle of conflict I begin to consciously awaken to it. I become aware of it, and I see it as being the intruder that it is instead of a guide. I recognize it as being something false instead of something necessary. My interior understanding changes my relationship with the dynamic. Changing the relationship with the dynamic changes what drives me through the moment, and I begin to act differently towards myself and the images that normally drive me.
ED: In case somebody might think, "Well, don't we have responsibility for things?", this actually makes you more responsible... in the right way.
GF: It's the only responsibility. Look. What is real responsibility? How can I say I want to act responsibly when by reliving what I relive, I drag myself into some pit, cover myself with mud, then walk out and visit with my family? That's not responsible. Responsibility is responsibility across the board. The real responsibility is to the Light, to understanding, to the Truth, to Love. And if one really wants those things, then we have to understand all of these forces active in us that are driving us into being the most irresponsible human beings in the world. When I stop acting irresponsibly, then I begin to become responsible -- as everyone can do right now. Come awake to yourself. Be present to yourself. In that kind of awakedness, in that kind of awareness, I have a new relationship with all of the life both "outside" and inside, and that relationship delivers me from all that I once regretted, and gives me a way in which to live where I don't have to have regrets anymore, because I just don't make the mistakes.
ED: So the ultimate responsibility is self-responsibility, to be awake in the moment, and that's where the healing is, isn't it?
GF: Yes, exactly. Because that's where it's whole. Another part of regret is that I'm always divided up between myself, the thing I did wrong, and the one I did wrong to. Real healing is a unification, and self-responsibility is a form of awareness in the moment. Healing takes place not by me trying to do anything, but because of my willingness to see the truth. Know the truth and it sets you free.
ED: It's not me trying to heal myself, which I can't do, but allowing the Light to heal me.
GF: Allowing a natural understanding to produce a natural healing.
ED: Thank you, Guy.
GF: You're welcome.
ED: This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.
Release Yourself from the Unhappiness of Painful Regrets
Posted by Guy Finley in 459 Galice Road, Merlin, OR 97532 on , and updated on .
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