ED: Hello. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. We're going to be discussing Guy's new book, Apprentice of the Heart. Guy, this book is remarkable, and it's a real departure from your previous books in which you presented principles that people could use to follow the inner journey. This book is very personal, almost like a journal of your own experience during a particular time of your own inner journey. Why did you write this book and what did you hope others would get from it?
GF: To be honest with you, I did not write this book. I know how that sounds, and I don't want to be mysterious, but this book wrote me. Its creation spanned roughly five years, from 1992 to 1997. This was such a powerful period in my life, where on certain days the tides of my own heart, my own inner life, were so overwhelming to me that I had no recourse but to establish a kind of dialog between myself and the moment in which this immense struggle was taking place.
It's the story of a love affair of a sort. If you ever really love something, you just can't get it out of your mind. The love that I write about in this book -- that all of us are intended to have -- is a love with the Divine, the Living Light, God. If it comes for you and initiates this relationship, you can't not notice it coming and taking what it takes. You can't not notice when it visits you again for a moment and refreshes and replenishes that part of you that was so empty and nothing without it.
This is what happened dramatically at this time in my life. The book represents a kind of dialog that took place between myself and this very unusual Visitor that I became more and more friendly with, conscious of, that began to educate me as I was always intended to be educated, but that I couldn't do for myself.
As I look back over the book now, I think the value in it is that each of us, in our heart of hearts, longs for a love that changes us. The Love that changes us that I write about in this book is not particular to me. It's a quality that the whole of this life is predicated on.
ED: This book is really about learning how to love, and it seems that should be the most natural thing for people, yet everywhere we see people suffering from lack of love. Why is that?
GF: There's a sort of secret that we all need to know, and that is that before we can actually learn what it means to love, we have to have something awakened in us. We have to have a new relationship with Love itself that allows us to have love with other human beings, or the other creatures of the world. So, yes Ellen, it teaches us how to love, but it begins by helping stir in us the need for a new love.
I'm afraid that as human beings, we have become quite convinced that we know what love is, and absolutely we don't know what love is. We know the object of our desire. We know the sensation that passes through us -- wanting to keep it there, accelerate or excite it further -- but we've lost a very precious part of our own character, soul, our own Life. We've lost the ability to love.
I remember certain kinds of feelings that I had the first time I was ever in love, the first time I really felt something move through me, that when it did, I wanted to be one with something. That's what this book is about. Love first invites us into her life, into itself. It invites us, then it unites us, and it transforms us as result of the unity that has taken place.
ED: You said that you did not write this book, but it's clear that something must have stirred you.
GF: I can say that I was invited to understand an immense process that was going on inside of myself to learn, to discover, to unite myself with not only the qualities that had been stirred up inside of me, but the One who was doing the stirring.
We never think about things like that. Everyone knows what it's like to be stirred, but what's doing the stirring? We think, "She stirred me." No. She, he, they, it, that project didn't stir me. They are merely a representation of something. The representation can't stir you. Something stirs you to want to be united with what you see has stirred you. That's where Love comes in. That's the real nature of Love.
How do you convince human beings who have convinced themselves that the feeling they have about themselves or someone else is the whole enchilada, when it's not? Everything is a promise, an aspect, a hint, a reflection. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. You begin to recognize that there is this constant stirring taking place in you, and that the purpose of the stirring isn't to set you against life or to make you believe that life is against you, or that somehow for that stirring, life has acknowledged you as being special. None of that is the truth. The whole thing is a process meant for the perfection of the human being that is being stirred by Love. We're all being stirred by It, but we don't recognize that.
Everybody knows what it's like to sit at home and have the winter of the heart come into them... dead... nothing going on. It doesn't seem like you're being stirred, because you say, "There's nothing there. I'm empty." No! You're being stirred, but you don't recognize it as a stirring because the minute that feeling comes, comes with it all the conditioned thoughts and feelings that would convince you the reason you feel as you do is because he, she, they did something or didn't do something. Now your heart and mind are set outside of yourself, trying to change the condition instead of being one with the process of transformation taking place in the stirring itself.
ED: So an "Apprentice of the Heart" is something each one of us is intended to be, to learn what it takes to be receptive to this stirring by a higher love?
GF: We're intended to go through this life day by day, wherein the lessons that only Love can teach are always producing moments of change in us that we can only understand by equating our moment in life to a much broader life.
We go around with little tiny lives, Ellen, because we love money, power, possessions, food, drugs, entertainment, authority. Those kinds of loves, while they have their "place" on this planet, produce nothing but a critical, isolated human being. So this "Apprentice of the Heart" that I'm writing about is not only what we are intended to be, but what each and every one of us go through where a timeless Love comes to us and begins to do in us what we haven't been able to do for ourselves.
ED: This does come across so strongly in the book that even though it's so personal to you, the reader can understand that you're talking about a higher form of love that we are all supposed to partake in. It's as though you are speaking for everyone who goes through this struggle.
GF: Is there anyone who hasn't had a heartache? Is there anyone who hasn't won something and lost it? Is there anyone who doesn't feel lonely at times? Who doesn't look out and wonder why someone else has a relationship they don't, or how they got into the relationship they did?
These are moments in which Love herself, Divine Love, is trying to educate us, to teach us: "Look. When you're a child, these are the things you do. As you mature, you do these things."
I can remember when I was a boy, I had a great iguana. His name was Junior, and I loved him. In my book, Seeker's Guide to Self-Freedom, I wrote about the natural progression from this kind of nascent love to higher levels of love. For example, maybe one loves their go-kart, then something in school, or a sport. Then, they love something they thought they were going to become. Next, maybe they love someone that was going to take the journey with them. Each and every one of these loves that have been in our lives -- and we are supposed to be filled with them -- is a kind of taste, a sip of something good.
You know why we like these moments? Because it's more important for us to get to the park to play football than the fact that we're sick. It's more important that we're with our girlfriend or boyfriend than the fact that we have to walk forty miles to see them. We learn sacrifice. We learn that there is something greater than ourselves through Love. It's the only way we learn that.
All of these are preparational moments. They are aspects designed to teach us to let go of the part of us that believes without "something outside of ourselves," we can't complete ourselves because this Love that educates us is already complete, already whole inside of us. It's asking us with all of the things we do, "Won't you consider Me? Will you consider for a moment that what you're going through, you're going through because you're really looking for Me? You just think you're looking for what you're looking for."
Over and over again, we realize that wasn't what I was looking for, and Love is saying, "Hello. I'm in here. I'm in this heart, and I'm trying to soften it. I'm trying to change it. I'm trying to show you things about yourself that only I can show you. You can't show yourself this, but if you'll be careful, if you'll watch, you'll begin to see how I'm sitting behind all this and wanting to do for you what you can't do for yourself, which is make you a whole and decent human being."
ED: It's very clear that you're talking in the book about a higher kind of love, a connection with the divine, and yet, it's also clear that higher love informs all of the other love relationships. So it's a series of levels, all fed from above, and then it touches us at each of these different levels with our relationships and the things we do. How can we get more of that higher inspiration into every moment of our lives?
GF: It's a strange thing, Ellen. The way that Divine Love works through us and for us, with us, is through our relationships with life. As we are now, we don't really see the unseen. We're not conscious of it. It's not part of our being when we look out and see a winter grapevine, for instance. Part of our consciousness is not to look and see the fullness of that grapevine in its barrenness. That's not the way our mind is yet. But as the mind awakens through the process of Love, of being united to that which moves and perfects everything around us, slowly but surely, one's eyes begin to change, meaning that the nature within us starts to see the action behind all things. It's not a selfish seeing anymore. It's not connected anymore with, "Darn it. Why aren't there grapes growing? I want to make my jelly." It's not like that. It's like being one with, a part of the whole of that movement.
So when we have these various relationships, whether it's walking outside and seeing the grapevine and the grapes aren't there, or we look at someone that we think is great and they betray us, or we love someone and we're on the rocks with them, or we're in an exalted moment with them... every relationship that we have in life, Ellen, waxes and wanes.
Just as the grapevine seasonally waxes and wanes, our heart waxes and wanes. But here's the beauty behind this idea. It's not so much that the heart itself waxes and wanes, which it does; these vacillations are natural and necessary for all living things. What we need to realize is that all such movements -- in and through our heart -- serve a higher purpose than first perceived: it is for us to discover that each of our hearts is a part of a broader reality within which the waxing and waning of a Greater Life is always taking place. That's Love. It holds all things equally. It sees the whole of everything in one movement.
ED: So love really opens our eyes and increases our understanding of how we are connected with everything, and everything is whole. It's an acceptance that comes from understanding that nothing is ever lost.
GF: Life is very challenging. To be a human being trying to wake up, to have love in their life, is tough. Why? Because we're always being asked to leave ourselves behind. We're always being shown that whatever it is that we're going through in the moment is part of a waxing or a waning. Sure as shootin', it's going to pass. We can either be someone who sits there and tries to hold on to whatever it was that we thought was validating us, or run from what we thought was making us a victim. But we can do something that we've never done before, which is begin to see the whole of the process taking place. Then we start to have the experience of the Love that is behind the forms that are temporary. I think the whole thing is for the experience of that Love that gives rise to the relationships that pass.
Nobody wants to die, to have their heart inflamed and then collapse in on themselves. But if we're willing to recognize the fullness of a season within something like that, then we can start to learn to look at life with different eyes, and start to want to understand what's behind what we see instead of us trying to cling to what we see in order to confirm ourselves.
ED: One of the most poignant aspects of the book is the fact that this Love comes and goes. You yearn for it, and it disappears, and then you have the moments when it comes, and there's that sweet fulfillment.
GF: This is how Love works and this is part of the process the book talks about: Love comes, She gives you something, you go through a process, things change, you see great things, you're united, and then Love -- much like the ocean -- washes in and washes out.
The purpose of the book and of Love itself is to educate us through our experience that we are not apart from the whole of that movement, but rather we ourselves are in that movement. When we at last discover that by going through this process that we must go through, then life takes on a completely different meaning for us, because no matter what happens, we remain in a relationship with something that right from the beginning we know is good and true for our soul, through and through.
ED: One of the things you come to realize as the book develops is that it's something in you that you're not giving that is pushing love away or not allowing it to come.
GF: The only problem there is between ourselves and Love is that we are in it. This is a difficult principle to grasp. The only thing that comes between you and what you love is that you want something to love to make you you.
Here's a man or a woman who loves music, art, or science. The great ones are educated by Love. They are taught to become masters of their art because Love has mastered them. Love takes them, transforms them. Love does what we can't do as individuals, which is to dissolve the border that exists between myself and what I love. So that when I truly love something, the way I'm completed by it, by and large, is when I'm completely removed from it as someone trying to take something from it. Then I am it. That's everything... to become what I love, not to own what I love, not to possess it so that I have some power, but to erase the distinction that exists between myself and what I love simply because there's a me trying to isolate everything so that I can be its possessor. You cannot possess Love. Love possesses you, or it's not Love at all.
ED: We can also begin to see that the thing that stands between me and the Divine Love is not only me but my longing for Love. It seems incredible that Love is all around us, we're meant to partake of it, and yet we stand in our own way.
GF: More than that. Love itself is part of a passage. It's hard to explain this, but the action of Love is a unifying force, and we're after that. The whole of our true being is longing to be re-united, to be part of something that is returning, that is becoming whole. Love itself is part of a passage for a human being. This Love that I'm talking about in the book is not the end. It is still part of a process by which a person is intended to begin not only to be initiated into the mysteries of their own heart, but for that initiation, the beginning of transcending the self that has the experience of that initiation.
Instead of moving down into further and further dispersed energies, it becomes rather a process of moving back up through these energies of life that God has created so that bit by bit a person becomes possessed by a force that is moving back to the original, to the whole, to the true, to the good, to that which is fully undivided. That's the true transcendental life.
ED: So to discover this love is just the first step, the opening of the door into realms unimagined.
GF: Yes, but isn't that what love is, even at the simplest level? To fall in love, to have a love for something? If you have that love, it shows you what you need to do, because it starts to unite you with an understanding that you didn't have prior to the love for that thing. As that understanding grows, one is united in a different order of knowledge, of life. That's the bliss, the pleasure, the goodness. Who wouldn't want more of that wine if they have it once? Then you find out you can't give yourself more, so you need another relationship, something still broader, and one is taken along. This is the true "Apprentice of the Heart." One is taken, step by step by step, by Love to Love.
It takes time, Ellen. No one should be in a hurry to understand this. Anyone who has a longing for love has been given that longing by Love itself for the purpose of that person being brought into Love so they can be changed. I know, as sure as I'm sitting here talking to you, that there's great hope as long as our heart remains alive and open.
ED: This book has many deep ideas in it, but at the same time -- as in all your books -- there's a practical side to it. You have a chapter in which you talk about how anybody can bring love into their everyday activities.
GF: I think you're referring to the last chapter. What I want to do is help individuals understand what is possible for them to do. For some of us, it's a terrible state of affairs, but it's true: The human heart can die while the human being still lives. It's a fact. Christ said, "Let the dead bury the dead." There are human beings who have decided to cling so ferociously to their unhappiness that they have crushed the possibility of being renewed by Love itself so that they can have a new springtime.
Do you remember when you were fifteen years old? Maybe you wanted to be an astronaut. The fact is, no matter what it is that you have a longing to do or become, you have that longing to do or become that because Love itself has seeded something into your heart by which, would you follow that longing, you would be introduced to Love who will take you through the process of purifying yourself through that relationship. It's unfailing. I know it more certainly than I'm sitting here, because my own life has been nothing but a series of events that have proven the point.
ED: And if you give yourself to that Love, even in a small thing, then that will bring you along higher and higher.
GF: If we'll give our heart to something, then the Love that invited us to give our heart to that will give us the love we need to unite us with that which we want to give ourselves to.
You know what the most outstanding feature of a human being is? Whatever he or she wants to be in relationship with, they can be united to. It is the greatest gift. No other creature has this. Even the angels themselves don't have it.
If I want to know a tree, I can learn so much about it. I can spend my time with it. I can give my attention to it so thoroughly that there will be a time in which there is no longer a distinction between my sense of self and my understanding of that tree, so thoroughly will this awareness of my intention unite me with that through the field of Love. She is the third party.
If people could just understand this: It is possible for us to become one with whatever we give our love to. In the end, everything is intended for us to learn what it means to give our love to Love, to God, to the Divine. Then there is a completed cycle, and the circle is whole. There is no longer a distinction between ourselves and that which we love. What could be better than that?
ED: So even if a person feels "I have no love in my life," if that person would even have a sincere wish to know love, that would be the beginning of true love.
GF: You can build a fire in the winter, and if you come back after it has been out for a long time and stir those ashes, there's always a little spark in there. I don't care who you are, how dead the heart feels. If you can feel that the heart is dead, it's still alive. If it's still alive, that means it can be re-inflamed, but it's work. Love will give you everything that you need. That which draws you to it will also give you what you need to succeed with that relationship, but you have to be willing to approach it. You have to give up what is unloving. You have to give up the sense of self that you cling to about how you've been denied something or didn't get your fair shake. That's all nonsense, and it's coming to you from the part that has turned those ashes dark and cold. It can be changed if you want it to be.
ED: So the cost of love is to give up that part of us that keeps us from love and that puts us in pain.
GF: It sounds rather simple in a way, but I'm afraid there's much more to it than that. Let's say a person has a sincere love for God, because many people do have this nascent feeling that they are not complete. Maybe they don't call it God. Maybe they say, "I want to be part of the whole. I want to be real." They begin to understand that there is a third party necessary. Can I love you or you love me without there being something that allows you and I to meet in a common place? Mostly, by and large, what we call love is that we have an image in our mind of what this person is like and what they can do for us, and when I consider the image I feel, the pleasing sensation, I call that love. But when there's real love between people, it's because there is something that is mediating. There is an existing force that mitigates the barriers between the two -- the selfishness, the isolation, the parts of us that are always trying to prove ourselves at the cost of others. There is a third party in any true relationship, and that third party is this Love, that Light.
ED: The two people actually enter into this higher relationship that is already there, that has always been there.
GF: Yes, that's exactly it. They enter into something that has brought them together. "Wherever two or more of you are gathered in my name" has to do with the fact that there already exists a level of life, an energetic field, a pure and positive light that makes it possible for human beings to transcend the individual characteristics that are at the root of our conflict, and find what is in common between ourselves in this Love that unites us that way.
These aren't just words. This is an experience that a person begins to recognize -- that every time they try to bring something to them, they can't bring it to themselves.
When I was a boy, I used to go to the beach. I loved the openness, the expanse of the ocean. I'd always get frustrated sitting there, because I knew that the best that I could do was walk up and put my hands in the water and splash it on myself, that there was something between myself and the ocean that wasn't supposed to be there, else I wouldn't have the longing that I did.
That's what Love is. Love makes us aware of that distinction, and then if we're earnest enough in our wish to be an undivided human being, Love removes that distinction by showing it to be me, myself. The part that reaches is the part that pushes away.
ED: We have to give up our false loves in order to find Real Love.
GF: That's exactly right, Ellen. We're trying to give ourselves all the time what we think to ourselves will be the completion of ourselves. This changes, if we had eyes to see it.
Has a pizza ever been the idea of heaven for you? If it's not a pizza, then it's a person. If it's not a person, then it's an assumed power or a possession that I have to have. We are moved along by a certain nature within us that doesn't know anything about love even though it is a certain order of love within us that drives us to pursue these things.
Gradually a person starts to recognize, "I have been trying to give myself that which I've longed for my whole life, but no matter what I do from that nature, I actually don't change. I don't bring myself what I want." Then a person begins to let go. He or she actually begins to see the relationship between that nature and its activity and the absence of what it is that they long for. Slowly, as a person steps back, as a person becomes quiet and understands that Life is trying to give them all along what they want, then they begin to receive what they were intended to.
ED: I think most people believe that they have to have certain conditions in their lives in order to have love. I have to have a person in my life. I have to have everything just right. But what you teach in this book is that love is always waiting for us, isn't it?
GF: Love is saying: "Seek me and I will find you. Come toward me and I will guide you every step of the way."
These are not just nice ideas. They are veracities. They are truths, principles, and they're meant to be expressed in us, but only as we're willing to act out our wish to approach Love through them.
ED: In this book you've shown how you've discovered this.
GF: It shows that every one of us shares in common a consciousness that can be completely enamored, taken over by, possessed with, filled with, consumed by Love. I am no different than any other human being on the planet. Every last one of us is intended to be prepared by Love for Love.
ED: In this book, you show how each individual can find for himself the true meaning and fulfillment of Love through a continuous relationship with it.
GF: I hope it's a light to let people find Love with, and to know that all is well. Love is a part of a continual transformational force. There is no moment in which it ceases to produce, in whatever it's present in, a new promise.
ED: Thank you, Guy. Apprentice of the Heart: Lessons in Life Only Love Can Teach is available at bookstores everywhere, or you can obtain it through Life of Learning Foundation. This has been a Fireside Chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Thanks for joining us.
