ED: Hello, I'm Dr. Ellen Dickstein. Welcome to a fireside chat with bestselling inner life author, Guy Finley. Today I want to talk about being new each moment. We live in such a marvelous universe... things are always moving and changing. Yet, for some reason, most human beings feel bored with their lives moment-to-moment. Why is that, Guy?
GF: Because they live in a little world whose boundaries are determined by their own thoughts about themselves. Inside of that world, nothing can be new. It's surprising that it's not obvious to us, but anything that we think about ourselves is old by the very definition of considering ourselves, because -- simply put -- in order to think about myself, I have to be thinking about who I was, what I've done, what happened to me. So the minute that I take thought about myself, I have picked up my past, and the moment I pick up my past, I effectively enclose myself inside of a certain kind of psychological pen, a cage of a sort. Of course, then there are certain laws that take place inside of thought that the minute I start to feel life is boring and I feel enclosed, then I try to resist a condition that my own sleeping psychology has produced... and then it's off to the races I go.
ED: How do we breach the gap between that small enclosed self and the infinite?
GF: The spiritual life is a true paradox. Christ said, "What man taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?" Yet, when we're confronted with the idea that the very nature of thinking about ourselves limits us, we don't know what to do with that idea, because the reason I think about myself is to expand my boundaries. I believe that the more I can consider myself and the various possibilities that I have in life, the larger I will be as a human being... and that's because of a number of reasons. For one thing, the way our mind works, it wrongly equates who we are with what is around us. We're sitting here surrounded by people, with a fire behind us, and there is an environment that we're in, but this exterior environment is a secondary environment. The first environment is the internal life of a man or a woman. That internal environment is what determines how one experiences their external environment. Now, enlarging that idea (if we dare do it), that means that when I'm in my mind thinking about myself, dreaming about what I'm going to have and what I want, my mind projects an image of what I'm going to do, and be, and have. As I'm in this dream, I think to myself that what I'm seeing as my possibility exists as something actually apart from myself by which if I could achieve it, it would fulfill the promise I feel when I vest myself in it.
The trick is -- and why I call it a paradox -- is that what I've imagined already belongs to my past. Even if I think about a brilliant future, it's still a contrivance of images, hopes, dreams, experiences I've had before. So I think I enter into a new world when all I enter into is a re-configured world that is in essence made up of who I've been. I look for a new "me" in who I've been, and I can't find it. Then I hear something like this, and if I have any part of me that can even receive a little bit of it as being true, I say: "Well, what am I supposed to do? What should I think about? Do you want me to be a zucchini?"
ED: That's just it. We're so used to thinking about ourselves, it's hard to imagine a life where we're not.
GF: Physics (science), even common sense, dictates that no form exists that is not a manifestation of some order of energy. Therefore, if there is some matter, something of substance, by the fact that it has substance is greatly determined by the quality and quantity of energy it took in order to produce it. That means that the nature of whatever thought we take has a nature before what we consider. So, when I'm thinking about my tomorrow, and I imagine a bright day or a bad day, it doesn't occur to me that before I have that image of myself or the world around me, that the very image that I'm involved in is a creation of a certain order or energy, and that without that kind of energy, there couldn't be that kind of thought.
This is actually simple in one respect. If I'm having a bad thought, that bad thought has to have its origin in a certain kind of energy that's tainted, dark, shadowed, so that a negative energy expresses itself in a negative form.
Now, the reason that I'm saying that to you is because the way we are now, we don't yet understand that there is a completely different order of energy available to us that has nothing to do with the kind of energy that produces thoughts and the inherent emptiness in them. Whatever I'm thinking about has to be a product of whatever energy it is that I'm identified with inside of myself.
Becoming a new man or woman (as we are supposed to be) is not some wild idea. I would like to have a feeling of being refreshed and new all the time. To us, that's part of the fiber of our being. We are meant to be new. You can't find anything in the universe that isn't renewed by the energy responsible for its manifestation.
ED: And that's what we keep seeking...
GF: That's right, because it's actually atomic in us in a manner of speaking. It's in the atomic structure of our being, and yet, because of the structure of our being and the fact that we are built the way we are from the things that we're built from, our mind continues to try to create that sense of newness for us by drawing upon images that confirm us as being individuals instead of being naturally refreshed like a river running into a lake and replacing the water.
ED: If I understand you, what you're saying is we're drawing our energy from the wrong center.
GF: We are deriving a sense of ourselves from something that we were never created to derive our sense of self from. What we all do presently is think about ourselves in order to confirm ourselves. Vernon Howard once said, "Do you think you're real because you suffer?" I suffer, therefore I'm real? The fact of the matter is that so much of our life is spent first producing what is bound to betray us (meaning not capable of fulfilling us), then as we recognize that this is not fulfilling us, we begin to resist what isn't working, and in our resistance of what isn't working, we turn to the very faculty that produced the falsehood in the first place. So, part of our awakening, part of what makes the spiritual life difficult (and it really isn't difficult) is the actual awakening to this very moment... meaning to be aware of myself is to experience directly what it is that inside of me is trying to give me myself.
ED: So it's being aware of myself within a context rather than being lost within what my own thoughts are telling me.
GF: That's actually not a bad way of putting it, Ellen, because it really does require a new context. You see, as we are now, the only contexts we have are our own thoughts about our own thoughts.
ED: And we don't even think of it being in a context because that's all there is.
GF: That's right, and one of the reasons we don't think of it as being in a context is because my thoughts divide the world up into what I believe is something not me and something that is me. I can't recognize presently (the way I am) that my thoughts and feelings about that person out there is not because that person is that, but because it's part of the context of the way I perceive them. So we're really in a very closed little closet of ourselves, trying always to expand the boundary of it, without realizing that everything we call upon in order to enlarge it is part of the thing itself that we're trying to escape. I keep coming back to this one idea in everything that I talk about because it's so vital to understand: I want a new experience of life; I can't have a new experience by creating it for myself.
ED: And really what we're doing by seeking a new experience by creating more inside ourselves is that we're becoming more crowded inside ourselves.
GF: Precisely.
ED: You gave a talk the other night here at the Life of Learning Foundation about the "untouched moment." I loved that talk. We maul, mangle the moment with all of these images instead of experiencing it as it is. We force it into our own images.
GF: Here's a man who spends a fortune on a new home. Part of the glory of it is that he's found a way to set up solar panels in order to generate energy that doesn't cost him anything (which, by the way, is how it's supposed to be). Finally, the day comes that the house is complete, they move in, go to turn on the lights, and nothing. "What's wrong?!" He blames the contractors, and nobody can figure it out, and then his wife says, "You know, we had a storm last week. Maybe there's a film over part of the solar collectors that is stopping the sun from getting through." He goes up, washes off the solar collectors, throws the switch, and the light goes on. Now, inside of that little story is everything we're talking about.
We don't create this new energy, this new life. It's covered up. It's veiled. It's the idea that the sun sits behind the clouds, but we're not aware of the sun behind the clouds because we're identified with the storm that we're sitting in. We don't know that there's a light that even as it sits there is partially responsible for the very storm that we're sitting in.
So, the idea of a new life has to be connected with a new energy, and a new energy has to be connected with new self-knowledge that I can't create for myself this newness I want. I must simply cease to produce this old life that I keep trying to find newness in. It's only that recognition that changes things. It's only the discovery that I'm sitting at home and I'm as negative as a man can be. I don't like the way it's going. He's this. She's that. I'm sitting there and the reason that I'm negative is because I believe somehow or other that if I could just correct this condition, then this old problem would become refreshed and I would be new again.
I can't recognize that I'm sitting in a self-constructed darkness, because the darkness that I'm in passes itself off as the passageway to the end of itself. No negative state, no thought pattern can produce the end of the pain or the torment that it is itself. This is such an important idea. I will talk about it and try to be clear about it until the day that I die. I'll be laying someplace and I will still be trying to get across this one idea: It is not the things in our life that are the problem; it is the consciousness in us that approaches them. We must change the consciousness of ourselves before we can hope that the content of our life that we derive our experience from will ever change.
Now, how does one change one's consciousness? It's the oldest question in the universe. The answer is simple: He can't. Of himself he cannot change the consciousness of himself, but he has something in him capable of becoming conscious of what his consciousness produces. In that awareness of what his consciousness produces, he can cease to participate in what promises something real but brings only something false. When I cease to participate in what is secretly punishing me, guess what happens? Life is a ball. It is not a problem anymore because I've ceased to be a part of the problem.
ED: It basically comes down to self-observation then.
GF: You know what it really comes down to? Being sick and tired of being sick and tired. I can only think of one example, and it's very personal, but perhaps I'll share it. In recent years I have become enamored with golf. I love the game because of the discipline relative to one's attention, and the necessity to be in the present moment... all of the things connected with taking part in principle instead of trying to be a power unto yourself to achieve what principle would bring you effortlessly. I could go on for a long time about it because I find it so deeply spiritual. It's a form of martial arts. Here's the point: I stink. I'm not unified in the understanding I have about the game, so when I swing, I'm still trying to swing. A good golfer doesn't try to swing; he lets the swing take place. It isn't until (and as) I get tired of being punished by my own insistence that I can do that, that I finally let go of the whole notion that I can do that. Then when that happens, the swing takes place without me doing anything. In that moment it's all new because I've stepped out of the way, and in the newness there is really something that is ancient, timeless, eternal, which is the principle that lets the club strike the ball and send it on its merry way towards the green.
The point being, it isn't until one recognizes completely the absolute insufficiency of approaching life, trying to make it work the way they want to, that finally they let go of all of that insistence, and when they do, lo and behold, everything that they were looking for is just waiting for them, saying, "Isn't this better?" We say, "Yeah," and then two seconds later, we're right back to doing the same thing because our present nature wants the experience of being the one.
ED: And we're afraid of not being the one.
GF: Due to contrastive images and all of those things that one "aspires to," which is really just trying to fulfill the sensation I have of myself in the moment. Life is trying to teach us, just as in that simple example of golf, to let it go. Let it go. Then, it isn't an effort to find what is new. I've simply stopped repeating what is old. I can't let go of what is old until I realize how much it hurts to continue holding on to it. So there's a learning curve in this -- not a mental learning curve, but an experiential learning curve connected with my willingness to participate in the moment and to see how I'm punished by my own insistence that things be the way I want them to be. That's what teaches us. It's not because we're smart. No one becomes an enlightened human being because they're smart. Trust me. An awakened human being is not someone who is brilliant. It's someone who is tired of being bitter and pained and broken by the ego that lives in them that insists it's God, that it knows how things should be. The clearer that gets to you, the less you want to have to do with it; the less you have to do with it, the more willing you are to watch it; the more you watch it, the more you see how insufficient it is; the more insufficient it is to your new eyes, the more you are awake to its operation. Gradually, through that kind of upward spiral born out of observing oneself, you begin to separate yourself from who you've been and what you've tried to be. Then, everything you've wanted to be appears by itself.
ED: Getting back to this idea of the untouched moment... one of the reasons why there is no newness in a touched moment is because it's the same thing always touching the moment, and so we are not allowing the moment to give us anything new.
GF: When I spoke of the untouched moment, a virgin moment, I was referring to the fact that each and every moment is absolutely fresh. It is something bestowed upon us as surely as a wind sweeps through a canyon and brushes away any of the dust and smoke that's gathered in it. As sure as that wind passes through it, there is a wind -- God's life, the Light -- that passes through us, always new.
ED: A new source of energy.
GF: It's always new. And not only is it always new, but it's eternally that way. It's never not untouched. Now, insert into this wonderful life that is itself a refreshing force unto itself, a human being who is sustained by that force and source, but who believes himself or herself to be different than that force or source. Then that person wants to grab ahold of things. I want to know what's happening. I want to be in control of what's happening. In order to know or be in control of my life, I have to have something to get my hands on. Since the real moment has nothing in it that you can get your hands on, the only thing you can get your hands on are ideas that you have about the moment.
ED: You define the moment.
GF: The mind, from our own conditioned experience, defines the moment so that I can hold onto it and control it. And of course I'm holding nothing but an illusion, a true figment of my imagination. That's the touched moment. It is something that I'm reaching out and believing that I'm holding something new but I'm not holding anything at all. The energy that lives that way pursues its own ends and winds up, as we know, with nothing new. So the untouched moment is this life that we are already in and that is already in us that we don't have to do anything towards at all, Ellen, except just sit there when a wind blows.
Imagine a person who is touched by a beautiful summer breeze, and the person says: "Wait! Stop! Quick! Get something to hold that wind. I want to hold the wind." You can't hold the wind. You can't hold what's new.
ED: And this is something that we can do right now.
GF: This very moment. One of the problems we face -- and it connects with everything we've talked about -- is that because I am addicted, habituated to the energy that produces the thoughts and images by which I know myself, when I first start to actually come awake to myself and bring myself back into the room where I am, I think: "Well, this is pretty boring."
ED: At first it seems worse.
GF: Yes, "This is just empty. Why would I want to be awake and aware like this?" Because the part of you that is telling you that it is empty or meaningless cannot live in that new moment. It only lives in moments that it is a generator of itself. So there is a transitional period in a person's interior work where gradually they have to be weaned away from the energy of thought so that they can begin to be filled with the energy of God's life, the present moment that is always pouring down. That's why it is necessary to sustain one's willingness to work at these ideas.
ED: Yes, and it's not just because of the happiness that it will bring us, but because that's what we've been put here to do.
GF: It's not a question of the happiness it will bring us. Again, we're right back into thinking about images that give us those pleasing sensations. It is happiness itself, Ellen. That life, that energy is happiness itself. It is newness itself.
ED: Yes. 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.
